Looking Out the Window of Café Brauer

It’s a weekend evening in Chicago. It’s
December and it snows heavy but the city
refuses to be calm. I am setting tables in
my black bistro uniform, placing the shining
salad fork below the little spoon about

two-hundred times as I circle round
the flowered tables spread across the
hardwood floor of Café Brauer. The DJ, the
bar-tenders, the hip young bearded man
hanging giant snowflakes from the ceiling,
the cooks, the party-supply delivery staff. We
are all rushing, all at work to construct a perfect
evening for a well-to-do bride and groom.

They must be rich because the venue is historic
and I work for an esteemed company. They’re
handsome, I know, because I saw the picture
on the sign by the door. Jessica and Thomas,
December 11, 2010.

Now I’m looking out the window, at the real
snowflakes and the coldness and I’m feeling like
I’m part of a movie set. I’m thinking about an
email from a friend the day before. She lives
in Caracas; she went there to find Jesus
in the world’s forgotten ones. She was talking

about sixty thousand people made homeless
by rainfall. Some of them were her barrio
neighbors,

a certain group of human beings.

The world has offered them only an eroding
mountainside to sink some planks into and call
home, she said. They must have known that
eventually the mud would give way and take
their tin and plywood houses down the hill, but

I suppose they didn’t have many options. At least
before it happened they had time to pull out
their refrigerators and their stereos and put
them in my friend’s apartment. They sit there
now, I imagine, unplugged and open and waiting
for their owners to come back. But the whole
neighborhood is in a shelter, she said, waiting
in shame for some kind of government aid.

I’m clearing tables, and my black tie is spotted
with uneaten wedding cake. Candles still burn
on a high ledge; the waving flames light
a tile mural of curving tree branches and
sea-blue sky. The night’s formalities have passed
and young aristocrats dance close together in
front of the giant speakers. They look at one
another and bounce and shout Tonight’s Gonna
Be a Good Night.

One guy is going crazy. He shifts his
hips like a broken robot, shoots his
elbows here and there, spins on his heel and
glares into the videographer's light. She’s
shouldering the camera and bending her body
and capturing his intoxicated performance
just the way she wants it. The crowd around
them is white teeth and clapping hands and
make-up and cocktail glasses all glued together
and pulsing with the party bass and Lord knows

I am looking hard for his grace in the big
warm room and in the movement of the
dancers. I turn again to the window
and I see frost creeping inward
from the edges of the glass.

Short Drive, Autumn Night

I drive three slow miles in
a green pick-up. Sunlight recedes
and the hollow hum of autumn
echoes over emptying fields.

On the passenger seat a
notebook and tape recorder
glow in the light of the dash.

One mile to the East. Then
I turn onto a smooth road
named after a bridge,
named after a landing,
named after a long-dead man
called Warner, who worked
commerce on the river and
lived in slower days.

Southbound now, the truck carries
me into cool, settling darkness.

I roll down the window
to breathe in the air that
beckons winter. In it,
and in me, there is sadness
and the certainty of loss.

Psalm 58

Psalm 58 is a hard one. I know you probably won’t go read it right now just to see what I’m talking about, and it’s too long to quote the whole thing in a blog entry. So I’ll summarize. It starts out like this:

Do you indeed decree what is right, you gods (or mighty lords)?
Do you judge the children of man uprightly?
No, in your hearts you devise wrongs;
Your hands deal out violence on earth.

After this the psalmist launches into a verbal attack on the wicked men who poorly rule and judge. They are like venomous snakes, they speak lies, and they have fangs like young lions. He calls to Yaweh, the covenant God of Israel, to tear out these fangs from their mouths, to let the wicked be like a snail that dissolves into slime or a stillborn baby who never sees the sun. To top it off, the psalmist declares that the righteous will rejoice to see such vengeance and will “bath his feet in the blood of the wicked.”

Yikes.

There are some immediate red flags that go up when we encounter such disturbing imagery in the scriptures. First, we get angry with the arrogant psalmist. “Who is this guy to be thinking of himself as righteous and everyone around him as wicked? Hasn’t he heard of original sin? Doesn’t he know that he is wicked too?” Second, there is the apparent contradiction between the Old and New Testaments. “Jesus says to love and pray for your enemy, but this psalm is basically calling down violent curses and wishing for the death of other people.”

How do we make sense of these kinds of questions? Are they the right questions to ask? Can such a passage possibly speak to us about the God we call to and follow today? Or are we better off to leave it behind and stick with the New Testament and milder Old Testament passages like psalm 23 and psalm 120? Here are a couple observations that can help us understand the place of this psalm and similar ones in the life of the scripture-reading church.

1.The last couple lines. Part of the answer lies in the last lines of the psalm, which (to be fair) I haven’t talked about yet. This is how the psalm finishes:

Mankind will say, “Surely there is a reward for the righteous;
Surely there is a God who judges on earth.”

This assertion forms a kind of bookend. It places God the righteous judge against the present judges and lords who are violent liars. This comparison helps us to see that at the core of all the distracting imagery, the psalmist is calling out and looking forward to a day when Yaweh will work his good judgment on the earth.


2.On earth. This is an important little phrase because it reminds us that the whole Bible tells the story of God’s saving work upon the earth. The widespread idea of salvation as something that happens to an individual’s spirit after he or she dies simply does not fit with the scriptures. Rather, the Lord’s acts of creation, the formation of Israel, and the giving of the Law and the prophets are all part of his work on earth. All of these led up to the incarnation of Christ on earth, and it is in the person of Jesus Christ (his ministry, death, and resurrection) that the God of the scriptures dealt with evil and began his kingdom on earth. Hence, the promise and hope of God’s people in the church age is the full coming of this just kingdom, the bodily resurrection, and communion with the Father on the renewed earth.

Until that time, part of what we do is observe the evil and injustice around us, as the psalmist does, and call out to the Lord. Our crying out demonstrates our belief that he has worked and is working still to bring about salvation and righteous judgment of evil on earth (as opposed to the present flawed judgment exercised by corrupt human lords).

3.One more thing, which is not an observation but a digression. Many people these days find themselves unable to call out to the Lord in earnest as the spirit of this psalm beckons us to do. This is a problem because, regardless of their speech or reasoning, such an incapability or unwillingness reveals unbelief. Young, disenchanted postmoderns observe evil in the world and, rather than calling out to a just, compassionate, and powerful God, they change God into an absentee creator—a watch-maker who wound things up and walked away at the beginning of time. He cannot be reached now, they say, so what would be the point of calling to him? We might as well work for the bettering of the world through our own community-based undertakings, which also happen to be hip and trendy.

On the other hand is a group of people whose over-spiritualized version of Christianity has left God just as impotent. This kind of Christianity (from which many of the disenchanted postmoderns have fled) makes few concrete demands about how its adherents function on the earth because it understands belief God as an individual and subjective matter. God is a spiritual being, they reason, so he mostly cares about what happens in the “spiritual” realm. Of course, such an attitude bars them from even entering into the kind of indignation voiced by the psalmist as he observes the outworking of evil on the earth.

The irony is that both of these attitudes are but two sides of the same coin of Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment is the thought movement that began in Europe after the Reformations and laid the foundation for modernism by removing God from the default worldview the masses. Its voices include people like Voltaire, Hume, and Thomas Jefferson. According to scholar N.T. Wright, the Enlightenment’s basic goal was this: “Kick ‘God’ upstairs, make religion a matter of private piety, and then you can organize the world to your own advantage.”

Such an attitude has survived in various forms for centuries, and in many cases the church simply re-voices this message while mixing it with select passages of scripture.

Continuing with the examples above, the first group says, “God is a distant creator who is not involved in the activities of the world; therefore, I’m not bound to his moral imperatives. I can order my life however I want” (a.k.a pursue social justice through mostly human ends while tipping my hat to ‘God’ and sleeping with whomever I please.)

The second group says, “God is a spiritual being mostly concerned with spiritual happenings; therefore, I will be okay as long as I make a regular appearance at church activities because these are the places where spiritual things are dealt with. Other than that I can order my life however I want” (a.k.a. make war on or otherwise oppress whomever I want in order to maintain the way of life on the earth to which I am accustomed.)

Both of these approaches come quite naturally to many professing Christians today, but they are each a far cry from the kind of faith to which the Lord, through the scriptures, calls his people. If we do not work hard to do business with the Bible as a whole, including difficult passages like psalm 58, our inherited-values will be what truly guide us and shape our view of God, his world, and his desire for his followers.

Disciples and the Shame of the World

Bonhoeffer was a serious dude. I want to be like him. I like what he says here about the role that Jesus’ disciples play in taking on the shame of the world as they follow him. It comes from Cost of Discipleship. (Please forgive all the sexist pronouns, I’m just quoting the guy.)

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

These men are without possessions or power, these strangers on earth, these sinners, these followers of Jesus, have in their life with him renounced their own dignity, for they are merciful. As if their own needs and their own distress were not enough, they take upon themselves the distress and humiliation and sin of others.

They have an irresistible love for the down-trodden, the sick, the wretched, the wronged, the outcast and all who are tortured with anxiety. They go out and seek all who are enmeshed in the toils of sin and guilt. No distress is too great, no sin too appalling for their pity. If any man falls into disgrace, the merciful will sacrifice their own honour to shield him, and take his shame upon themselves. They will be found consorting with publicans and sinners, careless of the shame they incur thereby.

In order that they may be merciful they cast away the most priceless treasure of human life, their personal dignity and honour. For the only honour and dignity they know is their Lord’s own mercy, to which alone they owe their very lives. He was not ashamed of his disciples, he became the brother of mankind, and bore their shame unto the death of the cross. That is how Jesus, the crucified, was merciful. His followers owe their lives entirely to that mercy. It makes them forget their own honour and dignity, and seek the society of sinners.

They are glad to incur such reproach, for they know that then they are blessed. One day God himself will come down and take upon himself their sin and shame. He will cover them with his own honour and remove their disgrace. It will be his glory to bear the shame of sinners and to clothe them with his honour. Blessed are the merciful, for they have the Merciful for their Lord.

On the El and Thinking

Highways and public transit are
the root system of the business district.
Each day the trains and traffic pulse the same.
Over hundreds of square miles of land,
well beyond the city’s drip line, they stretch
to take in life and make the tower grow.

Years ago Anderson wrote of this giant
who then crept through the nation’s quiet fields
slowly taking hold of our talent, our creativity,
our gifts of heaven. Over time we came to
him with increasing willingness—with progress
in our minds and science
on our side and money to be made.
And we forgot about life.

This morning I dissolve again into
the grey day’s workforce.
I am a brooding nutrient
packed into a stuffy vessel tottering on
elevated tracks toward the tall buildings
at Lake Michigan’s shore.

Each time the train car stops it reveals
the frightening silence of working people
on their lonesome way. A few times
I dare to look the other human beings
in the eye. Without speaking we
ask one another, “If we are all
doing our part to help something live,
why do we feel so dead?”

Inspiration From a Smiling Child

This evening a little girl sitting in a grocery cart smiled at me. She was probably one and a half, with dark hair hanging in curls beside her dark eyes. Her mother was deliberating between boxes of cereal as I strolled past with my plastic basket full of groceries, my hand gripping my shopping list scribbled on a note card. The girl watched me. Her stare, curious and innocent, and the freedom with which she moved brought tears to my eyes for just a second after I passed by.

What made the moment poetic? I think it was her simplicity. A child knows very few things. Chief among these are her own hunger and thirst and the safety that accompanies familiar or friendly people. She does not know about budgets, sale prices, the four food groups. Her mind does not grow weary analyzing the ethics behind or her diet or guessing at the thoughts in the minds of strangers. She has not yet learned the fear instilled by the governing forces of a society or the shrewd art of dealing with people. In short, she knows and believes in goodness, and from this simple belief all of her actions flow.

It takes a long time to regain the kind of faith we had as children. For those who have not embraced the promise and truth of Christ, restored trust in Goodness and the restful and free life that grows from it may never come. And of course, we who are reborn in faith still face continual hardships that batter down our hope in the goodness of God. The weight of getting on in the world descends and divides us so that few of our actions are linked to a clear motivation or a single, deep conviction.

Nonetheless, to have the simple trust of children is part of the Christian hope. The Lord draws us to rest in himself. He heals us over and over from the wounds inflicted since our memories began, and through it we hold to the truth of the good Father and the coming good Kingdom. Even through the stings of suffering and the drudgery of living, our lives can resemble the beauty of children at play. They can inspire the same kind of startling wonder as the little girl who smiled at me in the grocery store.

A Psalm for "Nones"

Recently I spoke with some friends about the destiny of disillusioned, church-raised twenty-somethings. A few of us were visiting with a college friend who now lives in the Pacific Northwest, and the conversation started something like this, “So I heard you don’t go to church anymore either.” I found it particularly telling of the Generation Y experience.

Though I am a member of the local church where I was raised, I feel that I best fit into this allegedly growing demographic that some culture monitors call the “nones.” These are people who claim no official ties to a denomination or congregation yet consider themselves people of active Christian faith.

I get lost in the terminology—postmodern, emergent, neo-monastic, anarcho-primitivist, house church, intentional community, missional community, ect. The books, websites, and seminars where this language is born serve as both public representations and facilitators of cultural movements. At the most basic level, the jargon reflects different limbs of the Church asking the same questions about how to practice life in Christ.

My own study, prayer, and practice have certainly taken shape under the influence of larger thought patterns. After all, we are all individual actors living within complex systems of influence that shift with the ages. It is precisely for this reason, in fact, that we must wed ourselves to the treasure and truth of the Scriptures, allowing the story of God’s saving action in the world to form our identity and guide our lives. To this end, I have found myself reflecting often on Psalm 131, which is a fitting prayer for a generation of restless skeptics. Here it is:

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;
My eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
Too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,

Like a weaned child with its mother;
Like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, hope in the LORD
From this time forth and forever more.

Hebrew scholar Robert Alter describes the first four lines of this psalm as “images of reaching beyond.” How fittingly this describes the striving and stirring of many believing young adults. We move from place to place and group to group, looking for a sense of belonging. We promote our ideas and ministries hoping to gain a feeling of satisfaction. We debate with others and perpetually question ourselves, waiting for validation or peace of mind. Much of this behavior flows from our legitimate effort, as individuals and as a body, to understand the faith we have inherited and how it relates to our experiences.

Often in these efforts, however, we do not realize that we are reaching beyond the source. This is where the psalmist introduces the image of a weaned baby. A weaned child no longer receives the nourishment she craves. Milk no longer flows at her desire, so she fusses and cries. She does not understand. But eventually she learns to rest against the source itself. Calmed and quite, she knows the presence, goodness, and love of her mother, even if her belly still hungers.The psalm’s closing line admonishes Israel to hope in (or wait for) the Lord with contentment, trust, and intimate familiarity with Yahweh.

My prayer for myself and my generation is the same. We are skeptical that our questions can be answered, but hopefully this attitude will lead us deeper into the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge. Like babies, we fuss and squirm and start smoking and quit going to church, but hopefully older generations will bear with us and be for us the patient presence of the One who is truth and provides rest. Because of injustice and systemic evils, we pout with God and try to recreate him to our liking; but hopefully we will find the humble clarity to see our blunders and trust his goodness.

Hopefully we will learn not to lift our eyes to lofty doctrines or new philosophies for comfort. Instead may we lean against our Father. From beneath the verbiage of our age, he invites to know him and hope in him even when he withholds from us the answers and direction we desire.