In Defense of Boring Movies - Timbuktu

This post is part of a series of essays In Defense of Boring Movies. 

It’s a time which separates the beloved from those they love,
And when you think of them, painful obsessive thoughts are all that come.
—"Cler Achel (I Spent the Day)," Tinariwen (trs. from Tamasheq)

What is a boring movie? A boring movie is one whose purpose is not to entertain, but to provoke thought. Watching a boring movie is about self-improvement: it's like sitting down to read a book of ancient philosophy or densely written fiction—in the end, it can be rewarding and even fun, but you have to put in the work yourself.

There are no rules for how to make a movie like this, but a couple of common characteristics have emerged as I have studied this kind of film. One is sparing use of music: many of these movies refuse to use music as a crutch to tell the audience how to feel. (The previous entry in this series, Steven Soderbergh's black and white Raiders of the Lost Ark cut, might seem to be an exception, since the whole movie is set to music and has no dialogue or other sound, but the music in the film is never the first choice for pairing with the images on screen, and sometimes even actively works against the natural emotion that the scene might be invoking.)

The other characteristic is frequent use of long shots. (Long in time, not distance.) Lengthy shots force viewers to slow down and reckon with what we're actually seeing, to focus on images and allow thoughts to bloom in response, rather than trying to keep track and make sense of a rapid sequence of cuts designed to carry forward a plot and maintain interest. Click the clip below and watch for 60 seconds or so for a good example, comparing last year's frenetic Interstellar with the grave, somber 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The whole video is worth watching, by the way, but some other time when you're not reading this post!)

The movie I'm reviewing here, 2014's excellent Timbuktu, has both of these qualities in spades. The director, Abderrahmane Sissako, uses long shots to establish a quiet, even meditative mood, which is tough (and, in a way, bold) considering the movie's premise: in 2012, Timbuktu, an important city in Mali, west Africa, was occupied by Islamic militants, and Timbuktu depicts life during their regime. 

The sparing use of music is a tool that requires viewers to focus on their emotional reaction to and interpretation of a scene. Music can be used to enhance a scene, sure, but it can also simply tell the viewer what to think or feel; refusing to use music in almost any scene in Timbuktu, Sissako lets the audience think for themselves about the nature of life in occupied Timbuktu; for the most part, the slow pace and refusal to heighten tensions with music lends the whole thing a humdrum feel, especially in the first half of the movie. Life goes on in the city, less conveniently, with more difficulty and strangeness, but still feeling very ordinary.

In Timbuktu, though, unlike other films in this series, music has a specific meaning throughout the film: all forms of music are forbidden by the occupying regime, so when music does show up in the film, it is usually associated with illicit activities. Mostly, the association is subtle; music plays in the soundtrack almost exclusively during events that are, in one way or another, illicit or forbidden, as in this questionably legal soccer game, played without a ball because soccer is forbidden (note: the scene involves one person speaking through a translator, and subtitles appear for the translator but not the original speaker):

 

The association is direct, though, in at least one case, where some young adults are arrested for gathering and making music:

Sissako employs long (sometimes very long) shots to great effect. Not only does he get viewers to slow down and really contemplate what is happening on screen, as with any longer shot, but he also uses long takes to make us absorb and process singularly uncomfortable, disquieting moments. By refusing to cut away to a new angle, the audience is provided with no relief, and we are forced to reckon with the discomfort radiating from the screen. Take, for example, this accidental death (murder?) scene, in which confrontation, awkward struggle, accidental gunshot, flight, and death take place in just four shots over three and a half minutes: 

Note music doesn't interfere with the awkwardness and discomfort of the struggle, but arrives after the crime has occurred, continuing the connection between music and illicit actions. 

~   ~   ~

Timbuktu asks us that most unsettling of questions: What if the monsters we fear most are just like us? In other words: If the occupiers in Timbuktu are simply ordinary men, who argue over soccer, make bumbling mistakes, and put forth bad arguments to cover poor or self-serving decisions, what separates us from them? Could we become like them given similar circumstances?

And in the tradition of boring movies, it gives plenty of space—plenty of slow-paced, quiet screen time, unencumbered by music or frenetic action—to contemplate the answer. 

~   ~   ~

To wrap things up, here are some more reasons to watch this movie, if you're still on the fence:

• If you're a language nerd like me, you'll love it—the characters speak not only widely spoken languages like English, French, and Arabic, but also the local languages Bambara and Tamasheq (one of my favorite bands, Tinariwen, perform primarily in Tamasheq).
• Like just about any film on my Boring Movies list, it's visually striking, and all the more so because you get plenty of time to look. Western Africa is rarely depicted in media that Americans watch, and it's a beautiful place to shoot a movie.  
• Unusually for the Boring Movies list, the movie has more of an ensemble cast--there is a central plot line of sorts, but lots and lots of characters get generous screen time and character arcs. I think this gives the movie a unique and intriguing feel. 
• Also, unlike most of the films in this series, Timbuktu clocks in under two hours—at a quick 96 minutes!
• If you're still unsure, the late, great Dissolve website has an excellent review that might help you decide.  

If you're like me and still have a Netflix DVD account, you can get Timbuktu that way, but it's also available as a video on demand from Google Play, Amazon, and iTunes. 

Doing the Right Thing in Ferguson

"Ferguson Day 6, Picture 44" by Loavesofbread
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons 

Got to give us what we want 
Gotta give us what we need 
Our freedom of speech is freedom or death 
We got to fight the powers that be
—"Fight the Power," Public Enemy

Spike Lee's 1989 film Do the Right Thing ends with a race riot. Neighborhood tensions between black and Latino residents, the cops, and white and Asian shopkeepers, already seething below the surface, are exacerbated by the heat of a sweltering August day. These tensions are pushed to the breaking point when a fight erupts in Sal's Pizzeria; the police are called in and end up killing beloved local character Radio Raheem in order to break up the fight. In an act of spontaneous rage (or maybe just a desire to get started with what everyone knows is coming?) the main character, Mookie, takes a garbage can and hurls it through the front window of Sal's Pizzeria, which the angry crowd enters, smashes up, and sets on fire.

Earlier in the movie, Mookie is admonished by another character to always do the right thing. The question for the viewer is, when the cops kill your annoying friend and everyone's mad as hell because it's hot and people aren't safe in their own neighborhood, what on earth is the right thing to do? Whether you think smashing up Sal's Pizzeria is right or not, you can (and should) end up understanding the motivation behind it—even as it frustrates and angers you.

~   ~   ~

Unless you were living under a rock, you know that this week a grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed unarmed black teenager Mike Brown over the summer. You also know that a lot of people were angry about it.

What you know beyond that probably depends a great deal on whether you live in the conservative or the liberal media bubble, but either way, someone in your circle has gone out of their way to condemn the subset of those angry people who reacted by smashing things.

I think this is a distraction. It focuses attention on something of small consequence—the destruction of property, usually insured, rarely animate—and away from something of enormous consequence: the destruction of black life, without remorse and without consequence.¹ If the story you’re getting about Ferguson is centered on black people stealing, you’re getting a racist story. It’s the story a racist would tell, and it's the story that racists would like you to believe in and tell others. And if you’re creating that story—well, you do the math.

My reaction to the week's big Ferguson news was to post a month-old column from Rolling Stone called “Smashy Smashy: Nine Historical Triumphs to Make You Rethink Property Destruction,” which points out that:

[I]t's a familiar refrain for anyone who's been involved in Occupy Wall Street, the anti-Iraq War movement, or any of dozens of other protest cycles: The "good" protesters march, carry signs and make their voices heard, but anyone who smashes, burns or vandalizes contaminates the otherwise defensible show of democracy. This attitude is complicated by the facts, to say the least. In fact, the historical pedigree of property destruction as a tactic of resistance is long and frequently effective. To cite just one example, in recent years the largest police reform packages were only adopted after large-scale rioting.

I hoped that posting this would get people to see that, what do you know, the looting isn’t the main story here, and that in the course of time the rioting might actually be part of the reason things change. Like the viewer watching the end of Do the Right Thing, I wasn't necessarily happy about rioting, but I understood the emotional place that it came from, and I wanted others to do the same.

I had hoped that maybe I’d get to discuss the article civilly with someone, or that people would like it and move one. But no:

(Let me just note as an aside that derailing someone's conversation into an abortion debate strikes me as at best a bad idea and at worst a real jerk move. Since as far as I'm concerned, it is a derail, and doesn't actually belong in this conversation, I'm not going to address my second commenter’s second question in the body of this post.²)

Suffice it to say, I slightly underestimated the quotient of anger I might stir up among my Facebook friends.³ It’s too bad, too, because I could have actually had an interesting and more extended conversation with the first commenter. It’s hard to have a multi-threaded Facebook conversation at the best of times, though, and angry friends compound that difficulty a hundredfold, so I kept it brief.⁴

There are actually several good cases to be made for rioting as tool for change, better than Rolling Stones' rather tongue-in-cheek and slightly off-base treatment.⁵ I’m not going to try very hard to make such a case myself, though, because I can’t come up with a solid, specifically Christian reason to justify said destruction, and I don’t believe in attempting to hold my faith and my politics apart as if they were magically separate realms of my life and thought.⁶ (Take a look at those links and judge the case for yourself. The worst that can be said of them is probably that they do seem to boil down to “the ends justify the means,” as my second commenter worried/jibed. But note that, again, usually what gets destroyed is just stuff, not people.)

I said I wasn’t going to try very hard to make a Christian case for rioting, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to take a stab at it. So here’s a thought experiment:

• As a Christian, I believe I have a duty to try to keep people from murdering each other, rooted in the parts of scripture where God tells us not to murder each other. 
• I see someone who I know is going to eventually murder someone (because they do it all the time and haven’t expressed any real desire to stop). 
• I know that I might be able to keep them from murdering someone if I smash up a shoe store. 
• Would I, as a Christian, be justified in smashing up that shoe store? 
• My gut says yes.

If that doesn’t satisfy you on a deep emotional and intellectual level then, hey, get in line. The nice thing is, it’s not the point.

The point is, black lives matter, and in America they’re often treated as if they don’t. And as a Christian, and an American, and a human being, I have a big problem with that, and you should too, whether or not you’re any of those things.⁷

If Ferguson is about anything, it’s about the value of black life. Forget about the looting. If you must, think about it briefly on your way to being angry about the real problems. And remember: always do the right thing.

---

1. I write “without consequence,” but Darren Wilson supporters have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on his behalf, and he was reportedly paid handsomely for his ABC interview. So really, just without negative consequence. But I digress. ↩
2. I will address it in a footnote though, because who doesn’t love footnotes about abortion. Bombing an abortion clinic would be unlikely to actually halt abortions, because historically women have sought unsafe and illegal abortions when they don't have access to safe and legal ones. These are dangerous for both woman and fetus. It's bad tactics, in other words, and there's no particularly moral way to justify it. If your concern for fetuses/the unborn (there's no neutral term in this debate, I find) is genuine, then you can help them by supporting broader access to birth control, which is a very reliable, fetus- and woman-friendly way to reduce the number of abortions in a society.↩
3. Only slightly though! Shout out to all my non-angry friends posting in the feed. Bonus points for the Do the Right Thing reference, which gave me the framing device for this post.↩
4. And then wrote this post. So, uh, hooray for temporary brevity! Is there a Christian case for destroying the oppressor’s actual property rather than whatever happens to be nearby? Most definitely, and it’s rooted in the example cited by the first commenter. Basically, if Jesus can smash stuff in the Temple to make the point that the Temple system is corrupt and that he’s going to replace it with himself, then I can pour concrete on anti-homeless spikes to make the point that, hey, don’t be a jerk to homeless people. The principle is the same. There may be other ways to get people's attention and make a point, but few are as effective as blowing up their stuff, and stuff doesn't really matter much anyway.↩
5. Off base because none of their examples is about rioting as a means for creating change; everything they cite is about either directly or symbolically blowing up the oppressors' stuff, rather than going nuts on whatever's available.↩
6. Look, I like pasteurization and encyclopedias as much as the next guy, but I could lose the element of our Enlightenment intellectual heritage where religion is supposed to be personal and private. Religion is by nature public, communal, and therefore political in nature, so deal.↩
7. Future alien archeologists: this goes double for you.↩

Alternate Sartoreality

Me and Dad on my wedding day

I can see a lot of life in you,
I can see a lot of bright in you,
And I think the dress looks nice on you,
I can see a lot of life in you.
—"That Dress Looks Nice On You," Sufjan Stevens

As a young Christian, I learned somewhere along the line that caring about your appearance was wrong. It even had a special name: vanity, a word that, in spite of all I have learned since, I have still not learned to associate with small handheld mirrors or combination sink-and-cabinets.

I say "learned," but I can't say that this was an idea anyone actually ever set out to teach me. It may have been implicit in some Sunday school lesson somewhere, or maybe one of those old Hanna-Barbera Bible cartoons.¹ Maybe I just got it from reading Jesus' words about not worrying about what you should wear.

Anyway, it's not like I needed a religious reason not to care about what I looked like: it was not a focal point of interest for me much before college.² I liked t-shirts from Target with weird slogans on them, old ratty jeans, and whatever else felt comfortable. My concern about dressing nice being a form of vanity was real, but it mostly served as a convenient excuse to ignore my parents' advice on personal appearance when the subject came up.

~   ~   ~

One of my best friends in college was a delightful young woman who lived on the same floor as I did in the dorm. We connected over shared interests and worldviews, but especially because we were both committed Christians at a university with a predominantly secular student body. One major item of difference between us was my friend's meticulous concern for her appearance: she dressed impeccably whenever she left the dorm, and clothing choices were a frequent though minor topic of conversation with her. So, naturally, I asked her about it one day.

She explained that dressing nice for her didn't feel like vanity—she wasn't seeking a sense of superiority over others, or prioritizing small details that did not matter instead of caring about weightier topics. Instead, she did it as a form of self-care: dressing well made her feel happy and confident, which were especially important for her at college, which she found to be an often intimidating, even depressing, place.

This made sense to me. Not right away, but eventually, and without much further persuasion on her part.

So I started doing it, too. I learned to dress myself well, and then did so when I needed to feel especially happy or confident. First day of class? Wear a nice shirt and some slacks. Going to a party full of people I don't know? Throw on a tie. Taking an exam I hadn't studied that well for? What the hey: put on a suit for that one. I dress pretty nice most of the time now, because it makes me feel happy and helps me get things done.

~   ~   ~

These days, I try to avoid buying something if I can find a way to make it myself, or do without. Not primarily because I value frugality (which is a deeply ingrained value for Anna in a way it probably will never quite be for me), but because participating in late-stage industrial capitalism usually feels slightly dirty to me.³ So when I had a mind to buy myself a nice, fitted shirt the other day, it occurred to me that I could make one instead, maybe.

I have a rack full of button-downs that have quietly gone unused or under-used since I realized that off-the-rack shirts don't fit my slender frame very well at all and started buying fitted shirts instead. A regular shirt from a department store is designed to be worn by men of varying builds, and I am decidedly at the narrow end of that variation, so I end up kind of swimming in all the extra fabric:

That red line is roughly where my actual body is inside this shirt

My wife owns a sewing machine and graciously offered to show me how to use it. I looked up how to alter men's shirts online, but I found all the sewing terminology confusing, so I decided to just wing it on the grounds that these shirts were expendable.

I began by checking my shirt to see how much I could afford to lose; the first one, a plain blue number, seemed like it could comfortably lose at least an inch on each side and in the arms. I turned the shirt inside out, and sewed a line about an inch from the side seam on each side, turned roughly 90 degrees once I got to the armpit, and drew a tapering line down the sleeves to the cuff:

As you can see, I ended up doing the sleeve twice after deciding to take a bit more

Anna taught me a trick for sewing in a straight line, which was to try to keep the fabric aligned with the edge of the metal plate on our sewing machine:

This is the "after" picture; I wisely opted not to try taking a photo during the actual sewing. 

Another trick is to just sew down one of the stripes in the shirt, if it has them:

And that was pretty much it. The results have been pretty positive. This is the blue shirt I started with:

Maybe slightly baggier than I'd like, but decent for a first try. Here's the shirt from earlier, before and after:

It's probably slightly too tight now, though that may be alleviated somewhat once I actually cut off the material I've sewn off from the rest, which is just sitting inside the shirt right now. Probably the best result is this one:

It's got a little bunchiness in the armpits, but otherwise it turned out great. All three are vast improvements over wearing baggy unfitted shirts, and they'll all probably go in the regular clothes rotation now that they actually fit me decently.

~   ~   ~ 

So if you're a slender dude with access to a sewing machine, and your shirts are baggier than you want them, I say give this a shot. Definitely start with shirts you don't care about, and get some advice on how to use a sewing machine if you don't already know. Good luck!

---

1. Note: I can't technically confirm this, but I'm willing to bet that these were at least a little bit racist? Last time I saw one I was probably just entering teenagerhood, so my critical thinking skills were still in their nascent stage. If memory serves, though, the main characters are two white people and their wacky brown friend of vague ethnicity, which sounds kinda wack.↩
2. Aside from really wanting a beard as soon as I could get one, of course, with unfortunate results: ↩

That beard is composed of like 7 hairs 

3. Just to take one example: Amazon, so beloved by consumers of our generation for its convenience and low prices, achieves said convenience and prices in part by being terrible to its employees. Its business model also seems designed expressly to destroy other businesses. I'd say these are uncommon principles for running a company these days, but I'd be lying: those are the only principles in town right now. And they suck.↩

Godwin's Law and the Nazi Rhetorical Paradox

Mel Brooks as Hitler, sans Hitler costume. Source.

It all began down in Munich town,
And pretty soon the word started gettin' around.
So I said to Martin Bormann
I said, "Hey Marty, why don't we throw a little Nazi party?"
We had an election, well kinda sorta,
And before you knew it, hello new order!
To all those mothers in the fatherland I said,
"Achtung, baby, I got me a plan!"
"Whatcha got Adolf? Whatcha gonna do?"
I said "How about this one:
World War Two!"
—"To Be Or Not To Be," Mel Brooks (there is no actual nudity in it, but I can't imagine the video linked here is safe for work at all)

"Say what you want to about the tenets of [insert ideology here], at least it's an ethos."
—a friend of mine, whenever he wants to subtly compare something to Nazism*

A well-known rule of the internet, Godwin's Law, states that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." A corollary to this law, one which I wish were observed more often, is that whoever uses the comparison automatically loses the argument and the discussion must immediately cease:

"Constantly stopping these briefings halfway through is becoming a pain." Source 

There's a paradoxical quality about appeals to Nazism to bolster one's argument. They don't really work because, on the one hand, Nazis were Pure Evil, and on the other, they really weren't that different from you and me at all, dear reader.**

Let me break that down.

1. The Nazis were Pure Evil

The reason comparisons to Nazism don't work as rhetoric is the same reason the words "never" and "always" don't work as rhetoric.

A few years ago, I learned to avoid absolutes in trying to convince someone of something. If say, you're trying to convince someone to change their habit of eating lots of cookies,^† telling them "You always eat five cookies when you get home from work" or "You can never seem to keep from eating cookies when you have the chance" is a bad strategy, because all the person has to do is think of one counter-example ("I only ate four cookies when I got home from work on Thursday!") and you're wrong, your argument is suddenly weak, and the person is unlikely to be convinced.

Similarly, comparisons to Nazism are easy to push aside, because everyone knows that the Nazis were just the worst, man, like literally. Since our culture treats Nazism as the absolute height of all evils, and Hitler as the pinnacle and archetype of that evil, comparisons to Nazi ideology or the Fuhrer don't hold much water, because it's easy to find counter-examples and undermine the argument ("Obama isn't just like Hitler; Hitler was a vegetarian!")

2. The Nazis were just some dudes

Some recent reading I've been doing has brought the opposite side of this coin to my attention quite sharply. We treat Nazism and Hitler as radical, ultimate evil, but in reality there's a discomfiting degree of continuity between ourselves and Hitler, between American national ideology and Nazism.

Dale Aukerman's book Darkening Valley: A Biblical Perspective on Nuclear War was recommended recently to me by a friend of my wife (and, I think, a new friend to me also). It initially struck me as an odd topic to read about, but the book's recommender assured me it was worth my time, and he was not wrong.

The project of Darkening Valley is to discuss nuclear war through Bible stories. Each chapter takes a particular story from the Bible and uses it to explain and engage with an element of nuclear war; the opening chapter, for example, uses the story of Cain killing his brother Abel to remind the reader that a tendency toward violence is a deep element of human nature, and then goes on to point out how dangerous that fact is in conjunction with the fact that humans now have the weapons required to destroy themselves nearly instantaneously.

Aukerman touches on Hitler and Nazism often throughout the book, circling round again and again to examine the ways in which the specter of the Nazis has been used to justify war and the threat of war. Most strikingly, in a chapter titled "Hitler and the Woman Caught in Adultery," Aukerman discusses the "dark continuity" between himself and Hitler, between Nazism and the rest of the human race, and uses the story of the woman caught in adultery and brought to Jesus to illustrate his point. I'll quote Aukerman at length here, since he's substantially more eloquent than I am:

I want to challenge the assumption that there is a sharp discontinuity between who we are and who Adolf Hitler was, and the parallel assumption of discontinuity between our particular society and Nazi Germany. It is crucial for us to recognize not only the continuity between the darkness deep in each of us and the darkness in Hitler, but also a continuity between positive impulses and longings within us and those, even if to a large extent atrophied, within Hitler. 

The evidence that substantiates this dark continuity is manifold: many of the experimental findings of contemporary psychological studies of aggression and violence; any introspection which owns up to lethal sentiments, murderous fantasies and racist presumptions within us; the final stages of World War II in Europe during which the Allied nations outdid the Axis powers in unleashing violence; the prevailing popular attitudes in Allied countries toward the Nazis then and now. The attitude that Hitler and those around him were so wicked that they simply had to be done away with, was identical to the darkness that was being combated: a readiness to do away with those seen as enemies, a driving need to annihilate those reckoned unworthy to live.

It is most of all in the scriptural witness that we are shown the nature of this dark continuity...[T]he most revealing passage is...the story of the woman caught in the act of adultery. The Pharisees and the doctors of the law could come as they did because they recognized no continuity between who they had been and were and the publicly exposed adulteress. Jesus, moving to save the woman from execution, sought also to save her accusers from perdition and to bring them to a recognition of this continuity. It may be that most or even all of the accusers had not committed adultery as a physical act. But he who in the Sermon on the Mount probed into the depths from which such acts emerge was doing the same here. He wanted to express to his antagonists that a conspicuous example of wrongdoing, rather than reinforcing an exultant self-righteousness, was to bring awareness of the sin common to all human beings and of the shared need for forgiveness and conversion...  

All the desolation of nature, the razing of cities, the slaughter of millions of human beings carried out by Nazi Germany was only a limited foreshadowing of the desolating, razing, annihilating which the peoples of West and East are prepared to carry out. During years of residence in West Germany, I often wondered how decent, good-hearted Germans could have gone along with Nazism. Some of the answer comes through asking the same question of Americans (including myself at a certain level) and nuclear weapons. There is the drivenness of both those who lead and those who are led; fear of determined adversaries; emptiness within individual and society; the lure of power; the drive to be the center of the universe; the infernal darkness within, which the Dark Powers from without align with themselves. The Yes to nuclear weapons by good-hearted Americans who are distraught by the death of a pet and full of altruism toward neighbors recapitulates that earlier yielding to the Dark Powers by Adolf Hitler and those who moved in concert with him.

Dale Aukerman, Darkening Valley, pgs. 19 and 22, emphasis added 

My point, and Aukerman's point, is not that the Nazis and Hitler were good, or even that they weren't evil. It is simply that when we use the Nazis for rhetorical point scoring, when we hold them up as the highest, purest example of Evil, we miss the opportunity to actually reflect on what Nazism was and to use that reflection for tangible, human good. We miss the chance to see their darkness in ourselves and our neighbors, and to work actively to resist that darkness. We blind ourselves, and we risk a tragic stumble.

---

*This is a play on a quote from the Big Lebowski.
**I mean, especially if you're a Nazi, dear reader, because I certainly can't tell who you are from this side of the screen. But even if you're not a Nazi, is what I'm saying. Get it? If not, uh, read on, I promise I explain elsewhere outside this footnote.
†It's a hypothetical example. Stop looking at me like that.

The New Testament (in 48 hours)

This is the final entry in a series of posts on Reading the Whole Bible

I'll meet you at the Alamo mission
And we will say our prayers.
The Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mother
Will heal us, as we kneel there,
In the midnight moonlight,
Midnight moonlight, moonlight,
In the midnight, moonlight,
In the midnight moonlight, midnight.
—"Midnight Moonlight," The Be Good Tanyas

How It All Went Down:

At long last, I've come to the end of this project. As I mentioned in an entry this summer, I'd initially thought it would take me about three months to read my Bible, given that there were only 2000 pages or so, and with a good novel I can do 2000 pages in a couple of weeks. 2000 pages of Bible, I reasoned, shouldn't take much more than that. I ended up making quick progress until I hit the ~600 pages of poetry in the middle, which were so different and hard to plow through that I ended up taking a whole month off just to enjoy reading other things; I read much more slowly once I returned to them.

Perhaps surprisingly, I was expecting the same problem with the New Testament.

The New Testament is not my favorite part of the Bible; that designation is reserved for the beautiful narratives of the Hebrew Bible, especially 1 and 2 Samuel. Biblical narrative is what I crave; thankfully, there are five narrative books stacked right at the beginning of the NT: the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) which depict the life of Jesus from slightly different angles, and Acts, which describes the beginnings of the Christian church as it spread from Israel into the Roman Empire. While these books sometimes don't quite measure up to the sheer narrative artistry and literary pleasures of the Hebrew Bible's greatest moments, they are all still wonderful to read, and examining them in detail with commentary was something I looked forward to. These books were not my problem.

My problem with the New Testament has always been the second half, which consists almost entirely of epistles (a word which I was not able to distinguish from "apostles" until I was almost an adult) or letters. These letters were often sent from a church leader to a specific church in another city, but sometimes to a specific individual or a more general audience, the early Christians as a whole. These books, in other words, do not tell a story; rather, they lay out instructions and theology for the early church, often using the techniques of ancient Greek rhetoric to do so. To say the least, the prospect of ending the Bible project with a slog through ~200 pages of this epistolary material did not seem all that exciting.

To get around this, and the risk of dragging out the project over another month or two, I borrowed a technique I learned in college: set an arbitrary deadline and cram like heck to meet it!

It so happened that by the end of 2013, I had only finished about one and a half gospels, and so had over 300 pages left to finish in the NT before I was done with the Bible. Since I'd made no plans for New Year's Eve, I decided I would try my best to finish before midnight. After I got home from work, I sat down with some snacks and a couple of Bibles for cross-referencing and went to town. I ended up making it about halfway through the remaining 300 pages before midnight, going to sleep, waking up early, and finishing the rest over the course of the next day, finishing just before midnight on New Year's Day, 2014. So if the Whole Bible Project had really been a college assignment, I would have lost a letter grade for turning it in a day late. Still: the arbitrary deadline worked! 300 pages in 2 days was by far the best speed I'd managed to accomplish over the course of the project. The real question was: at that pace, would I get anything meaningful out of it?

What I Got Out of It:

Dude, of course I did. The Bible is awesome; pretty much no matter how fast you read it, you can learn something. As the New Testament book of Hebrews puts it, "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword."

Except, of course, that when you read that verse in context, it's clear that it means nothing of the kind:

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account. (Hebrews 4:12-13, NRSV)

In Hebrews, the verse is clearly referring not to the liveliness and potency of scripture, but to God's ability to speak to and judge the human heart. Yet I have never heard this verse quoted by a Christian except as a way of talking about the Bible, "God's word," as we have come to call it, never mind that the Bible as we know it, for obvious reasons, simply did not exist when the anonymous author of Hebrews was writing.

One of the most interesting parts of reading through the whole NT, then, was putting back into context verses that I'd heard quoted time again in church as prooftexts for some idea or other, discovering in the process that they meant something completely different than I'd been taught. Here's another one, Romans 8:28: "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God" (NRSV). For some reason, this is often quoted as proof that God wills all things, good or bad, and that the bad things he wills are secretly going to work out for the better, which has always struck me as insane. The notion that rapes and murders and catastrophes and wars are God's will is fine, if you don't believe that God is good, but the people who say this stuff do believe that. In context, or heck, even out of context, it seems pretty clear to me that this verse means something radically different; as my commentary so helpfully put it, "[Romans 8:28] does not say that God wills all things, but that God works in all things for the good of those who love God" (New Interpreter's Study Bible, pg. 2022, emphasis mine). It was nice not only to read it as part of a larger whole, but to have the commentary on it confirm my suspicion that it is being misinterpreted.

The slightly disturbing thing about the project was that, even as I was gleefully reading well-known verses and discovering their original meanings, I also watched the Biblical authors do the exact opposite.

The funny thing about the Bible is how self-referential it is. The Biblical authors were constantly quoting, alluding to, or retelling each other's stories and ideas:

Map of all the cross-references in the Bible; color corresponds to textual distance between the points of reference

As the earlier books of the Bible aged, they took on a new character for the Jews (and later Christians) who read them. The most important conclusion that later readers came to was that these books were not just texts written for the specific time and audience of their authors' day, but as universal divine messages to people, and especially messages that were relevant for their own time as later readers. One important result of this was that the books of the Bible that had already been written came to be seen as a kind of vast code, any part of which might be extracted and connected with something else to make a new meaning.

For example: the author of Hebrews, the very book I've already complained about people extracting a single verse from and giving it a whole new meaning, felt extremely free to quote from and allude to the Hebrew Bible throughout his own book; my commentary counts 30 direct citations and 70 allusions. These citations and allusions are not serving the purpose of elucidating what their original authors wanted to say to their own audience; rather, the author of Hebrews is governed by "the conviction that Christ is the ultimate meaning and goal of the [Hebrew Bible] and thus that the [Hebrew Bible] constantly points to him" (NISB, pg. 2152; the original text has "OT," that is "Old Testament," where I've put "Hebrew Bible," but OT is not a term I've been using in writing this series). In keeping with this conviction, the author of Hebrews disregards the original meanings of his texts and read them as if they referred to Christ. 

My feeling of superiority, therefore, was severely undercut by the fact that the same principle I was objecting to seemed to have been applied throughout the very Bible I was trying to protect from it. Wrestling with questions of context and reinterpretation has been a big part of the fun of this project, though, which I've written a bit more about elsewhere. 

What Else: 

The best part of this two-day Bible smorgasbord was finally discovering some actual enjoyment in reading those dreaded epistles. When segments of the epistles are read in church, they often come off as didactic in tone and the kind of un-fun thing you wouldn't really want to dive into at length. When reading in a group at a Bible study, they seem confusing and sometimes even pointless. However, reading them on my own, quickly, with a commentary to guide me, I discovered a couple of delightful things:

The first was that, quite apart from any spiritual meaning I might someday extract from them as pieces of religious instruction, the letters actually double as a sort of sketch of the very early history of the church. These letters, after all, are the first Christian writings we possess, and they make for a sort of historical mystery or puzzle to solve, the prize for solving it being a vision of the structure community and life of the first people to believe in Jesus as we Christians, their spiritual descendants, still do today.

For example, the main thesis of the book of Galatians (so named because early Christian missionary Paul wrote it to a church in the city of Galatia), is that as Christians, we are justified, or known to be righteous, because of our faith in Christ, not because of obedience to religious laws. In articulating this message, though, Paul takes a moment to tell how he confronted the apostle Peter (here called by his Aramaic name, Cephas) when he saw him doing something he thought was wrong:

But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews? (Galatians 2:11-14, NRSV)

The point of the story is that Paul is defending the right of Gentile Christians to not get circumcised (since they were justified by faith in Christ, not obedience to the Jewish religious laws, including the commandment that males must be circumcised). It supports his thesis in the book of Galatians: he has stood up for this idea in his own life, as the story demonstrates. But the result of him telling us the story is that we have this little glimpse of conflict in the early church, between two of its most key founding members: Peter, the most prominent disciple of Christ and a leader of the early church, and Paul, the formulator of much of the early church's theology and the person who most actively spread the faith to non-Jews. These kinds of clues are nearly always left out of church services, because while they are interesting if you're looking for this sideways glimpse of the early church I'm talking about, they tend to leave something to be desired in terms of teaching a religious idea or lesson.

The other delightful thing I discovered in the epistles was the radical, creative, odd beauty of the theology in the letters. When I read these letters, Christianity felt less like something a couple of millennia old, with tradition after tradition and interpretation after reinterpretation stacked against and on top of each other across the ages, and more like something completely fresh and weird, at once full of adventure and joy. Reading the books all in the course of 48 hours helped reinforce this feeling for me, since I was seeing the letters all together and watching the church grow and change and think and even argue with itself over the course of its first few decades. But I think all it really takes to get this feeling is to step away for a moment from the idea that these books are written primarily for you, the reader (an idea which I've found Christians, especially Protestants, seem to assume more often than is healthy) and to instead start by thinking about the original audience. To me, the fact that they are letters, often literally written to a specific, named audience of people, was also helpful in this regard.

At all events, I enjoyed thinking about ideas I'd heard countless times before being articulated for the first time, to the audiences for whom they were originally meant. The newness, the weirdness, the creativity came through powerfully and beautifully for me. As a demonstration, I'd like to return to the book I started this section with, the Letter to the Hebrews. The main point of the book is to articulate the idea that Jesus is the believers' very own High Priest, like the Jewish High Priest who made the atoning sacrifices in the Holy of Holies at the Temple at Jerusalem, only better:

For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself again and again, as the high priest enters the Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own; for then he would have had to suffer again and again since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself. (Hebrews 9:24-25, NRSV, emphasis mine)

The notion that Jesus is a High Priest of some kind or another has been rattling around in my brain for a decade or two, mostly because I often sang this one song that mentions it briefly at the beginning. I've also been aware of the notion that Jesus' sacrifice atones for sins, in the abstract, for a long time. What's neat about this passage is how eloquently, and creatively, it articulates a completely new piece of theology: Jesus is the new High Priest, who made a sacrifice, not of an animal's blood, but of his own, and not for one time only, but for all people and for always.

For Christians today, this idea maybe isn't that big of a deal. But for the Jewish Christians who were the audience for this letter, who were concerned about the religion they'd chosen, facing rejection from their society and religion, and considering leaving the faith, this creative bit of theologizing might have made all the difference. It connected their faith with the faith of their forbears, and assured them that they had chosen the correct way, that they were still part of God's people.

The fact that the Biblical authors were able to draw together the different strands of their faith, different ideas from previous generations, into something new that spoke to their own day, gives me hope that I and my fellow Christians can do the same in our time. While I may sometimes worry about people forgetting the context for the verses they quote as proof to each other, in the end I am encouraged by the examples I found in the New Testament, especially in the epistles, and I believe that God can still speak to us through the fresh reading and application of these ancient texts.

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Photo Sources:
http://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Visualizations/BibleViz
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/29811338@N05/3601180188/

Reading the Apocrypha

Part of a series on Reading the Whole Bible

Orthodox priest studying his Bible, which contains the Apocrypha

So take to the streets with your apocalypse strain,
Your devotion has the look of a lunatic's gaze.
—"Apocalypse Song," St. Vincent

 A couple months ago I finished the Hebrew Bible and started work on the Apocrypha, a group of books that form the middle section of my NRSV Bible. The books in this section weigh in at a relatively svelte 350 pages or so in my Bible, compared to the great and honking mass that is the Hebrew Bible at 1300 pages.

The Apocrypha are not a separate section in Catholic or Orthodox Bibles; you will find the books that are gathered under that name in my NRSV scattered throughout a Catholic or Orthodox volume. And a typical Protestant Bible will exclude them altogether: as a Protestant myself, no Bible I ever saw in church growing up had these books, and it wasn't until my parents thoughtfully gave me a New Interpreter's Study Bible* for my college graduation present (yes, I was then and am still a Bible nerd) that I finally came to own a Bible that included them. To understand why this is so, we need to dig into a little history.

A Short History of the Apocrypha:

In the three centuries before Jesus' life on earth, the Jews lived not only in their homeland of Palestine but also in communities scattered around the ancient Near East, especially in Alexandria, Egypt. They were a part of the first Jewish diaspora into the larger ancient world. The language of their daily lives ceased to be Hebrew, in favor of the Greek that their neighbors spoke. (This was especially true of Jews living outside of Palestine. In Palestine, on the other hand, many Jews, including Jesus, came to speak Aramaic as their primary language.**)

The Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek for the benefit of this diaspora community. (The most popular ancient Greek translation was called the Septuagint, though there were others.) Meanwhile, religious books were still being composed by Jews in these last three centuries BCE; they were sometimes composed in Hebrew, sometimes in Greek, but were usually translated and circulated in Greek if they hadn't been written in it, and most copies of the book in existence at any given time would have been in Greek. The most popular of these books took on as much significance as the older books of the Hebrew Bible for many ancient Jews, and the distinction between these newer books and their older counterparts might not have been as clear as one might think. To quote my Bible's notes on the subject, "For a Greek-speaking Jew living in Egypt, it would have been far from clear that (for example) Proverbs, which he or she would know in its Greek version, was Holy Scripture, whereas the (rather similar) Wisdom of Solomon, which was originally composed in Greek, was not" (Access Bible, pg. 32).

This means that, in Jesus' day, there was a sort of unofficial Jewish canon of scripture that included both the older books that we now know as the Hebrew Bible, and some newer books either written Greek in or primarily known in their Greek translations. When Christianity formed, it inherited this larger canon of Jewish scripture. Later, as modern Judaism began to form under the rabbis who led the Jewish community after the destruction of the Temple, Jews began to consider only the books in Hebrew as canonical.

So, somewhat ironically, Christians ended up preserving quite a number of ancient Jewish writings that would likely have been lost otherwise. There was some dissent about these books among Christians in ancient times, who noticed that the Jews had a smaller canon that only included the older Hebrew works,^† but for the most part, other Christians paid little attention to this dissent. But all this doesn't quite explain how I, a Protestant, ended up never getting around to reading the Apocrypha until this year. For that, we need to jump forward to the Reformation.

Depiction of St. Jerome, ancient translator who objected to the Apocrypha

In the sixteenth century, a number of religious thinkers and leaders called for changes in the Roman Catholic Church, were denounced and expelled as heretics, and ended up forming their own church movements as a result. This period is called the Protestant Reformation (which has always struck me as slightly odd, since the people who protested and left the Catholic Church did not really succeed in reforming it, though the Catholics eventually got around to making some of the changes the Protestant Reformers suggested anyway, in a movement amusingly titled the Counter-Reformation). One of the most important ideas of the Reformation was something called sola scriptura, which is a doctrine that the Bible contains everything you need to know in order to be saved from sin and hell, and therefore that only ideas that are directly stated in the Bible (or that can be logically derived from statements in the Bible) should be considered doctrines of the church.

In enunciating the rallying cry of sola scriptura, the Reformers began to examine the contents and extent of said scriptura in more detail than was common at the time. They ended up agreeing with the earlier Christian thinkers who had wanted to remove the books from the canon.^‡ While early Protestant translations of the Bible, including the still-widely-loved King James Version, kept the books as a separate section between the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha quickly fell out of favor (from what I can tell, many Protestants considered them "too Catholic," but I can also see how it might be annoying and weird to have some books in your Bible that aren't, you know, scripture), and most Protestant Bibles that are produced today, KJVs included, do not include the Apocrypha. Protestants working on new translations have generally not even bothered to translate them.

Title page from a Counter-Reformation Bible

Thankfully, the good folks who created the (somewhat redundant-sounding) New Revised Standard Version did bother to translate the Apocryphal books, and they are included in both of the NRSV volumes that I own. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, most NRSVs used by Protestant churches do not include the Apocrypha. There's also a Catholic NRSV edition that includes the books in the order they appear in in Catholic Bibles.) The NRSV Apocrypha section includes not only the books that appear in Catholic Bibles, but also some that appear only in Orthodox Bibles.

Reading the Apocrypha:

As I've remarked before, I have way more love for Biblical narrative than for other Biblical genres; I'm especially bad at enjoying or understanding Biblical poetry, at least at any length. Unfortunately for me, two of the longest books in the Apocrypha, the Wisdom of Solomon and the book of Sirach, are books of poetry. Wisdom was pretty good; it's the shorter of the two, and I enjoyed its message of the importance of pursuing goodness and righteousness, even in the face of opposition. Sirach was a doozy though; not only is it the longest Apocryphal book by far (51 chapters and 87 pages in my Bible, while no other book in the section gets much beyond 50 pages), it's also not very fun or interesting, and it's littered with the most entrenched patriarchy/misogyny I've seen pretty much anywhere in the Bible, which is not the most forward-thinking, when it comes to gender, on a good day. Take this gem, Sirach 42:12: Better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good; it is woman who brings shame and disgrace. "The severity of this statement," my Bible commentary notes, "is unparalleled in Biblical literature." Blerg.

Much of the other material in this section is a lot better than this, though, and in fact one book, Judith, is practically a proto-feminist text. The main character of this short novel is Judith, a strong, independent widow who saves her town from an invading army by tricking her way into the general's quarters and beheading him. I love its positive vision of service to God and people, although I suppose its violent resolution is not necessarily my favorite thing in the world. It's quite well written, however, doing a great job of building suspense and creating a sense of danger for the heroine before she completes her grisly mission.

And boy, is it grisly

I once read somewhere that ancient authors thought it was important to avoid creating suspense because it distracted the audience from the point of the story. If this is true, then whoever wrote the book of Tobit must have subscribed to this ancient literary theory. Tobit is a really fun, edifying, and satisfying story, but the funniest moment in it for me is when, about three chapters in, the author steps aside from narrating the story itself to assure the reader that everything is going to turn out okay for the main characters. (Second funniest moment: Tobit 6:3, which says, "Suddenly a large fish leaped up from the water and tried to swallow the young man’s foot, and he cried out." Hee hee.) The book is the story of a man, Tobit, and his son, Tobias. Tobit is a pretty cool guy, but early in the story becomes blind and impoverished, and God sends an angel to help Tobias on a journey to retrieve some money for his dad. Along the way, Tobias saves a woman from a demon that's been keeping her from getting married, and then marries her (the woman, not the demon). The book places a weirdly strong emphasis on the importance of properly burying the dead, and I found it mildly unsettling that the angel in the story feels the need to repeatedly lie to conceal the fact that he's an angel, but these are both things that actually added to the fun for me in discovering this new book. 

Other fun stuff in the Apocrypha included the various books called "Maccabees;" 1 and 2 Maccabees, for example, are actually two different authors' perspectives on the same period in history. I have next to no exposure to said time period, the era when the Jews rebelled against their Greek overlords and set up an independent state of Israel (which lasted for over a century, until it was conquered and incorporated as a Roman province; sigh). "Maccabees" is the nickname for the family that led this rebellion, and of one member, Judas Maccabeus (or "Judah Maccabee"), in particular; the nickname probably has something to do with the Aramaic word for "hammer," though apparently there are other theories.

Judah Maccabee leading his army

Amusingly, neither 3 Maccabees nor 4 Maccabees has anyone from Judah Maccabee's family in it, though they both involve roughly the same period in Jewish history as 1 and 2 Maccabees. 3 Maccabees is delightful mostly for the deliciously weird irony of its premise. At the start of the book, the king of Egypt, Ptolemy, is saved from death by a Jew. To show his gratitude, the king offers a sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem; once there, however, he is enraged to discover that he is absolutely forbidden to enter the Holy of Holies, where even the high priest is allowed only once a year, and so the king resolves to kill all the Jews in Egypt out of spite. Much hilarity ensues, including several (failed) attempts to trample the Jews to death with elephants, and the king ends up blaming the idea for the whole episode on his advisers when he finally repents in the face of an angelic intervention. 4 Maccabees is a philosophical treatise that sets out to prove that reason can govern the emotions, but it is taken up in very large part with an unnecessarily detailed account of King Antiochus torturing seven Jewish brothers and their mother to death (an event which 2 Maccabees records with slightly more decorum as part of a general campaign by the King Antiochus to snuff out the Jewish way of life, which eventually led to the Maccabean revolt). Neither 3 nor 4 Maccabees can be found in Catholic Bibles, and 4 Maccabees is scarcely in any Orthodox ones either, but I was certainly happy the NRSV translators included them, especially 3 Maccabees, which is a riot.

Several books of the Hebrew Bible appeared in expanded form when translated into Greek; these Greek additions are listed among the Apocrypha, but are mostly too short to give much attention to on their own, though one addition to Daniel, Bel and the Dragon, is kind of cool because it has a dragon. The Letter of Jeremiah is an addition to the Hebrew Bible book of Jeremiah, and it's pretty much dedicated entirely to the questionable Biblical argument that idols should not be worshiped because they are man-made. This made it a lovely example when I needed to wrap up a post about idolatry a few weeks ago.

My favorite book in the Apocrypha was 2 Esdras, which only appears in the Slavonic Bible (one of the Bibles of the Orthodox churches), and Jerome's Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate (where it appears as an appendix). The Wikipedia entry on 2 Esdras calls it "one of the gems of Jewish apocalyptic literature," which I think sums it up rather nicely. The book is a collection of several authors' viewpoints on the chaotic and troubling goings-on of the early centuries CE, but my favorite is the middle section, which depicts a dialog between the main character, Ezra, and the angel Uriel, who God sends to comfort Ezra in his distress and answer his questions about the end of the world and the life to come. In particular, I identify with Ezra's questions about the nature of the afterlife, especially his outraged inquiry, repeated throughout the book: why is it that most people who live will not go to heaven, but will suffer in the afterlife? Ezra several times rejects the angel Uriel's too-pat answers to this very important question, and while Ezra eventually comes round to Uriel's way of thinking, a number of unanswered questions remain, which is how I like my Biblical books. 2 Esdras reminds me of nothing else in the Bible so much as Abraham's argument with God, in which he attempts to save the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of the few righteous people who live there. This argument between God and Abraham is one of the pivotal moments in the book of Genesis and in Jewish thought on the nature of God, and 2 Esdras expands on it and plays with it and many other Biblical scenes and tropes, to good effect. I'm glad I have a Bible with this book in it, and the others I've talked about; I hope to revisit them again sometime soon.

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*The NISB is a great book, and I've been using it to supplement my reading, especially when I'm reading at home in the evenings. It's not very portable, though; thankfully, as I mention briefly in the first post in this series, my father was kind enough to get me a copy of the more obscure but quite good Access Bible, which has provided enough commentary to keep me engaged and make sure I'm understanding what's going on in some of the more obscure places. It has significantly less commentary than the NISB, though, and it's a paperback to boot, so I can take it with me from place to place without totally hulking out and frightening passersby with my unbridled physical prowess.
**Aramaic is a language related to Hebrew; it was the language of the Babylonians, who destroyed the ancient nation of Judah and carried many Jews into exile in Babylon. This is roughly how it replaced Hebrew for the Jews in Palestine: not only would the Jews in exile have used Aramaic in their daily lives, and would have brought it with them when they returned to their ancestral home a generation later, but also the people who stayed behind in Palestine became part of the Babylonian Empire, an Aramaic-speaking empire, and would have needed Aramaic for administrative and other purposes.
†These included St. Jerome, who learned enough Hebrew from his Jewish friends to translate the Bible into Latin (in what became known as the Vulgate, which is still in use by the Catholic Church). In doing so, he found out that they had a smaller canon and objected to the inclusion of the books that the Jews had not included in their Bibles into his Old Testament, even going so far as to get into a debate with St. Augustine on the subject. He ended up translating them in spite of his objections.
‡The Reformers had varying views of the works in the Apocrypha; Luther thought that, though they were not to be considered scripture, the Apocryphal books were still good and valuable, and he said wanted them to be read and taught by Christians. Calvin had a much more pessimistic view, though even he was not entirely consistent on the matter. From what I can tell, the Anabaptist Reformers generally thought of these books quite positively and may even have thought of them as authoritative scripture, though like other Protestant movements, modern Anabaptist churches have generally excluded them from their Bibles.

Photo sources:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orthodox_Priest,_Tek_Teklay,_Ethiopia_%288070187014%29.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Workshop_of_Pieter_Coecke_van_Aelst,_the_elder_-_Saint_Jerome_in_His_Study_-_Walters_37256.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johannes_Eck_1537_Titel.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GENTILESCHI_Judith.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:143.Judas_Maccabeus_Pursues_Timotheus.jpg

Scattered Thoughts on Advent

It's Advent, the second coolest time on the church calendar. Here are some things about it.

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Advent Wreath

 As a child, Advent was mostly fine but also slightly irritating, because it was mainly celebrated by lighting Advent candles during the church service each Sunday. As a pastors' child, I was inevitably roped into this task at least once per Advent. I found this to be pretty embarrassing, though I can no longer articulate exactly why, since I was generally happy to participate in and help out with the service in other ways. 

The other major source of Advent embarrassment during my childhood was Christmas kettles. My parents are ministers for the Salvation Army, which meant that Advent was also Kettle Season, and our family was charged with filling in any gaps in the volunteer bell-ringing schedule, especially right at the end when people were busy doing their important Christmas Eve things. At such times, I was given a bell and told to smile and say happy holidays, but doing these things was nearly unbearable to me as a thoroughly introverted and quiet child. Once, as a teenager, I rang a bell at a kettle by myself, and was discovered by some high school friends on their way into the Walmart I was in front of, much to their amusement and my chagrin. 

As an adult, I have come to love these things. Advent candles are a nice ceremony that helps keep a sense of continuity among the various services I see as I travel around the country during the season; most churches I've been to during Advent have some version of the candle lighting. Kettles, meanwhile, became a lot more fun once I grew up enough to play Christmas carols on my tuba at the kettle, which I love.

Me & Tuba

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Every year, my church puts out an Advent devotional, which has a short thought for each day of the season, with suggested Bible readings for each day. The devotional at my church is composed by members of the church, with a different person volunteering to write something each day. This year, I got to participate. Below is my entry:

12/14 - St. John of the Cross
Psalm 146:5-10
1 Samuel 2:1-8
Luke 3:1-18

In Luke 3, John the Baptist is preparing people for the arrival of the Christ, just as the Church prepares for Christ’s arrival during the season of Advent. John quotes Isaiah’s command to prepare a way for the Lord’s return to Jerusalem. In doing so, he draws on Isaiah’s message of hope for an end to exile and disempowerment and despair, which was still very pertinent in his day. As it is in our own.

How can we prepare for the Christ? “What should we do?” ask John’s listeners in Luke. He tells them: Share with those in need. Take no more than you ought. Treat others with respect. John suggests that his listeners prepare themselves and their world for the coming of the Christ through acts of justice. May the Church take his words to heart in our own time.

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Growing up in the Salvation Army, Advent was the time Christmas carols were sung in church. So when, during my college years, I was invited to play my guitar for the Advent hymn sing at a Lutheran church, I brought some printouts of Christmas carols with the appropriate chords to strum. When we sat down to sing, people started to request songs that I'd never heard of before. I looked them up in the hymnal and tried to piece together what I should play on the fly from looking at the four-part harmonies under the words, a challenging task for a mediocre guitar player. 

Lutheran Rose

"Why don't we sing some of these songs I've prepared?" I asked, motioning towards my printouts. "Oh, no, those are Christmas carols. You can't sing those at Advent, because it's the season of preparation for Jesus to come. These are all songs about Jesus already being here!" This was my first introduction to the liturgical intricacies that are engrained in Lutheranism and other churches. Thankfully, the Lutherans put up graciously with my less-than-robust gutarmanship, and I learned some lovely new hymns as a result. 

Photo sources:

Photo 1: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adventwreath.jpg

Photo 2: Me

Photo 3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lutherrose.svg