If you’re going to blow it, BLOW IT!

1 Cor 14:8-9 ...if the trumpet does not sound a clear call, who will get ready for battle?

One evening a few days ago I fell into that Internet sinkhole called Youtube. By the time I dragged myself out I’d watched about two hours of old movie clips, vaudeville routines, classic TV ads, dumb pet and people tricks, and about an hour and a half of George Carlin. Now, some of you may be surprised that a Christian pastor and preacher would watch an hour and a half of George Carlin, but I want to let you in on a little secret; most of the preachers I know, particularly those my age and younger, love George Carlin.

I’m tempted to say that we love him in spite of his foul language and outrageous ideas, or that we overlook his anti-religious and anti-establishment rhetoric for the sake of his art, but we all know you can’t separate things out that way. An artist is a whole package, an integrated experience. And an extreme artist like Carlin is like winter on the Canadian prairies, or on the coast of Newfoundland. For those of us who love these things the shock and discomfort are an integrated part the whole. You can love just the pleasant weather of course, and some people do, but they don’t really love the place. First chance they get, they move to Miami or Victoria.

To state the obvious, most preachers love language and believe it can be powerful. But, tragically, less obvious is the fact that we have a God-given reverence for unvarnished words, and a deep distrust of euphemism. And why don’t most people know this? Because we’re sinners, rascals, scoundrels, cowards, people-pleasers, afraid to speak clearly.

We lack the resolve, the audacity, the courage, to do the work we’re called to do. So God, in his grace and wisdom, raises up from time to time, a Dostoevsky, a Solzhenitsyn, a Gandhi, a Malcolm X, a George Carlin, with a gift, not so much to see more clearly than we do, but to speak more clearly than we dare. And for a few moments, days or even weeks, the rest of us have the courage to speak and hear with a little more clarity.

All who seek to fearlessly declare what they know, or even think they know, stand in the tradition of the biblical prophets; a preposterous and audacious heritage. And every now and then we need someone to blow the trumpet clearly: any melody, any call, any note, just so long as it is clear. We’re in a war, sleepwalking into battle, vaguely aware that someone, somewhere, once hummed a few bars of reveille or whistled a bit of the call to arms. Please God, find us a bugler.

“Who are you?”, the captain asked.

“John Updike, Sir.”

“Can you blow a horn?”

“Yes Sir! What would you like to hear?”

“Just anything you know, but loud and certain, like a cannon, like a church bell.”

Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,

each soft Spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled

eyes of the eleven apostles;

it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart

that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then

regathered out of enduring Might

new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,

not a stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow

grinding of time will eclipse for each of us

the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel,

weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,

opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen

spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are

embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance.

Hope Easter was, for you, as: preposterous, unacceptable, astounding, ridiculous, absurd, amazing, obvious and unbelievable as it was, again this year, for me.