How to Avoid Jesus

The boy didn't need to hear it. There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.

In her 1952 novel, Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor provides this description of the protagonist, Hazel (Haze) Motes. In the course of the novel, Motes does everything he can think of to get away from Jesus. In the end, Jesus wins, though it's not entirely clear whether Motes does.

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Regardless of what's going on with Motes, himself, I find the quote above insightful. During Jesus' ministry years, the Pharisees had convinced themselves of their functional sinlessness through observing a set of laws and procedures. As long as they followed those rules, they figured they were OK and didn't need anyone to save them from anything (John 8.33-41). Of course, the temple sacrifices reminded them of sin, but they were always getting forgiveness because they correctly followed all the procedures that were required of them.

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To them, and to us, Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." Sick people who know they're sick go to the doctor for help. Sinners who know they're sinners go to the Savior for true restoration and forgiveness.

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Hazel Motes tried to avoid Jesus by living a perfect, moral life. When that didn't work for him, he tried denying Jesus' existence altogether. Denying he was sick didn't work, but neither did denying there was a doctor who could detect sickness.

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The best way to avoid Jesus is to avoid sin. As deluded as Motes was, at least he knew he fell short. We, on the other hand, sit in our church pews and sing our cheesy worship songs and delude ourselves into thinking everything's alright...all the time giving nary a thought to the falling short that we do every day in every way, and nary a thought to our inability ever to make it right.

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[My friend David just posted his own blog entry about Flannery O'Connor. Check it out.]

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Photo: Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes in John Huston's 1979 adaptation of "Wise Blood".

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Who Cares?

Every day on NPR, and every day in the newspaper, I encounter a story on the two-month-old strike of America's movie and TV script writers. To which I respond: Who Cares?

The media are enthralled by the story, but I have yet to hear even one person at work, home, or church comment on the strike. Not a single person. Who Cares?

"There will be fewer new series on TV for the balance of this year." Who Cares? (I don't watch TV, anyway.)

"There may be fewer new movies at the cineplex." Who Cares? (I haven't found time for half the already-extant movies I'd like to see, and my favorites usually aren't from the U.S., anyway.)

If the writers never came off strike, my life wouldn't change. Would yours?

If the writers never came off strike, we could still read books. There's no book strike, and even if there were, I've got a 10-year backlog on my shelves at home . . . and another 1,000 years' worth at the library.

If the writers never came off strike, we could listen to music or go to concerts.

If the writers never came off strike, maybe more people would read my blog. Now there's something I could care about!

But what if things got really, really desperate? Perhaps we could relearn the art of conversation.

Jesus Goes to the Movies

The people responsible for Campus Crusade's Jesus Film claim that their movie has been seen or listened to by 6,223,295,000 people.

The CIA pegs world population at 6,602,224,175 (of which 4,795,026,261 are age 15 and over).

So does anyone besides me find Crusade's numbers incredible?

In·cred·i·ble (Function: adjective Etymology: Middle English, from Latin incredibilis, from in- + credibilis credible)

1 : too extraordinary and improbable to be believed

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A Good Film

From 1979-1982, in the years between college and graduate school, I worked in Eastern Europe. This was back in the day when these countries were Communist and when America's biggest adversary was the Soviet Union and the countries under its domination. Although I was in almost all of the Soviet Bloc countries, my focus was on East Germany and Poland. So I spent a lot of time in East Germany, which the Germans called the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) and the English speakers called the GDR (German Democratic Republic). It was another world. Except for maybe North Korea and a couple of the "-stan" countries in Central Asia, there's nothing like it today.

With the possible exception of the Soviets' KGB, and most likely not even excepting them, the DDR operated the most effective secret police system in the world. It was called the Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit, but everyone referred to it as Stasi. In this country of 16 million, there were 91,000 Stasi employees and 300,000 informers. That works out to 1 out of every 41 citizens. To give you a sense of what that means, that ratio would yield 100,000 people in Atlanta who were spying on you, or 100 people in my church of 4,000, or 4 people in my Sunday School class of 150. And yes, there were informers in churches, including pastors and bishops in the main church denomination (the Lutherans).

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When "The Wall" fell in 1989, the Stasi shredded documents as quickly as they could. Before they were stopped, they had accumulated 16,000 bags of confetti. The German government is now reassembling those shreddings. Of what didn't get shredded, there are 138 km (81 miles) of documents in the archives; add in microfilm and the like and the grand total is 172 km (107 miles). That is not a typo. That means, roughly, that everyone in the country had a file that was, on average, half an inch thick. Nearly 100 pages. Of course, some files were much thicker than that. I wonder how thick mine is.

This year's Academy Award winner for best foreign language film is The Lives of Others (or, in German, Das Leben des Anderen). It's the story of a Stasi officer and the artists' community he spies on. If you liked Helen Mirren's acting in The Queen, you'll like Ulrich Muehe's acting in this film. It's a study of a person, how he starts committed to and believing one thing, and how he has to grapple with those beliefs. This actor communicates more with his face than most can manage with a torrent of words. The rest of the cast is almost equally good. But beyond the acting, the film is fascinating for how it captures the mood of the DDR and the methods of the Stasi during this time (1984, 2 years after I left and 5 years before The Wall fell). Some of it was even filmed in the old Stasi headquarters, which I visited a few years ago.

If you like quality films that allow you to think and keep you intrigued, see this film. Yes, it's in German with subtitles, but don't let that stop you. Trust me, it's fine, and after the first 5 or 10 minutes, you'll forget you're reading. The Lives of Others is showing in 2 theatres in Atlanta. How easy it'll be to find in your own city, I don't know, though the theatre was surprisingly full when I saw the movie on a Saturday afternoon. If the theatre doesn't work for you, there's always the DVD, which I'm guessing will be out soon. A word of advice, though: try not to learn too much about the plot details before you go; you'll enjoy the little surprises more that way.

See this film. Marvel at the acting. Hang with the story. And thank God we don't live in a society like that.

Drink this Beer, Save the World

Have you seen the new film, Amazing Grace? It's a little bit about John Newton, the redeemed slave trader who wrote the hymn by that name (though not to the tune we know, by the way). But the movie is mostly about William Wilberforce, who, motivated by the gospel - the God of the gospel, actually - fought for decades in the British Parliament to abolish slavery in the British empire. Unfortunately, the movie somewhat minimizes the religious aspect and makes it more a story of political machinations. Nevertheless, it's a moving story (I cried 3 times), and I recommend it.

So imagine my delight to find that Wilberforce has been commemorated with his own beer - from a Christian brewery in England, no less (notice the subtle fishes in the brewery logo). It's a fair trade beer, and a portion of the profits will be donated to stop human trafficking (a.k.a. the slave trade) in today's world. Alas, it looks like we'll have to go to England to be able to drink any of this righteous beverage.