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Empty Tomb or Empty Gesture?

One of Canada’s leading newspapers, the Toronto Globe and Mail, reported this past Easter weekend on a local church who decided not to sing, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today, Alleluia,” but “Glorious Hope Is Risen Today.” As the reporter, veteran Michael Valpy, probed to find out in just what that hope consisted, if not Christ the Lord, he was told by the pastor, Gretta Vosper, that her church had no room for miracles. Just moralism.

No “Big God-ism,” as Valpy reported her putting it: “No petitionary prayers…. No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity’s teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus’s death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.”

The Subversiveness of Easter

What in the world is Easter about? It makes no sense to celebrate the gruesome death of a minor country preacher, making a virtue, as Nietzsche warned, of failure.

There’s no subtlety to the symbolism of the alternative celebration of fertility this weekend, all eggs and rabbits and rainbows and yeah, we get it. Yet the odd, dark events of that ancient Passover/Easter weekend warrant a closer look. For here some important matters are being transacted in disguise, in irony, in spite of the intentions of some of the lead characters in the drama.

As Jesus submits himself completely to leaders of the Jewish religion of the day, he finally tells them who he is—Messiah and the divine Son of Man—only for the light of this final revelation to expose the dark logic of their understanding and motives. Since they will not accept him as Lord, he must be a blasphemer. And since they will not worship him as God, they must destroy him as Beelzebul. For all of their great religious tradition and learning, their custodianship of what Paul sums up as “the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2), when their God finally comes to save them, they not only fail to recognize him, but take him to be exactly the opposite, the Enemy.

The Romans, representing the rest of humanity, the Gentiles, demonstrate the hollowness of their own purported glory. For as Jesus then submits to the Roman legal system, the pride of that civilization, it evanesces under the slight pressure of expediency. Jesus becomes a nuisance, and the massive integrity of Roman law is easily set aside, as a cardboard façade, to dispose of him. So much, then, for all those marble columns and domes and pavements (let the reader understand). Rome was, indeed, built on sand after all.

The Reality of Sex

It was my privilege to give a public lecture at the University of British Columbia recently on the question, “Why Are Christians Against Sexual Freedom?” I haven’t spoken on quite this subject before, so I enjoyed preparing for it partly so I could think about the question a little more clearly than I had previously. Here’s the gist of what I said, and I’ll be glad if you can clarify my thinking still further:

Some Christians Are, Indeed, Against Sex: Some Christian teachers have taught the superiority of lifelong celibacy. Some Christians have taken out their own confusions and frustrations and traumas on others by speaking of sex as a Bad Thing to be avoided if possible and endured if necessary. Yes, some Christians are against sex, so they’re certainly against sexual freedom. But that’s not all there is to say.

Christians Aren’t Against Sex: In fact, the very first chapter of the Christian Scriptures contains the very first command of God to the very first human beings, and it’s this: Have sex. Indeed, have lots of it (Genesis 1:28). The world, God says, is fresh and wild and good. It’s now yours to look after, and it’ll take more than you two (Adam and Eve) to do it. In fact, the planet will take a planet-full of human beings to bring it under cultivation (“subdue it,” “have dominion,” etc.). So (ahem) get busy.

Sexual relations are celebrated in an entire book of the Bible, The Song of Solomon, and celebrated so graphically that Jewish and Christian commentators throughout history have tried to distract us with spiritual allegories so that we won’t stare at all the eyes and hands and breasts featured therein. And, to be sure, sexual imagery sometimes is used in the Bible to depict the relationship of God and Israel.

No, Christians aren’t against sex.

Alternative Bishops among Anglicans? One’s Already Here

I normally stay away from commenting on the convulsions of the Anglican Communion, whether here in the Diocese of New Westminster, whose bishop is a heretic and schismatic (by the standard definitions of those terms), or in the Anglican Church of Canada, which tolerates such behaviour, or in the Anglican Communion worldwide, which is wracked by controversy over the legitimacy of homosexuality (ostensibly) and a lot of other things, such as heresy, schism, power politics, racism, and more (fundamentally).

I have belonged to Anglican congregations in Winnipeg and Vancouver, and have lots of contacts in Anglican churches in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., but I am not a confirmed Anglican and am not currently a member of an Anglican congregation, so I rarely speak up about what are “family problems” in someone else’s “tribe.”

Speaking of “tribe,” however, I was moved to headshaking a year ago by the appointment of Mark MacDonald, already an Anglican bishop, to the newly-created post of National Indigenous Bishop in Canada. According to the Anglican Journal, Bishop MacDonald has “pastoral oversight over all of Canada’s indigenous Anglicans no matter where they live.”

A Great Evening with Chris Botti

For my last birthday, my beloved gave me tickets to see jazz trumpeter Chris Botti in concert here in Vancouver, the last Canadian stop on his tour that takes him next to Poland. Middle son Joshua, studying composition in Chicago, saw him a few weeks ago. Kari, Josh, and I have come to the same conclusion: this guy’s good. In fact, he’s likely great.

Botti is pretty widely known now, after ten albums, for his warm, heavily reverbed trumpeting. He’s drawn the most attention for duets with singers as widely disparate as Frank Sinatra, Sting, and Chantal Kreviazuk. Easily slotted into the “smooth jazz” ghetto with such abominations as Kenny G (see Pat Metheny’s classic estimation of Mr. G’s so-called talent), however, he doesn’t deserve such a fate.

Yes, he used to host a radio show called Chill with Chris Botti—and he has the “FM voice” and quiet wit to do that sort of thing, as the concert showed well. Yes, some of his music does help one mellow out into dreamy semiconsciousness (not a bad thing for music to do, especially for hyper types such as I).

But the boy (he’s two years younger than I am) can play.