The Golden Ass

THIS KANYE THING

So, there’s this Kanye thing. I’m not a Kanye fan. Never have been. I’ve never bought a single one of his albums. Never listened to an entire one anywhere near all the way through. The easiest things that come to mind when I think of Kanye are his gaffs at awards shows and his suposedly new found faith (and support of Trump). I did listen to the two songs on his new “Jesus is King” album that everyone says are most “repeatable.” I did also enjoy them!

Yet, despite my distance from really knowing the man, I find myself drawn to this “Kanye thing.” I’m intrigued. And, in the midst of that intrigue, I’ve found myself asking larger questions to which this public situation or conversation seems to speak.

"Why are evangelicals all over this Kanye thing like white paint on a picket fence?" I've noticed that Christians are really excited that, because of Kanye, Christ is being proclaimed and known. There seems to be a prevailing sentiment among us that we’re in a war for the culture and direction of “our country.” Now we have a huge celebrity on our side to help us win! Yay!

For the record, I’m an evangelical by heritage here. So, I’m at least partially asking or talking about myself. While thinking and praying about all this, I came across stories that struck me in two different ways.

THE TAKES

One was James Corden’s airplane karaoke with Kanye and his Sunday Service chorus. When I saw that, though I was a bit turned off by Kanye’s quip about his taxes that seemed to reveal a bit of a prosperity gospel message, I was filled with joy to the point of shedding a tear or two. It was very easy for me to identify with, engage, or attach to.

On the other hand, I came across a number of “Kanye takes” from African American Christians who had a lot to say about the racism and White Supremacy at work around whole situation that I pretty much never would have thought of on my own. Let’s just say they weren’t so easily excited about it as I was. I tried to allow those other voices so different from mine help serve to reveal my blind spots in helpful ways.

So, there’s clearly a discord there. It got me to thinking…

MY CONFESSIONS

When I walk into a mega church and see all the church’s name brand merchandise, hear the loud music, sit and learn from an engaging and charismatic preacher...man I get all excited inside and feel identified with or attached to something big and important for Jesus! I feel attached to the winning side against evil and darkness and pain and despair.

Considering what I know about myself and my history – various ways I’ve tended to mistake idols for God - I get suspicious and wary of those exuberant feelings when I’m in a mega church.

In the middle of a conversation with a couple of excited evangelical friends about how I felt that was connected to this whole Kanye story, they weren’t mowing what I was growing, pickin up what I was putting down, smellin what I was sniffin. So…

I felt the need to explain myself in a whole lot of detail to them and thus essentially make or force them to see what I see and thus more possibly and want what I want. Instead of confessing that feeling of that need, I just simply and compulsively “explained” until I was blue in the face, in my own strength, without trusting a connection, presence, or work with them or with God. It was exhausting. I took a two hour nap afterwards. And I’m pretty sure that my explaining in that way set me against my friends in a position of antagonism, which I'm really not even!

I think or suspect that evangelicals are getting caught up in with this Kanye thing in very much that same way that I felt compelled to set myself against my friends by “explaining” “the truth” to them, too. That makes me wary like I am of my feelings when I go to a mega church.

Yesterday, I engaged with a patient who is Afircan American. He spent his life working as a laborer, doesn’t speak very polished English, lives in what my family would deem “a bad neighborhood,” and has a tiny, old house filled with 30-year-old dusty clutter that he can’t afford to replace with newer and more expensive technological entertainment. It often takes a while for him to get around to completing a sentence or a thought. He talked a lot without a lot of direction about a lot of stuff I didn’t need to know to do my job. I found myself feeling irritable towards and impatient with him.

Just as I felt wary in a mega church and now feel wary of my need to “explain” things to people, I immediately felt wary of my feelings towards that man yesterday.

I at the least suspect that same part of me that was compelled to presume to exert control over my friends is the part of our evangelicalism that wants President Jesus on Air Force One rather than the Lamb of God on a donkey. My functional picture of heaven is clearly Kanye’s luxurious ranch life instead of my patient’s life as an unskilled laborer.

What qualified as “explaining” in my head – about the connection between mega churches and Kanye’s productions - really probably amounted to a euphemism for an attempt at overpowering my friends and making them look like idiots (which they’re not). Coercing my friends over to “my side” strikes me as the same as joyously having Kanye on “our side.” We’re winners for a big life on an American ranch in middle America with God. The laborer in a small, dusty house in a bad neighborhood who has a hard time completing his thoughts – he’s, in Trump lingo, “a loser!” (Apparently I’m more like Trump than I had realized)

As I confessed my compulsion to my friends, I realized that I hadn’t been speaking participatorally in unity with them. I was speaking as though we weren’t on the same path or in the same world together. The first truth I told wasn’t about myself in relation to them as my friends. The first truth I spoke was about some contested object “out there” and thus appropriately directed outwards TO them as “the other” who disagreed with me. And, I think that’s what we tend to do in relation to “the world.”

MY HOPES

The truth is that friends aren’t idiots and have their own agency and power to shape the world with me. And, that creative agency and power is given to them by God as WE, together, are purposed to participate with Him in the re-creation of all things with Jesus. Same goes for the “loser” laborer who isn’t in as much of a busy hurry as me and isn’t interested in reaching up the social ladder towards life on a luxuriously giant ranch.

As I found myself getting annoyed and impatient with my patient yesterday, I was gracefully honest with myself about it. In that moment of grace that opened space for the work of Jesus, I also realized that I was placing myself in a position of status over and above him, looking down my nose at him. It was in that moment that I was given to not only see and enjoy but accept into my own being that he was filled with more love, grace, truth, and light heartedness than I ever have been! As I confessed my judgment of him in my heart, I was given to see that he was teaching me how to be human! The reason he was rambling on and on about information irrelevant to bureaucracy and clinical goals is because he was, with the radical hospitality of Jesus, welcoming us with open arms and, despite having just met us, trusting and treating us as dear friends. Perhaps I really AM a "fool for Jesus"?

My wariness of our normal way of hoping to win makes me hopeful of finding different way of hoping and doing. What if, as evangelicals, we might be able to learn to be human from those who we tend to treat as our enemies or other than ourselves? What if that other way starts with the confessions of a professed non-expert, someone who doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, someone who’s just unhurriedly mumbling and stumbling along the laborious path that God has him on without looking ahead to the unlikely Triumphal Victory Parade of Arms in Pyongyang? Can I, like a man who clearly doesn’t understand his own medical condition, talk about Kanye without being qualified to do so?

Do I need to now “explain” how the complaints of racism and White Supremacy from my African American brothers and sisters are tied to my own confessions here? Do I need to now control the narrative on how those brothers and sisters might have also, then, been, perhaps unwittingly, “explaining” something important about what I was also noticing about and wary of regarding our evangelical reaction to this whole “Kanye thing”? They were telling me about my blind spots, but we were participating in the telling of the same story together. My deception is the same as their suffering. It’s not us against them.

Confronted both with my wariness and that laborer’s “easy yolk”, I get to thinking about how Jesus makes himself known in ways that are very different from how we tend to want to do so. Emmanuel, God with us, came as Jesus Incarnate, as one who came not to be served but to serve. He commanded not that we “win America for Jesus” but that we would be known as his disciples by our love.

Do I need to now "explain" how, perhaps, all this evangelical hoopla around Kanye is "Feast of Fools" for Jesus?

So, when I think of those big, exuberant, and important winning spectacles for Jesus that we see from Kanye or at a megachurch, spectacles which we passively watch as consumers or classroom pupils, or that we participate in as concert goers, it's my hope that we can perhaps begin to learn engage “the world” in more local, embodied, and “smaller” ways, ways perhaps driven by personal, relational discipleship instead of by big programs - whether those programs are on an IMAX theater screen or in giant pre-fabricated church buildings.

Whaddya think? Am I off my rocker? Has my cheese fallen off my cracker? Am I a crazy fool for these warinesses and hopes of mine?

18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23 but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

- from 1 Corinthians 1