Blue Like Jazz (movie review)

I have found it very difficult to write a review of Blue Like Jazz.  It is, as has been said, not another Christian movie.  And so I have found it hard to evaluate based on previously constructed film categories.  But here we go…

I love that it lacks the cheesiness and preachiness of typical Christian movies.  I love that the story is messy and real, that it avoids the cliché, everything-is-wrapped-up-nice-and-clean progression and ending.    I love that it is well-directed and well-acted.  I even love the fact that it made me squirm in my seat a number of times (There is a fair amount of foul language used, as well as some pretty crude conversations.  While these did bother me, I wondered if maybe that was the point, and maybe really being “in the world” and not simply “not of it” looks more like this than my own life does… shame on me).

The story is compelling, funny, and profound.  It is not a perfect movie, but I think most of my complaints come from wishing there was more.  A couple of the transitions in the story, especially near the end, felt a little rushed.  I also wanted a couple characters to be developed a little more.  But these are overall good problems; wishing the movie would have been stretched out a little more is definitely better than wishing it would be over already.

I am almost certain that someday I will write more about this.  Blue Like Jazz is a movie that starts discussions… important discussions about faith, doubt, Christianity in a secular culture, forgiveness, and so much more.  Make no mistake about it: Blue Like Jazz is bizarre, slightly offensive, and completely fascinating.  I would expect nothing less from the Steve Taylor and Donald Miller duo. 

Do yourself a favor and go see it.  Your toes will most certainly be stepped on… and I believe you will walk better because of it.

Find out where it is playing near you here.

myself or someone like me

I want to shed this life like snake skin, to find an escape from a story that is no longer my own, to climb from this cocoon, this grave, and breathe the air like nothing is holding me down.

This shell has grown too small for my aching limbs. I want to stretch beyond the confinement of this cage, to be born and reborn, to feel what it’s like to run, and fall, and rise again.

This Blog Contains a Lot of Cursing

(So I was watching a vlog at matthewlucio.com about whether or not God unfairly cursed Eve over Adam after they sinned, and about half way through a light bulb exploded in my head.  Shrapnel everywhere. Any similarities between this blog and that vlog are entirely uncoincidental.  I blame him... and the Holy Spirit.)

  

The curses that God speaks of after Adam and Eve fall are fascinating to me.  I think Lucio explained them well.  John Eldredge has also been very influential in my understanding of that whole scene in Genesis 3.  My sister, Beth-Anne, has also given me some insight, especially regarding how the curse effects Eve.  This scene is key to human history, which means it is key to the God-human relationship.  And something new (at least to me) hit me about that tonight.

There is a lot of cursing in the Bible.  “Cursed is anyone who makes an idol. … Cursed is anyone who dishonors their father or mother. … Cursed is anyone who leads the blind astray on the road. …Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from a foreigner, the fatherless or the widow.”  Cursed… cursed… cursed.

Back to Genesis and the first curse.  Greatly simplified: everything that would have been painless and pleasurable has now, because of sin, become full of pain.  And so God lays out the consequences of our disconnection from Him.  We cut ourselves off from life and death followed.  The curse.

So this is when it hit me.  See, lately I’ve been trying to read/hear/see everything through one filter: God is love.  If God truly is love, then everything (and I mean everything!) He does is part of that love.  So as I was listening to Lucio, I was trying to figure out where the love was in the curses.  To be sure, we brought it on ourselves and fully deserved our suffering.  And normally that would be fair enough.  But love, true love, is bigger than simple cause-and-effect justice.  And at first glance, the pronouncement of the curse(s) seems pretty dim. And so I wondered: where is the love in the curses?

This verse flashed into my mind: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13).  Jesus became the curse.  He took the curse fully upon Himself.

To me, this was an expansion beyond my typical understanding of Jesus dying for my sins and the sins of the whole world.  The idea that He became the curse for us implies that He died, not just with all our sins on Him, but with all the pain and anguish that came with them… and not only that, but all the suffering we experience (that all humans everywhere have ever experienced) as a natural result of our disconnection from God.  The labor pains and unfulfilled desires, the thorns and painful toil.  All of it, every anguish that came as a result of the first sin, it all rested upon Jesus from Gethsemane to Golgatha.  The curse given in Eden, and every curse since then, weighed upon His soul.

Furthermore, check this out. Back in Genesis, the curse is bracketed by two important statements:

• Prefacing the curse upon the humans is the curse upon the serpent, which concludes with the promise of a redeemer: “He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” 
• And following the curse is the first living (dying?) metaphor: “The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” The first animal is sacrificed by God himself… Jesus gives us the first picture of Himself as redeemer.

The curse is sandwiched between promises that the curse will one day be undone! In fact, in a way, the curse itself is also a promise of a redeemer to undo the curse!

When all of this converged (and exploded) in my mind, it entirely changed the way I see the pronouncement of the curses to Adam and Eve (not to mention all the rest of the curses and punishments pronounced by God throughout the rest of the Scripture).  Every curse that Jesus describes to them is a curse that He will one day take upon Himself.  Every pain that He pronounces is a pain that He will suffer in order to rescue us from ourselves.  More than passing a sentence upon them/us, He is passing a sentence upon Himself.  This is the price He is promising to pay to redeem us.

The pronouncement of the curses is not God saying “This is how much you’ve disappointed Me and this is how you’ll pay for your sin” but rather, “This is how much I love you.  This is how I am going to pay for your sin. This is how far I am willing to go to bring you back to Me.”

On The Nature of Desire, Patience, and Waiting

[Ironically, a much delayed and still unfinished blog]

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The thunderclap of wood against wood still resounds in my ears.
The ark door slammed shut with finality… the moment of vindication!

But all around, smug laughter;
And all above, empty skies.

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“In a moment what has been is lost in what will be.”
(Steven Curtis Chapman, When Love Takes You In)


“Christ if you're ready to come back
I think I'm ready for you to come back
but if you want to stay
wherever exactly it is you are,
that's okay, too,
it's really none of my business.”
(mewithoutYou, Carousels)


“When you're waitin' for love,
if you don't mind believing that it changes everything,
time will never matter.”
(Jars of Clay, Sunny Days)

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I. Empty Skies

When you’re waiting for something to happen, the most important thing in the world is time.  “How long?” is the most important question.  Or so it seems.

And it is a valid question, asked dozens of times in the Scriptures (especially in the Psalms).  But what is interesting to note is that there are only a couple times when God actually answers this question with anything specific.  Usually, as far as we know, the question goes unanswered.  It would seem that time is not on the top of God’s list of priorities.

Yet as humans, it seems like it’s all we can think about.  Case in point: Harold Camping.  He predicted that Jesus would return on May 21, 2011, and when that failed to occur, he revised his prediction to October 21, 2011. Yet the skies remain empty.  Camping is just one in a long list of people whose predictions about the timing of Christ’s return have failed.  As a Seventh-day Adventist, a failed prediction is in my denominational history as well.

What amazes me the most about all the predictions about the Second Coming is the fact that Jesus Himself said that no one knows the day or the hour when He will return (Matthew 24:36).  Our desire to know when is so powerful that we make predictions even in the face of such an obvious statement regarding our inability to make predictions!

Even when we aren’t making predictions, many of us seem obsessed with figuring out at least approximately how much time is left until the Second Coming or the Latter Rain or whatever it is.  I don’t want to say that the when of these issues is entirely unimportant, but I’ve been wondering lately if we’re missing the point by putting our emphasis on when.

Going back to Matthew 24, the disciples ask the when question, and while Jesus doesn’t leave them completely in the dark, His primary emphasis is to “keep watch.”  Stay alert.  Be on the lookout.  Be prepared.  So how long do you wait until you start preparing?  None at all. We start now.  Which really means that whether Jesus comes in two weeks or two centuries, our “task” is the same: to continually get to know Jesus more.  Everything else flows out of that.


II. Empty Gifts

So what about other types of waiting?  Maybe you’re waiting for the perfect job, or to get married, or have children, or some other dream.  Perhaps you’re even like me and believe that God has made you certain promises regarding some of your dreams.  And so you’ve been waiting… and waiting… and waiting.

In my own experiences, I’ve even believed that God has made certain time prophecies regarding things He planned to accomplish in my life.  Many of these predictions have come and gone, making me feel very much like William Miller or Harold Camping.  I keep adjusting my expectations, trying to figure out what when wrong and when these things will really take place.

Maybe I’ve been missing the point.  Oh, I’m sure that God has a timeline for me (though perhaps more flexible than I originally thought) and I even believe He has given me insight into timing (though I seem to be too dense to really get it), but I think I’ve been so focused on the when that I’ve been missing the point.  Perhaps, by focusing on the when, I’ve even delayed the fulfillment of these promises.

God wants to give us good things.  Great and amazing things.  And an abundance of them.  But He also knows that the greatest gift is Himself.  Himself alone and Himself in His gifts… but never His gifts apart from Himself.  This isn’t because He is selfish, but because He knows that His gifts apart from Himself are not only ultimately empty, but can also become curses which destroy our lives.

And when we focus only on the when of His promises and gifts, we prove that we care more about the gifts apart from the Giver.  The Giver of all good things is here now.*  Let us look forward with great anticipation to His gifts, but let us also bask in the glory of the Gift Himself through the entire journey.


III. Empty Stomachs

In Revelation 6, we find the final desperate voicing of the question “How long?” and while we once again don’t get a specific answer, we’re told to “wait a little longer.”  Perhaps this is all we need.  Perhaps it is enough to know that there is an answer, even if we can’t hear it, and that there will come a day when all is fulfilled, even if we can’t see it from here.

And when it does come, it will be so amazing that the years we’ve spent waiting will seem but a small price to pay for such joy.

Or so I’ve heard.  This is perhaps the most difficult thing to really understand. Sometimes I doubt that all that’s been destroyed, lost, and wasted can be worth the wait… or that there will even be anything at all to look forward to after such devastation.

But then Jesus gives me something like this: “I will restore the years the swarming locusts have eaten” (Joel 2:25) and I cling to hope that hope…  The hope that somehow the fulfillment is so grand that it swallows up everything that came before it.  The hope that love truly does change everything.  The hope that the emptiness only exists so it can be filled, and that when it is, we won’t regret all the time we’ve spent longing for fulfillment, but rather recognize that the hunger itself has led us to this moment of immeasurable pleasure.




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*Now let me contradict myself slightly for a moment here.  Christ’s presence with us now is not the same as His presence will be when He returns… otherwise, what’s the point of Him returning?  Apparently, His actual presence with us changes everything… “But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

Mount Constellation

On a mountaintop in Virginia,
I recline under the open sky, watching
the stars emerge, slowly,
one by one, each making its appearance
with significance, with meaning,
gradually filling the sky
with order and disarray –
patterns both familiar and foreign.

I love the way they unfold
with such patience and grace,
revealing plans as indiscernible
as they are clear.

And I wonder why
I am not as patient
with my own life.

As My Lungs Burn (11:11)

Inhale

This is where we live most of our lives. This is where I am now, holding my breath. Waiting. In between the dream and the dream come true. But the question is this: am I truly willing to wait without trying to control my life as I see fit?

Waiting is always the hardest start. This is a treacherous land. Thousands have laid their bones to rest in this valley. And I must admit, part of me feels comforted by the thought of sleeping with skeletons.

But a voice, a whisper – maybe just the wind, or maybe the Creator of the wind – bids me to steady my stance, to still my shaking legs and hold my ground. Because to move forward unbidden is the same as to lay down and die. This is not my home, but the time to leave has not yet come. Soon, but not yet.

And in the moments ahead, everything will change.

For the past few years, I’ve been maxing out at about seventy percent. But most of the time I’ve been living at about half of the potential I know is buried somewhere deep inside myself. Add to this a series of unavoidable casualties and irreversible setbacks – wounds given and received – and the weight of immobility begins to sink in. I wonder: could I leave even if I wanted to?

But I’ve sensed a shift in the wind. Subtle. Nearly imperceptible, yet inescapably real. Could it be true? Could He be coming to free me from this weight?

And then, at other times, I’m certain that nothing is different, that the days ahead hold only more of the same. That I truly am stuck.

Everything hangs on this moment. Everything depends on what happens next.

I’m holding my breath in anticipation. Without a doubt, despite my doubts, rescue is coming. I may not see it, hear it, taste it, smell it, or feel it, but it is coming. And when the coming months have taken their toll, I know I will not be the only one to stand in awe before the marvelous workings of the Redeemer – the Author and Finisher. This is as much an invitation as a declaration. Hope for it. Believe it. Expect it.

As for me, I am done arranging my life. I lift up my hands in surrender. Change is coming, not through my inaction, but in ways that my actions alone could never bring about. When these shadows and scars are behind me, all the glory will be Yours. Your mighty arm alone is able to save. You alone will have done this.

So this is me, waiting to exhale.