There's a Trick of the Light I'm Learning to Do, an album of original songs

From January 1 to March 31 of this year, I had the privilege of going on a sabbatical from my regular duties as the pastor of the Corner Church, a gift I am still benefiting from some four months after it came to an end.  I spent a good deal of that time resting, and praying, and seeking a rejuvenation in the Lord, and I intend to share some of the "lessons I learned on sabbatical" in a future blog series that I am planning. The primary purpose for my sabbatical, however, was to take some time to focus on a number of the creative projects I had been wanting for a long time to get to but never seemed to have the margin for. I spent most of my sabbatical finishing a novel that I had been working on for years, for instance, and another good chunk of it composing music and writing songs.

One of the fruits of all that creative effort was a 13-track album of original songs that I wrote, arranged and recorded myself, in the make-shift studio in the basement of my house. As with most of my songwriting, the songs on this album are primarily explorations of my life lived before God, my journey with Jesus, and my formation in the Spirit. Over the next few months on my blog I intend to share this album, song by song, and talk a bit about the inspiration behind each one.  For today, however, I thought it would be a good starting place simply to post the entire album here for your listening pleasure.  It is also available on i-tunes and Spotify, if you're interested in downloading it to a device for future listening.

I hope you enjoy!

Of Games and God (Part X): Gaming and the Image of God

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I grew up in the Radio Shack era, when personal computers were just beginning to come of age and it was mostly children and hobbyists who showed any interest in them. My first computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer III, affectionately known in those days as the Co Co 3. It came complete with a whopping 128k of memory (yes, that’s a “k” there, as in kilobytes), and no built-in data storage system. Any programs you wanted to run on the Co Co 3 you had to load into the memory via cassette tape, or type in manually, line by pains-taking line.

I spent many a happy hour programming my Co Co 3, though. It came installed with Extended Color BASIC as its standard programming language, and between the years 1986 and 1994, I coded whole entire worlds using this simple but versatile machine. Although I did program a working word processor that I actually used to type up high school assignments, my primary interest was in the area of video game design. Most of the games I came up with were poor derivatives of the platformers, the dungeon crawlers, and the text-based adventure games that were popular in those days, though I did have a game of my own design published in the Co Co 3’s monthly magazine, an obscure periodical known as The Rainbow. It was a clunky karate game, where two poorly-rendered stick figures squared off in a digital death-match of speed, agility and strength. 

When I look back on those early days, programming line after tedious line into a machine so that it would blip and blink in ways it never would have otherwise, except that I had applied my imagination to it like that, what stands out most strongly to me is the way the video game medium opened up all kinds of unique opportunities to be creative. As a 12-year-old boy, video game design was an intensely pleasurable artistic activity, one that contained but surpassed any other medium I had explored as a prepubescent artist, from drawing to writing to poetry to play-acting.  Even within the limited scope available to me on a 128k machine, this was so.  Some of the gaming universes being assembled on today’s most powerful computers are truly masterpieces of creativity.

I’m not just sharing this for the sake of the nostalgia, though, rather to illustrate a final aspect of video games that we ought to consider if we want to understand them theologically.  Over the last ten posts we’ve looked at video games from every theological angle I could think of, from the significance of community to the quest for transcendent immersion, from the morality of gaming choices, to the nature of predestination in the gaming world, seeking each time to attach a distinctly theological handle to this popular pastime. One theme that has colored all our discussions throughout this series, though I have yet to mention it specifically, is the fact that video game design is a uniquely creative endeavor.  There is, in fact, no art form quite like a video game.

I use term “art form” hesitantly here, however. My understanding is that there is some debate raging in the gaming world, over whether or not a video game can, in fact, be called a “work of art.” In his book God in the Machine: Video Games as Spiritual Pursuit, Liel Leibovitz suggests that video games are not art, per se; but this is not because they lack the fundamental qualities of artistic works, rather because they actually transcend art, functioning more as “religious rituals” than as “works of art.”  “Video games operate under a different set of epistemological guidelines [than art],” he argues. “They are not here to be contemplated rationally or negotiated as works of art. They do not invite the sort of subjective, distant reading that calls for Nietzsche’s infinite interpretations. Instead, they facilitate the sort of emergence that is common to religious ritual.” 

Liel Leibovitz is probably loading more significance onto video games than the medium can bear, here, but it is true that, rather than being a single work of art, video games assemble a whole range of artistic efforts into one single experience. Music, aesthetic design, visual art, literature, story-telling, drama, cinema—it’s all there together in a well-made video game, with the added dynamic that, unlike any of these art-forms on their own, video games invite their audience to interact creatively with the art itself, to create something original with it, even as they are experiencing it as a self-contained creation in its own right.

The video game, you might say, is a form of  meta-art, art that creates art, and in this it allows us to be uniquely creative: to create a world which in turn allows the gamer to create something that truly did not exist before he or she sat down to play.  Anyone who has logged untold hours on Minecraft, or Roller-Coaster Tycoon 3, or The Sims will get what I’m getting at here, but so will anyone who has slogged away grinding out experience points on Skyrim, for the sake of leveling up their character in the new build they’re working on, for their fourth new play-through of the game. Video games are a form of creative expression that in turn create possibilities for creativity.

This is a theological observation, especially, because the book of Genesis insists—and it is a point that has had more theological ink spilled over it than almost any other idea in the good book—that human beings are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27-28). This concept has a whole matrix of meanings around it, far more than we could unpack in a brief space like this. For now though, suffice it to say that in Genesis, it’s the creator God, in the process of creating the creation, who makes human beings in his image. The implication here is that in some sense human beings have a divine vocation to carry on and extend the creative work that God began in the beginning, when he made us in the world and told us to be fruitful and multiply.

Being made in the image of the creator implies that we are called to be creative, too.  This is only true in a limited sense, of course, one that is appropriate to our mortal human nature, but even so, it is a genuine call to real creativity.  This is why humans have always found music-making, and word-speaking, scene-painting and play-acting such transcendent experiences, I think, and also why our religious experiences have always included these kinds of profoundly human activities.  Because we were created in the image of a creative God.

There is much more to say about it than simply this, to be sure, because Christians would rightly insist that the New Testament consistently connects the “Image of God” language from the Book of Genesis to the revelation of God that we discover in the person of Christ. He is the true Image of the unseen God, and we will only discover what it really means to be made in God’s Image as Christ renews the image of God in us, shaping our lives to reflect his own, glorious life. And obviously, no video game on planet can do that for us. 

With that caveat firmly established, however, we are free to point to all sorts of creative activities as evidence of the fact that human beings are indeed made in the likeness of a creating God, including symphonies well scored, and sunsets well painted, screenplays well filmed and statues well sculpted. To the extent that every artistic endeavor calls into being something that might never have otherwise existed, we can find glimmers of the image of God in any of them. It never would have occurred to me at twelve years old, that this is what I was doing when I was coding entire worlds into existence with my Co Co 3, but in the joy being creative like that I truly was discovering  a little something of what it means to be made in the image of the Creator.

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Eating, Praying, Loving (Part IX): To Eat or Not to Eat

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A number of years ago I was invited to the home of a friend of a friend, who happened to be an Orthodox Jew. He practiced his faith very devoutly, and while we were gathering together in his dining room, he took some time to explain to me all the ways in which his kitchen was set up for him to be able to cook kosher, from having two sets of plates and cooking utensils (one for meat and one for dairy), to having separate sinks for washing up afterwards. 

It was my first real introduction to the practice of eating kosher. I say this somewhat sheepishly, given the fact that the Scriptures that the Jewish kosher traditions are based on are, in fact, the same Scriptures I receive as divinely inspired, that is, the Law of Moses. As a Christian, I’ve never paid much attention to the particulars of these dietary regulations, though, because the New Testament is crystal clear that followers of Jesus are not bound by the food laws we find in Torah. In Colossians 2:16, Paul says it plainly that Christians should not judge one another by “what they eat or drink.” He says this while he’s explaining that the Sabbath rules and the Jewish Festivals are not “required practices” for Christians either, so it’s clear that he’s talking about the Mosaic food laws specifically there. His reasoning for why Christians are not required to keep the Mosaic Law is fascinating, but also consistent with how the New Testament Christians invariably read the Old Testament: it’s because Christ has fulfilled the Law for us. “These thing [i.e. the Sabbath rules and Kosher food laws] are a shadow of things to come,” Paul says, “but the reality is found in Christ.”

To be clear then, I did not feel compelled to observe the Mosaic dietary laws that day, while my Jewish host was explaining them to me, even though he and I both believed that we were living in harmony with the Mosaic Law. (I should note, however, that even though Christians are not required to observe the Torah, that does not necessarily mean they can’t observe it, if they are doing so out of faith in Christ and as a way of honoring God.  Paul himself went to the temple to offer sacrifices in keeping with Jewish tradition (Acts 21:26), and this was well after his conversion (see also Romans 14)). That said, even though I did not feel compelled to start eating kosher myself, I actually found something profoundly beautiful in the practice.

I feel I need to go carefully when I say that, though. Many modern evangelicals have been so conditioned to think of the Gospel solely as a way of guaranteeing that their disembodied souls will get into heaven, that they can think of no other reason for eating kosher than simply as an effort to “earn your salvation.” We know that we are saved by faith and not by the works of the Law, they might say, so something like eating kosher is at best a distraction, and at worst a futile attempt to earn something that God offers us freely in Christ. And to be sure, I have seen some churches where the idea that you have to eat kosher in order to be saved (or do other things prescribed in the Law of Moses), has wreaked havoc on people’s spiritual lives, creating all kinds of division, and fear, and bondage. So if there is some caution, even suspicion, among Christians about the dietary laws in Torah, I suppose it’s understandable.

You can’t “earn” your way to heaven by eating kosher.  

Agreed.

But in my study, it never looked to me that this was what the ancient Jews were trying to do by eating kosher: that they abstained from shellfish or pork, so that God would have to let them into heaven. Or at least, that is a gross over-simplification of how the Mosaic Law functioned in first-century Israel.

And as far as I could tell, it’s not how eating kosher functioned for my Jewish host, that night while he was explaining it all to me in his kitchen. It was a way of marking his distinct identity as a Jewish person, a way of expressing his devotion to God, a way of bringing all of his life under God’s will (as he understood it), his life at the table as much as any other aspect of his spiritual life.

When I read Torah myself—and this is true throughout Torah, but especially so in the Book of Leviticus—that seems to be one of the underlying assumptions of the whole thing.  We are called to love the Lord God with all our heart, soul, and strength.  The implication here is that we are to bring the whole of life, physical and spiritual, under his guidance, his direction, and his authority.  This is why the laws we find in Torah cover almost every aspect of human life.  There are laws about food, and home-building, and sex, and how to use the bathroom. After all, the God revealed to us in Torah is truly engaged with every aspect of human life. All of it is lived before him, and he invites us to bring all of it under his loving care.

Whatever else they do, the food laws in Torah remind us of this: that the whole of life is lived in God’s presence and all of it is meant to bring him glory, including what you eat and how you eat it.

Of course, as a Christian, I still don’t eat kosher, but that’s not because I disagree with the Law of Moses on this point. It is, rather, because in Christ I have received the ultimate fulfillment of this point.  

In Christ, the word became flesh, God was found in appearance as a man, made like one of us in every way except for sin.  The theological term for this truth is “the Incarnation,” and in the Incarnation, the divine life of God and the mortal life of human beings truly came together, in one place, in the person of Jesus Christ. As a consequence, for the Christian, there is no longer any sacred-secular divisions in human life. Jesus assumed all of it onto himself and so all of it is now sacred to him, and as we live our lives in spiritual union with him, all of it can, and will be sanctified.

That doesn’t change  the meaning of the food laws in Torah for us, though; it simply changes how we  fulfill and express that meaning. God is still interested in all aspects of our lives, and he still invites us to submit it all to his will and into his care. A Christian doesn’t do that by refusing to eat pork, necessarily, but it is still essential to do it.  And even though it may not mean forgoing a cheese-burger at the next summer barbecue, still, Christians can draw inspiration from the Law of Moses, and its insistence that even what you eat and drink can be done to the glory of God.

Godspeed, a song

Slow down you, move too fast

You’ve got eternity 

Stretching out before you

Don’t miss this too, 

Before this too has past

Just take a breath, and take my hand, 

We’ll get there soon

At God speed—

The future unfolds so slowly

At God speed—

The past it lingers long

At God speed—

A thousand years exploding

At God speed—

Like the quaver in a song

Where a heartbeat lasts forever 

And forever lasts a day

And we sit there lost in wonder 

Till there’s nothing left to say

And there’s no one in a hurry 

'cause right now is all we need

And we stroll into the distance 

Till we’re moving away at God speed

Slow down you miss too much

You’re like a tourist snapping 

Selfies of heaven

There’s so much more 

Than we can see or touch

So hold your breath, and hold my hand, 

We’ll get there soon

At God speed—

The future unfolds so slowly

At God speed—

The past it lingers long

At God speed—

A thousand years exploding

At God speed—

Like the quaver in a song

Where a heartbeat lasts forever 

And forever lasts a day

And we sit there lost in wonder 

Till there’s nothing left to say

And there’s no one in a hurry 

'cause right now is all we need

And we stroll into the distance 

Till we’re moving away at God speed

Of Games and God (Part IX): The Problem of the Christian Video Game

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When I told my son that I was working on this running series about the theology of video games, he suggested that I check out a game called Gris.  Gris is a highly stylized platform game where the character, a mysterious girl named Gris, gracefully wanders a ruined wasteland trying to bring life and color back to the landscape. Aesthetically, Gris is unlike any game I’ve ever played. The graphics, music, and gameplay somehow work together to create a haunting experience, one where, although it’s not immediately clear what you are trying to do, you have no doubt that it's weighty, and tragic, and important.

As the game unfolds, the deeply spiritual nature of the quest in Gris becomes clear. Wandering from scene to scene, Gris gathers enigmatic points of starlight scattered around the world. Together these create constellations that help her ascend higher and higher into the heavens. Gradually she is able to restore color to the monochromatic landscape, and eventually she regains her ability to sing, which allows her to bring life back to the world.

In the last scene of the game, the girl faces the final boss, which turns out to be a monstrous version of herself, one that drags her down into an ocean of black sludge, and tries to prevent her from escaping. In the end, she is able defeat her inner shadow only by using the power of her voice and singing light and life and color at last into the world.

Apparently the game won all kinds of awards when it was released, including the 2019 “Games for Impact” award,  and the 2019 Game Developers Choice Award for Best Visual Art. It's especially notable that the game contains none of the traditional shoot-em-up, hack-and-slash, romp-and-stomp elements that are so ubiquitous in the traditional platformer genre. The quest in Gris is mystical, not militarized, visionary, not violent.

I’m mentioning Gris because even though it is not specifically Christian in theme, its subject matter—over-coming our inner darkness and grief to bring light and life to the world and so ascend to a beatific vision of the heavenlies—certainly touches on profoundly Christian ideas, though the Christian would want to add, I think, that it is not by mechanical effort that we overcome our inner darkness, rather by the gracious working of the Spirit of God upon us.  But be that as it may, I think a game like Gris has all kinds of potential to open up all kinds of conversations about Christian spirituality.

This potential stands out all the more beautifully when it is held up against video games that are specifically Christian in theme. You may in fact be surprised to learn that there have been some games designed over the years, packaged and marketed for an explicitly Christian audience. Of course, most of these are bizarre and embarrassing disasters, in my opinion, failing both as expressions of the Christian worldview, and as video games in their own right.

Some games just slap a Christian veneer on a traditional form, like this early example of a Super-Mario-style platform adventure, themed around the story of Noah’s Ark. It’s probably just harmless fun, but Mario himself was probably more fun than this, and the final boss fight, where Noah goes head to head in an shoot-out with Lucifer himself, is pretty cringy.

But a game like Noah’s Ark is relatively harmless.  Not so the video games in the Left Behind Series.  A blog series on the theology of video games is maybe not the place to unpack all the problems inherent in the Left Behind franchise in general, because there are so many it’s hard to know where to start—the movies, the books, the theological underpinnings of the whole concept—all of it is bad, in my opinion.  So maybe it's no surprise that it also created some bad video games.

But even if you accept the theological premise of the Left Behinders (which I don’t), the game itself is hugely problematic. Here Christians are pitted in a violent, arcade-style shoot-out against the forces of the Anti-Christ. And even if it’s true that violence per se is not rewarded by the game, still it reinforces a thin, but all-too-common narrative about the Christian life. In this narrative, the “true believers” are pitted against the heathens and the apostates (i.e. everyone else). These they must view as the enemy, but, instead of loving them as they love themselves, the way Christ taught us too do, they must overcome them, using all the traditional “video game methods” of coercion, competition, and conquest.  Evangelism, prayer, moral uprightness, and so on, are all employed simply as a means to win the game.  It would be laughable, if there weren’t Christians in the world who actually live out their faith in this way.

I haven’t done a careful-enough study of Christian video games to state this categorically, of course, but my limited experience with this sub-genre suggests  that we risk all kinds of dangers when we try to take our faith and “bottle it” in a video game format. If Mashall MacLuhan was right, and the medium is the message, there may be something inherent to the medium of the traditional video game that clouds the message of the Gospel.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. It’s one of the reasons I’ve spent the last three months exploring video games from every theological angle I can think of. As a gamer friend of mine once said: the Spirit is speaking in the world, and the Spirit can speak through a carefully-crafted video game.

The operative word there is "carefully."  It won’t happen simply by slapping a sloppy coat of “Christian whitewash” onto a traditional hack-and-slash shooter, and believing that somehow you’ve “sanctified the medium.” Better to play God of War and read its story as a Christian, than to take God of War  and try to convert it, by over-laying a distorted picture of the Christian God on top of it.

If a video game is going to be distinctly Christian, in fact, I would argue that it will mean reinventing the very conventions of the genre, finding brand new ways to express within the particular bounds of the medium, the deepest truths of our Gospel: that beauty is sometimes found best by longing for it, that joy is mysteriously present in the heart-ache, that life paradoxically comes through death, and death paradoxically colors every aspect of life.  These truths are not going to be expressed through a Christianized “version” of Doom, perhaps, but if you're wondering how they might be expressed, perhaps an hour or two playing Gris will stir your imagination up.

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A Christian Conversation About Steven Universe (Part V): The Crystal Gems and the Christian Family

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In 1977, the psychologist James Dobson founded an evangelical parachurch organization dedicated to promoting traditional family values, known as Focus on the Family. The decades-long impact of this organization on the evangelical church is difficult to put into words, but then, so is the complicated relationship I’ve personally had with Focus on the Family over the years. 

As a Christian teenager in the late 80s, I found Dobson’s frank writing about puberty, sexuality, and growing up to be profoundly helpful.  As young parents, the title of his book Parenting isn’t for Cowards was kind of a catchphrase in our home.  Neither my wife nor I had actually read the book, mind you, but the expression itself, “parenting isn’t for cowards,” came up a lot when we were tempted to chicken out on our parental responsibilities. We have financially supported Focus on the Family in the past, mostly because we saw value in its pro-life advocacy at the time, and there are one or two episodes of Adventures in Odyssey that still stand out as meaningful in my memory.

At the same time, however, I have often felt that much of Focus’s work, and the tone with which they conduct it, is not theologically sound, and may even be harmful to the witness of the church. Its legacy of opposing human rights for LGBTQ people is one such example. In 2009 it sold  the so-called “ex-gay” branch of its ministry, “Love Won Out,” to the ex-gay organization Exodus International, only to see Exodus close its operations in 2013 and issue a public statement acknowledging the harm its conversion efforts have caused. Then there are the theological challenges posed by Focus on the Family’s political activities. I am generally cautious when it comes to making political statements as a pastor, because I recognize that there is a diverse range of political opinion represented in my congregation, but even so, I have to say that the day James Dobson publicly endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race was the day I finally withdrew any moral or financial support I had once given to the organization.

One of the most problematic aspects of Focus on the Family’s work, though, is also the hardest to pin down. Somehow it took a very good thing—supporting the nuclear family—and made it the most-important thing—the mark of a faithful follower of Jesus. I remember a theology professor of mine who once waved the red flag over Focus on the Family’s ministry by saying this: their work assumes that the church exists primarily to serve the family, to make the nuclear family strong and keep it growing spiritually; when theologically the reverse is true. If anything, the family exists to serve the church, to help it in its work of glorifying Jesus and proclaiming the Gospel of our Lord. My theology professor was riffing on Ephesians 5 when he said this, that part where Paul says that a godly marriage functions, primarily, as a living metaphor for—and thus a beautiful witness to—the love that Christ has for the Church.

I think there is something to this, and over the years I have seen the fall-out of a “misaligned focus” on the nuclear family in the church. Pastors who council abused wives to stay in the marriage no matter the cost, no matter the risk, may be part of the fallout. Christian families who leave a local church when the children’s ministry no longer meets the felt-needs of the kids, may be some of the fallout. Christian parents who feel that they have no other choice when their LGBTQ kids come out to them than to ostracize them, may be some. So might the alienation that divorcees often feel in the church, or singles who wonder why there’s never a sermon series on “how live without a godly marriage.”

This post isn’t a theological critique of Focus on the Family, however. It’s actually part of the “Christian conversation” I’ve been having over the last few weeks about a queer-themed kid’s show named Steven Universe, and what it can teach the traditional church about being a community of hospitality for LGBTQ people. We’ve talked about things like: learning the queer aesthetic, and the pain of feeling like “the other,” the role of hospitality itself, and the complex nature of human sexuality.  

Today all I want to point out is just that, theologically, the nuclear family is not the biblical ideal for human relationships; brotherhood (read: siblinghood) in Christ is, which is a relationship that actually sits above, and informs, all other human relationships.  And whatever else Steven Universe does, with all its intergalactic space travel and mysterious battles with the Gems from Homeworld, it helps us explore what a familial relationship that “transcends and informs” the nuclear family might look like.

I remember the day I realized the true significance of “siblinghood in Christ,” as the ultimate human relationship. One of my theology profs (the same one waving the red flag about Focus on the Family, in fact), explained to our class that before your wife is “your wife” she is your sister in Christ; and before your kids are “your kids” they are your brothers and sisters in Christ. This bond that we share in Jesus, he argued, comes first.

If he was right, it would explain why Jesus says that everyone who leaves behind their “brothers or sisters or mother or father or children for the sake of the Gospel,” will get them back—brothers and sisters and mothers and children—a hundred times, in this present age and eternal life in the age to come (Mark 10:29-30). Jesus is talking there, I think, about how the Christian Church functions—or at least it should function—as God’s compensation for any human relationships we may have had to give up, because they could not bear our commitment to Christ.  

Passages like these shed fresh light on those places in Paul where he uses the imagery of “adoption” to describe our experience of salvation, or when he talks about Christians being "members of the household of God" (an ancient term for the Roman family). It turns out it wasn't just a polite convention when the early Christians took to calling each other "brother" and "sister."  We tend to take it as “only metaphor” when the Bible says that we are all children of God, but I think the early church took it very seriously and tried to live out implications of this truth. They understood that in coming to Jesus they had been quite literally adopted into a divine family, and so shared a sibling relationship with each other, one that transcended even their natural familial relationships.

If it is hard for us to process this idea, that God intends for us to experience in the Church a relationship with each other that is more compelling and intimate even than that which we experience in our nuclear families—if we find that hard to believe—it may be owing to the decades-long work of Focus on the Family, teaching us to focus especially on the nuclear family as the place where our need for love is met.  If it’s not that, at the very least it is owing to an evangelical church culture that has privatized the faith and relegated the church to the role of a simple dispenser of religious goods and services, instead of letting it be what God says it is: his divine answer to the deepest human longing for agape love.

In his ground-breaking book about being a gay Christian, Washed and Waiting, Wesley Hill argues that God meant for the church to be his “sanctified remedy” for human loneliness, God’s “compensation” to gay Christians for their sacrifice of homosexual partners.  He challenges Christians to recognize that “the New Testament views the church—rather than marriage—as the primary place where human love is best expressed and experienced.”  He is talking specifically there about marriage, but I think we could safely expand his point to include this discussion about the Church as God’s ultimate offer of “family,” too.  That many of us balk at this idea, because so few of the Christian communities we have experienced actually live up to this ideal, suggests a dereliction of duty on the part of churches, if not a complete failure of the Christian imagination.

To help our imaginations along, perhaps I could point you to the kid’s show that sparked this blog series, that sci-fi fantasy adventure known as Steven Universe. As I’ve mentioned, the central hero of the show, Steven Universe, is being raised by three alien life forms, gems from a planet called Homeworld. Steven himself is the son of a gem named Rose Quartz, a child she had through a love affair with an earthling named Greg Universe. Rose has since died, but Greg, Steven’s dad, is still very much in the picture.  What stands out to an astute viewer however, is that although Steven and Greg very clearly share a familial bond, Steven does not live with his dad (this despite the fact that Greg just lives a few doors down).

On the one hand, given the queer themes of the show, it’s easy to interpret this as simply an effort on the part of the writers to depict a child being raised by queer parents, in a non-nuclear family. This angle is most evident in the episode “Fusion Cuisine” (Season 1, Episode 32), where the parents of Steven’s best friend Connie want to meet Steven’s own parents, so Steven convinces Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl to fuse into a single gem, Alexandrite, and pretend to be his mom. Greg joins the dinner party too, as Steven’s dad, and in the ensuing hi-jinks Connie’s parents come to appreciate the fact that, even though Steven’s family is certainly out of the ordinary, still the gems have good parenting skills, and Connie should be allowed to continue playing with Steven.

Steven’s filial love for the gems and their paternal care towards him will become a more prominent theme as the show progresses, and it continues to deconstruct the traditional definition of what constitutes a “family.” In one episode, Steven meets a human cousin he never knew he had, a gruff traditionalist named Andy DeMayo. Over the course of the episode, Andy learns to let go of his conservative views and expand his definition of family so that it can, indeed, include the likes of the Crystal Gems. 

What we see in these episodes of Steven Universe is an effort to imagine human relationships that are just as rich, intimate, and supportive as those we might experience in the ideal nuclear family, but are formed not by blood and biology but by choice, by circumstance, and by a radical commitment to one another.

In this regard, I would argue, Steven Universe’s family is actually one of the best analogies for the church I’ve come across in contemporary children’s entertainment. Because like the Crystal Gems, the church is community of people with no biological relation, but bound together the way blood-brothers and blood-sisters are supposed to be bound together. It is a spiritual family created by the divine—but not less literal for all its being divine—adoption of strangers. In this adoption we are asked to identify with our fellow believers, who are just as much children of God as we are, with the same care, concern and mutuality we would show our biological siblings. From a biblical perspective, it is a family very much like Steven Universe's family, one formed by choice (first God’s, then ours), by circumstance (the divine circumstances of our adoption), and by a radical commitment (God’s to us, and then ours to each other).

Can you imagine?

If not, perhaps a couple of episodes of Steven Universe might help, as it explores the possibility that our deepest longing for family can in fact be fulfilled in ways far beyond our wildest dreams.

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All Manner of Thing Shall Be Well, a song

This song is a musical reflection on that famous line from Julian of Norwich's Divine Revelations, where, through a vision of the Resurrected Lord, God assures her that, "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and behold, all manner of thing shall be well." It's maybe fitting for me to post it today, in this season of the world when we seem to need that assurance as much as ever we have.  May it be an encouragement to you today.

One day the sun will rise

Like a banner of love unfurled

That’s when we’ll realize

That beauty will save the world

One day the rain will fall

On the dry ground like a fist uncurled

That’s when the earth will call

On beauty to save ….

All shall be well (I believe it, that)

All shall be well

All manner of thing shall be well

All shall be well (I swear it, that)

All shall be well

All manner of thing shall be well

One day we’ll all hold hands

All his lost boys and his hurting girls

That’s when we’ll understand

How beauty can save the world

One day the sun will rise

Like a banner of love unfurled

That’s when we’ll realize

That beauty will save…

All shall be well (I believe it, that)

All shall be well

All manner of thing shall be well

All shall be well (I swear it, that)

All shall be well

All manner of thing shall be well

Eating, Praying, Loving (Part VIII): The Open Commensality of Christ

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It's easy to underestimate the role that food played in the ministry of Jesus. We like to dwell on his healing ministry, his teaching ministry, his parables, his miracles, but we seldom stop to notice the fact that eating with others was central to his proclamation of the Kingdom of God.

The people in his day noticed this fact loud and clear. “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” the Pharisees wondered self-righteously (Mark 2:16), and they were asking out of more than just curiosity. He was so renowned for his habit of eating with social outcasts, in fact, that the religious elite of his day called him a “glutton and a drunkard,” because he (in his own words) “came eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34) with the kind people that everyone else had rejected.

The various points we’ve raised about the spirituality of food so far helps to explain the reason why Jesus made the shared meal so central to his ministry, but there is something deeper going on here. In ancient Jewish thought, hospitality was a profoundly moral act, something that revealed what a person was really made of, spiritually speaking. They held up the hospitality of Abraham as their ideal, who welcomed three strangers into his home, fed them, and discovered in doing so that he was sharing table with the Lord himself (Genesis 18:2). Throughout the Old Testament story, in fact, table-fellowship around a shared meal was one of the primary means by which the Jewish people experienced and expressed their fellowship with God. It’s the logic that underlies the sacrificial system of the Book of Leviticus, where most of the sacrifices functioned as a shared meal with the Lord. It’s there in the covenantal theology of the Old Testament, where the shared meal was the means by which Ancient Near Eastern covenants were sealed.  And it’s present, of course, in the formative event of the nation, where God liberated the people from Egypt and gave them a shared meal—the Passover supper—to distinguish them as his own.

In ancient Jewish thought, then, there was something profoundly spiritual going on whenever you invited someone to your table. Sharing a meal together was a sign of mutual welcome and acceptance, reciprocal respect and embrace, a way of spiritually identifying with someone else in the strongest possible terms. This explains, incidentally, why the idea of Jews and Gentiles eating together in the community of the early church was such a challenge.  When Peter (a Jew) visits Cornelius (a Gentile) in Acts 10, the scandalized Jewish Christians in Jerusalem criticize Peter specifically because he “went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them” (Acts 11:3). In Galatians, there is a fascinating passage where Paul describes the work he had been doing to try to integrate the Jewish and Gentile believers together in the church, and how the shared meal together was the stumbling block. He recounts how Peter (a Jew) was willing to eat together with the Gentiles at first, but when a group of Jewish Christians from Jerusalem raised their eyebrows, he “began to draw back [from the shared meal] and to separate himself from the Gentiles” (Galatians 2:12). Finally we note Paul’s instructions to the church in Corinth about an unrepentantly immoral believer. In 1 Corinthians 5 he tells them to expel the immoral brother, and instructs them “not even to eat with such a one” (1 Corinthians 5:11).

In each of these passages we see how the shared meal functioned in life of the early church, forming the identity of the community, signaling who was included, and requiring the early Christians to spiritually identify with their fellow Christians in the strongest possible terms.

If food is truly spiritual, sharing a meal with another, in the minds of the first Christians, was one of the most spiritual acts of all.

This brings us back to Jesus, from whom, no doubt, the early church got the idea of using a shared meal to shape their life together. Paul’s direction about refusing to eat with the unrepentant sinner notwithstanding, what stands out in sharp relief when we look at the life of Jesus in light of all this, is that he was willing to eat with anyone who would have him, and he welcomed to the table anyone who would come.

We see Jesus eating with synagogue leaders and high-ranking Pharisees; we see Jesus eating with the so-called scum of the earth, the “sinners” and the tax collectors. We see Jesus eating private meals with his disciples; we see Jesus eating with the masses in public demonstrations of the miraculous power of God. Some scholars refer to this dynamic in Jesus’s ministry as his “open commensality.” Commensality is the fancy word for “table fellowship,” and Jesus’s commensality was truly “open,” in the sense that he was willing to eat with literally anyone.

There is a challenge here for the church, I think, especially in this new era we find ourselves in. On the one hand, we are living through a time when pandemic lockdowns have restricted our life-together, and made human contact harder to come by than ever. On the other hand, we are living at a moment in history when marginalized voices and oppressed people groups are speaking up, insisting (rightly) that their lives matter.  These realities have created a long to-do list for the church, a full docket of issues that need careful attention, and spiritual needs that need addressing.

It can be hard to know where to start.

This isn’t the only thing that needs doing, of course, and if it’s all we do we probably will have failed in our calling for this moment, but as we’re trying to figure out how to respond to the world we find ourselves in at such a time as this, perhaps the best place to start is where Jesus himself started: by opening his table to any and all who wanted to share bread with him. If we did so, on the one hand, the voices of the marginalized would have to be invited and included and affirmed, just as much as any other voice; this was certainly part of the scandal of Jesus’s open commensality in his day.  On the other hand, we would be feeding the need for authentic human connection that we’re all aching with; this was certainly part of the beauty of Jesus’s shared meals, that everyday human beings like us, got to connect physically with him.

But more than that, if we truly practiced the kind of open table fellowship that Jesus modeled for us—taking seriously its significance and implications—I think we would discover that we are becoming the church he has called us to be, and that his Kingdom really is breaking in upon us.

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Of Games and God (Part VIII): The Gaming World and the Christian Community

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When I started this series on the theology of video games back in April, one of my colleagues who is both a great pastor and also an avid gamer, contacted me. The idea of exploring the theology of gaming intrigued him, he said, because video games have played such a significant role in his own life and spiritual formation.

He is involved in a church-planting work in Manitoba called “The Hearth," which seeks to be a “Holy Sanctuary for the Nerds, the Geeks, the Misfits and the Outcasts.” One of the initiatives of The Hearth is an event called “Geekdom House,” where participants gather to watch shows from the sci-fi, fantasy, and/or anime genres (anything with a strong, traditionally nerdy fandom will do) and then discuss its spiritual, religious, or theological significance. Another initiative is called “Limit Break,” which provides a safe and inclusive community “where nerd and geek hobbies and culture can thrive.” Limit Break seeks to provide mentorship for youth and adults who love video games and board games, in particular, and bills itself as “a community for people who feel otherwise isolated and are looking for a place not only to grow but to directly and intentionally help others grow, in their physical, emotional and spiritual lives.”

At the heart of a ministry like The Hearth is an awareness that human beings are hard-wired for intimate community, and that video games (among other “geekdoms”) feed our need for community in a unique way. It may be because video gaming is such a participatory activity, one that engages us so holistically as we are doing it, that we long to shared the experience with others. It may be because the worlds that video games create are so complete and fully realized, that they invite players to identify strongly with their particular game of choice. It might just be that the games themselves are so fun. Whatever the reason, many video games have strong followings—"fandoms," is the popular term—and these fandoms tend to generate strong communities of identification around their specific games.

This is true of the games I most enjoy playing. The various Minecraft communities I’ve encountered, for instance, or the various Youtubers who post their advice and theories around Skyrim, are good examples of this. I am a neophyte when it comes to online gaming communities, though. My brother has met people from around the world playing World of Warcraft online. My cousin has traveled across the country to met up in person with friends that he made through online gaming. This spring, when the Covid-19 lockdown made an in-person Easter gathering impossible, our family met up on my son’s Minecraft server and had a “virtual Easter dinner,” which we enjoyed together as our Minecraft avatars.

In each of these examples we see it, that gaming creates community.

There are lessons that the church could take from these gaming communities, as it considers its own life together. In a video game fandom, for instance, the game alone is the thing that holds the community together. The only thing you need to participate is the game itself. Similarly, gaming communities exist primarily online, where most of the usual markers that normally differentiate people, like age, gender, social status, and so on, are not as obvious or significant. In this regard, video game communities have the potential to create a kind of “leveled space,” where the only requirement for belonging is a shared love for the game itself.

This is, or at least it should be, what the church is like, with the all-important caveat that the thing that creates our “leveled space,” is not a game but a person, the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ; but like a gaming fandom, the church that really has him at the centre would say that the only requirement for belonging is a shared love of Him. Sadly, many churches add a whole slew of additional requirements for belonging. Some of these are intentional, like insisting that ours will be a teetotaler church, or ours will be a pre-trib-post-mil-dispensationalist church—and those who don’t agree don’t belong. Others are unintentional, like when we subtly communicate that if you want to be part of this group you have to belong to a certain tax-bracket, or you have to dress a particular way, or what have you. It may be human nature to do this. It certainly comes naturally to us. But whatever else it is, it is not the New Testament’s vision of the Church. In Galatians 3:28, the Apostle Paul said it like this, that in the Christian community, there is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.

I don’t know enough about video gaming to say how well the communities that grow up around particular games reflect this kind of open inclusivity. I have spoken to some gamers who were so passionate about their game of choice that they looked down their noses with superiority towards other games, other gaming consoles, and other gaming communities. It is possible to identify so strongly with the thing that holds our community together that we instinctively begin to “out-group” those who don’t share our commitment.

In this too, however, gaming communities have something profound to teach us, by showing us how truly unique the Christian community really is. Even gaming communities, in the end, are human creations, formed around a shared passion for a human endeavor. The fact that they are so appealing shows us how deeply the human heart really is wired for authentic community. At the same time though, they remind us that, unlike any community that humans have ever formed, the church is not created or held together by human beings, by their interests, their enthusiasms, or their intentions.

The church is a divine community, created only by the power of the Holy Spirit, through the work of Christ alone, to the glory of God the Father. As such, membership in this community, belonging and inclusion and participation, does not depend on any of the gate-keeping markers that human beings use to decide who is in and who is out. It depends solely on the invitation of God himself, which he extends to all in the person of Jesus Christ, and which he guarantees to us in the seal of his Holy Spirit. Here there is no Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free; neither is there Minecrafters nor Fortniters, Xboxers nor Nintendo Switchers, gamers nor nongamers, for we are all one, no matter where we are coming from or who we are, we all belong together in Christ.

Video games can sharpen our appetite for this kind of inclusive community, I think, and teach us how deeply we long for it and how badly we need it; but not even gaming communities can provide what God offers us in Jesus, an invitation to take our place in the Body of Christ, where belonging depends solely on the fact that we’ve been called together by him, and every godly passion, commitment, joy and activity that brings him glory has a place.

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A Christian Conversation about Steven Universe (Part IV): Encountering the Queer Aesthetic

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When I was a child, my list of favorite cartoons would have included some of the following titles: G-Force: Battle of the Planets, The Smurfs, Dungeons and Dragons, and, when I couldn’t get anything better, The Mighty Hercules. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any of these shows, but as a kid they filled my head with epic tales of fantasy, adventure, and heroism.

What I never considered at the time, though see quite clearly in retrospect, is that they also reinforced a certain aesthetic in my imagination. The term “aesthetic” as I’m using it here refers to the principles we draw on, or the characteristics we look for, to make value judgement about what is and what is not beautiful. By “beautiful,” however, I mean something more than simply “lovely to look at.” The “beautiful” in this sense is that which awakens our longing, excites our imagination, gives us pleasure, and elicits our joy. Aesthetic values can vary quite widely from culture to culture, which is why the carefully-balanced proportions of the Athenian Parthenon, and the kaleidoscopic spectacle of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Russia are both beautiful in their own way, though each is so unlike the other.

When I hold the cartoons that I enjoyed as a child up together, what stands out to me is that they are all working with a similar aesthetic. They tend to be centred around the male experience, and the women in them tend to be peripheral characters, usually disproportionately represented, and often serving as objects of male interest and affection. The heroes, too, tend to have qualities that were traditionally associated with a narrowly-defined masculinity: physical strength, confident resourcefulness, a rugged independence held in tension with service to the community. At the same time, there is a subtle romantic intrigue underlying them all: was Princess the love interest of Mark or Jason in Battle of the Planets? Which of the ninety-nine male Smurfs would win the affections of the one (and only) Smurfette in the village? When would Hercules finally settle down with the lovely Helena and make a bunch of baby Hercs?

These are all children’s cartoons, of course, but I think it is easy to underestimate how formative the aesthetic experiences of our childhood can be on our grown-up sensibilities, subconsciously influencing the value judgement we make as grownups about what is lovely, compelling, and desirable.

I say this, because when I first started watching the show Steven Universe with my kids, I was struck by how foreign the aesthetic of the show seemed to me, and how few aesthetic categories I had that I could use to make sense of it. Rebecca Sugar, the maker of Steven Universe has said that she had set out to make a show that was “definitely not heteronormative.” This is clear in the show's broad themes and philosophical underpinnings, but it is also subtly woven through out the show’s aesthetic, from its character design to its artistic choices. It is, as my queer child once put it, the “gayest show ever,” and in this, the whole thing is working with an aesthetic unlike any cartoon I’ve ever come across.

Both the show’s heroes and villains all are gems, which means that, aside from Steven himself, they are all exclusively female-coded characters. Steven is male-coded, of course, though the show explains that he is somehow an incarnation of his own mother, Rose Quartz, making his gender much more ambiguous as the show progresses. He is able to fuse with his best friend, a female named Connie, to form a non-binary character named Stevonnie.

At the same time, very few of the protagonists have any qualities associated with traditional masculinity. Indeed, an episode in the first season, called “Coach Steven” subtly deconstructs the entire trope of traditional masculinity. In this episode, Steven sets out to get himself and his friends in physical shape, adopting a “toxically masculine” drill-sergeant persona and running them through a rigorous workout regime. Through the course of the episode, however, he learns that there is a “real way” to be strong that does not require ripped abs and swole pecs, and indeed, that “muscular strength” is not the kind of “strength” he really needs.

I have to admit that when I first started watching Steven Universe, the “queer aesthetic” of the show took a long time for me to get used to. I’m a 46-year-old straight male, and hardly the target audience, I admit; but even so, I watched it with a traditional aesthetic in mind, one shaped by years of consuming narratives that presented traditional hetero-romantic, male-centric themes. As a result, I found the whole thing somewhat (in the original sense of this word) queer. All the pastel colors and glittering lights (which I would have associated, as a kid, with a “girl’s show”) coupled with all those intergalactic space adventures (which could rival even the best of G-Force for sci-fi thrills), made it hard for me to find my bearings.

If you’ve never seen the show, all this may sound somewhat bizarre, but the reason I’m talking about it  at such length is because experiencing the queer aesthetic of Steven Universe helped me see my own aesthetic sensibilities in a new light. When I experience a “text,” be it a story, an image, a work of art, or a philosophical idea, I do with it what all human beings instinctively do: I try to fit it into a pre-conceived aesthetic framework that helps me to determine if it is good, true, lovely, or admirable. This aesthetic framework is largely subconscious, built from a whole network of formative experiences and aesthetic messages that I absorbed from the culture I was raised in. I was enculturated, for instance, to look for male strength as a sign that something heroic is happening, and I was enculturated, too, to pick up on intimations of heterosexual romance as a sign that the story is moving towards something desirable.

Encountering a show that deconstructed this aesthetic, like Steven Universe does, and presented an alternative in its place, helped me to see both how subjective my traditional aesthetic is, and (more importantly) how strongly I identify with it. I think it is hard to really grasp how subtly our deeply-held aesthetic values shape the way we interact with and respond to the world, determining what we think is worth striving for in life, and how we ought to go about striving for it. A music lover who has encountered the musical forms of an entirely different culture, one that does not use traditional Western intervals or rhythms, perhaps, might get what I am trying to describe here: the cognitive dissonance of encountering a form of beauty for which they have no clear aesthetic categories, but they can still clearly tell is something joyful, emotive, and good.

One of the reasons I’m exploring all this, is because my experience with the show Steven Universe has prompted me to wonder how much the church’s response to LGBTQ people in general, is less about our theology than it is about our aesthetic values. This idea is hard to put into words, but if we have been spiritually raised in a culture that consistently presents heterosexual romance as the highest ideal, and only showed one kind of masculinity as good and one kind of femininity as lovely, then coming to understand and make space for the queer people in our community may actually challenge our aesthetic convictions just as much, possibly even more so than it does, our theological convictions, such as they are.

Like a 46-year-old heterosexual male encountering Steven Universe and having to learn how to read a queer aesthetic on the fly, I think that the church will have to re-examine those things it’s always held up as ideals of beauty, if it is genuinely going to embrace LGBTQ people with the gospel. This does not mean relinquishing our responsibility to make biblical value judgement on what is a godly and what is not a godly expression of human sexuality, or accepting an entirely relative morality when it comes to sex.

At least it doesn’t have to mean that. It could simply mean acknowledging that many of the narratives we assume to be good, and true, and lovely, are really values we’ve inherited from our culture, not absolutes we’ve derived from the Bible. The presupposition, for instance, that God intends everyone to experience heterosexual romance in order to be spiritually fulfilled (when Jesus himself never married)—the assumption, perhaps, that a certain set of superficial characteristics define “biblical manhood and biblical womanhood” (when Jesus himself often crossed gender boundaries in his day, speaking to women and admitting them into his company in ways that scandalized his 1st Century culture)—these are examples of aesthetic values that the church has often taken to be theological givens.

There are probably others. As the church makes authentic space for the LGBTQ people among us, I expect we will discover more; and as we do, I expect we will find, too, that there are all kinds of beautiful things to be celebrated in our midst, things we never would have noticed as lovely, except that we let our aesthetic values be challenged in this way.

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