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sensible: Alexandre Desplat, The Queen (motion picture soundtrack)

October 21, 2008 by David Baer

Alexandre Desplat’s minimalist score fitly accompanies the taut psychological drama that is the 2007 motion picture that imaginatively chronicles the tectonic shifts that were occurring in the royal family behind closed doors in the wake of Diana’s tragic death in a Paris highway tunnel. Alternately brooding and winsome, Desplat produces a soundtrack that underscores Queen Elizabeth II’s rather heroic change of mind regarding her family’s role vis-à-vis ‘the people’. Continue Reading »

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the horror, the cost, the dignity: James Bradley, Flags of our Fathers

October 20, 2008 by David Baer

James Bradley has written a loving chronicle of a battle of almost unimaginable horror that took place on the unlikely volcanic island that has embedded its name in military and our national history as ‘Iwo Jima’. His father was caught up in the events that unfolded on that diminutive, blood-soaked island, but also in the well-intention civilian environment back home, where the War Bond campaign seemed noble enough to justify almost any means. Continue Reading »

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unable to speak: Jeremiah 1

October 18, 2008 by David Baer

In the biblical narratives of a prophet’s calling to his particular function, the individual in question is usually summoned against or independently of his own will. He never asks for the job, never finds himself in some sublime moment reveling in the fulfillment of his long-time dream to become a prophet.

Moreover, such passages frequently show him asserting not only his disinterest but also his lack of ability for the work into which YHWH has dragged him. Continue Reading »

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Sammy unveils new moves: the story of a Rescued Rhodesian Ridgeback

October 14, 2008 by David Baer

I returned last evening from London to find Sammy racing up and down the basement steps beside Rosie, eager to greet his returning master. ‘Racing’ in this context begs some qualifiers. Perhaps ‘moving briskly’ is more to the point.

No longer plagued by the fear of falling down stairs, he moves up and down them with resolution rather than fear. Continue Reading »

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the quiet life: 1 Thessalonians 4

October 14, 2008 by David Baer

The apostle Paul is often taken for a fire-breathing apocalyptic with little time for this present world as it sulks and struts in its overwheening vanity. Such a view misses both his respect for our realia as the very texture of creation and his counsel to the Thessalonians to lead a respectably independent life:

Aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we directed you, so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and be dependent on no one.

Paul is concerned here with the believing community’s integrity. Having just concluded some choice words about what integrity looks like on the sexual interior of the people’s house, he turns to the painting and trimming of its outside walls. Here the topic is largely a matter of practicing a proper work ethic. A community that views itself as the first fruits of a new humanity can hardly get away with the life of a couch potato. Continue Reading »

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Love in the time of missiologists: why you can’t not hope (Paul and Eva Toms Lectureship in Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, October 9, 2008)

October 12, 2008 by David Baer

The incomparable Colombian novelist Gabriel García-Márquez is a master of the evocative book title. From Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) to El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (The Coronel Has No One Who Writes to Him) to Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold) to El amor en tiempos de cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera) García-Márquez tells stories whose titles dare you to read them.

The last of these is clearly my inspiration this evening: Love in the Time of Cholera. As its literary signature, that genre of fiction writing that has become known as ‘magical realism’ juxtaposes an ordinary concept to the fantastical, odd, magical, or extraordinary. So for García-Márquez does love—that most ordinary, common, everyday virtue of human coexistence—jostle awkwardly and suggestively against the time of cholera. The once-in-a-century affliction of cholera, in all its epidemic phantagasmoria, reframes love almost entirely. It renders it poignant, out-of-time, compelling. It makes it something different that it is ordinarily understood to be. Continue Reading »

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the ethics of new creation: Ephesians 4

September 30, 2008 by David Baer

The apostle Paul is seldom as brilliantly insightful as in his description of New Creation’s community in the fourth chapter of his letter to the Ephesians. The portrait of this new humanity as a body that responds to the direction of Christ as its head is redolent with ethical implications. It is a stirring picture, to say the least, but one that is at the same multi-layered in that way which both begs for and repays careful analysis. Continue Reading »

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a big secret: Ephesians 3

September 29, 2008 by David Baer

At the core of the apostle Paul’s self-understanding stands his calling to enlighten the nations regarding YHWH’s intention to bless them. Indeed Paul seems to evoke the language of the book of Isaiah’s enigmatic ‘servant of the Lord’ when he speaks of how he invests his own life in this almost startlingly non-Jewish mission.

Paul believes himself to be the custodian of a mystery hidden in the secret counsels of God until Paul’s own historical moment. At that time, his argument runs, what was hidden was made clear. Paul’s job is to illuminate the nations regarding the good news that YHWH’s redeeming obsession tracks itself out in their direction, intends to gather them into its embrace, and even sets its sight on renewing the whole creation until it cannot keep itself from bursting into praise. Continue Reading »

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eyes in the fridge: the story of a rescued Rhodesian Ridgeback

September 28, 2008 by David Baer

At times like this, the idea of wandering down to the kitchen for a midnight snack of olives becomes a very bad idea indeed.

Sammy’s eyes, you see, are in there. Tupperware never served a nobler purpose. Continue Reading »

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a most human temple: Ephesians 2

September 28, 2008 by David Baer

The apostle Paul has few compunctions about mixing metaphors, particularly when straining for descriptors of God and his redeemed people. In the second chapter of his letter to the Ephesians, he weaves together metaphors of citizenship and temple construction. When read against the background of the Hebrew Bible, this is not an unlikely amalgamation of images. Temple, after all, is shot through with communitarian and nationalistic overtones. Citizenship, in the same context, always means belonging in a community that worships this god or these gods and not some other. Continue Reading »

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