As the film started the biggest question I had was how one of my favorite books, written by one of my favorite authors, a book filled with individual vignettes and essays, could be turned into a movie with a beginning, middle, and end. Beyond that I also wondered how a film that raised its money through Kickstarter backers from around the world would come across in terms of quality. Would it be another hokey Christian movie that cut corners with production costs?

All Truth is God’s Truth

I’m not much of a culture war Christian. Back in the mid 100s (yes 100s, not 1000s) Justin Martyr stated his opinion of all truth being God’s truth. When I watch movies, decidedly Christian or not, I am watching for truth-telling. I’ve seen plenty of Christian movies, while presenting truth, that do it in such an uncompelling way and I am not drawn to the truth. Some truth telling involves brutal stories, some more heart-warming, but each has beauty in it. I know groups within Christianity will boycott this movie for the language, the drinking, the friendship extended to the LGBT community, but if the movie does these things while portraying much truth I believe it should be celebrated. The movie is rated PG-13 for good reason. It is not the “family friendly” movie that has quickly become associated with anything Christian.

And really this “all truth is God’s truth” as it relates to movies deserves some discussion because I know plenty of other PG-13 or R-rated movies that deserve the support of Christians for the adept ability they had to tell the truth. If it’s truth we’re after then Blue Like Jazz the movie is as good as anything out there because it paints truth about following Jesus in the midst of an extremely liberal college in Portland, Oregon during the often difficult post-high school years.

Lost in the Story

Overall I think the story worked very well. The screenplay obviously needed to include parts from the book and parts not in the book to allow a cohesive story to be told. Those of you who have read Blue Like Jazz the book know it lacks a consistent storyline throughout, but I believe the screenplay was written with the distinct themes of the book in mind. Many of the most important scenes from the book were kept within the film.

At some point toward the end of the movie I stopped trying to compare the movie and the book and I got lost in the story. The last 15 to 20 minutes of the film are pure beauty. They made any of the parts I struggled with completely worth it.

Themes

• “Jazz is like life because it doesn’t resolve.”
• “What if we’re not alone? What if all these stars are notes on a page of music swirling in the blue like jazz?”
• “Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.”
• “The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: life is a story about me” (quote from the book only but an inherent theme throughout the movie).

Check out how some of these themes develop in this short scene that sets up the end of the movie.

The Beauty of Wrestling

One of the things that a book cannot do is show the wrestling a person does in the silent moments of life. Sure the best writers can use all the descriptive adjectives in the dictionary to show the internal battle going on within a person, but in a movie we can see it on faces of the characters and in the circumstances they find themselves in. While this wrestling with faith is a key theme in the book, I think it took on new life in the movie. We see Marshall Allman (who played Don) run away from his faith and then slowly be drawn back in. Surely all Calvinists will love that aspect of the movie

Christian movies are often known to tidy up the ending or the tension through poor and disingenuous acting, but Blue Like Jazz does a brilliant job of portraying the tension of life and faith going on inside of Don. I find beauty in the telling of this truth.

The Beauty of Uncharted Territory

I see Blue Like Jazz venturing into mostly unknown territory. It’s a Christian movie in the sense that it is a movie about a Christian navigating our decidedly unChristian culture. It’s a low budget movie that does it’s best to portray one of the great books of recent memory into a compelling story. It’s a movie that was only made because several thousand people gave enough money to keep it afloat. How can a low budget, Christian movie pull off reaching the same audience the book did without becoming across as disingenuous or cheap? Well I’m not exactly sure, but part of enjoying the movie is enjoying the uncharted territory it is in.

My Rating

Having the blessing of some time to process through the movie I’d give it a solid B rating in terms of how it compares with other movies in the industry. In terms of the Christian movie genre, I’d give it an A+. Some of the budget constraints show because this does not have the visual appeal of recent movies like Hugo, Inception, or The Tree of Life, but I don’t think this disqualifies the movie from being worth seeing at all. Overall, I find Blue Like Jazz to be an incredible move forward in terms of Christian movies that tell the truth in a real and compelling way.

I hope you’ll go out to see it on April 13th (find locations here).

(Full disclosure: I was able to see the movie for free but was not asked to write a review of any kind)

Introverts make up anywhere from 40 to 50% of our society and yet so much of church life seems focused around creating frenetic environments of noise, busyness, and talking.

If you haven’t read Introverts in the Church by Adam McHugh add it to your must read list. If you’re an introvert you’ll feel like he understands all your frustrations. If you’re extroverted you’ll begin to think about how your church can create better environments that value people of all personality dispositions. Here’s a favorite quote of mine from his book that gets at the heart of this 2nd class citizen idea:

“People who enjoy reflection and solitude, and listen more than they speak, are often viewed as enigmatic, antisocial and passive.”

A great challenge for our churches, and society in general, is to create space for introverts and extroverts to both be welcomed and given the freedom to be themselves.

A few weeks ago Susan Cain (fresh off releasing her new book on introversion) gave a TED talk on introversion that meets well with this 2nd class citizen idea Adam McHugh speaks of in his book. It’s 19 minutes long, but highly valuable for all of us to consider when it comes to how we interact with others and how different personalities operate best.

I love so much about this video and the line of thinking Cain is presenting toward how we view introverts. Probably what I love best though is that she doesn’t shy away from her introversion. It comes across as she struggles to think of her next line or as she leaves longer pauses than is typical for most TED talks. She embraces this part of who she is instead of apologizing for it.

Here’s a great line from Cain’s book which dives into how Christians often view personality dispositions:

Evangelicalism has taken the Extrovert Ideal to its logical extreme…If you don’t love Jesus out loud, then it must not be real love. It’s not enough to forge your own spiritual connection to the divine; it must be displayed publicly.

Have you experienced the idea of introverts being 2nd class citizens?

A.J. Swoboda (Ph.D.) is a pastor, professor and writer in Portland, Oregon. His new book, Messy: God Likes it that Way (Kregel), is a manifesto for those whose faith is messier than they’d like to advertise. You can find out more about A.J. at his website, www.ajswoboda.com.

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We all deal with the mess of Christianity somehow.

In ancient Greek and Latin theatre, there would often be a character representing the gods. This character’s name was the Deus ex Machina. It means “God of the machine.” It was a character who had an exceptionally important role in the plot of the story. At the moment in the play when everything seemed at its worst, when all problems seemed beyond control or resolve, when the main character is about to be killed by the villain and everything is beyond fixability, this character would come out on stage. This was Deus ex Machina: the machine-god. And at just the right moment, the machine-god would swoop on stage, wave his magic wand over the whole messy thing, and the mess would be fixed. Kazam. Whammo. Finis. Curtain. Play over. Happy ending. Pay the babysitter.

We could use one of those gods right about now, couldn’t we? It sounds like the very thing we need to fix this whole mess we seem have gotten ourselves into. But we may be in for a long wait. And we probably shouldn’t quit the day job.

Because that god only does theatre.

Christianity is surprisingly messier than what I signed up for. I’m sure many of us would admit that. A famous pastor’s kid once said near the end of his life that he’d have become a Christian if he’d ever actually met one. His problem was, the only one he’d ever heard of apparently died on a cross. He saw the mess. And ran. Few of us admittingly accept it, but it’s true. This whole thing is just one big mess, isn’t it? Preaching a beautiful message of grace, we so rarely if ever practice it on each other. Let alone ourselves. Christians not acting like Christians. Churches not being the thing we think church should be. People renouncing God because of the hypocrisy of the people who follow him. Churches splitting like multicell amoeba. So on and so forth. You have to admit—most of the time—it all feels like one big fat mess.

Look, I get it. Really. And of course not helping is the minor detail that God sometimes seems oddly quiet about the whole thing. We all secretly wish God would fix it all up with one fell swoop by some magical moment with divine lightning. Kazam. Whammo. It’s understandable to me why some continue to predict this soon-coming apocalyptic catastrophe that’ll apparently magically fix everything. They describe a really angry God who descends in all his divine cruelness to fix it all by judging nonbelievers and pagans and liberals with storms and earthquakes and gnats. And then, just then, it will all return to the way it’s supposed to be. Problem fixed. But for those who watch the news there has yet to be such a resolve, for we’re still here. And so are the nonbelievers, the pagans, and the liberals.

And me too.

This is somewhat problematic. For a God of order that the Bible appears to describe, there seems to be a lot of messiness in the world. So either God is hopelessly out of control. Or God, in all God’s God-ness, fancies himself content with letting us, the human race, run around invariably being human, making fools of ourselves. And this because the point isn’t about everything here on earth being fixed. It’s about something else. Something that we don’t want to hear.

About how important the mess is to being authentically human.

Mind you, it’s not just Christianity that’s got a mess on its religious hands. No doubt, Christianity from page one has been surprisingly messy. But you have been too. So have the Muslims, and the Green Party, and Toys “R” Us. It’s all messy. Christian or not. Religious or not. It’s not like Christianity is all screwed up but we’re walking around with halos on our head. We as humans are the messed up ones. Sometimes I sit up late at night and wonder why I’m so messed up. Why I can’t change myself. Why there’s not some Rosetta Stone CD set that can fix me and teach me how to be better in four easy installments.

Sometimes we lose hope. We feel so alone. And in our weaker moments, we secretly judge those who appear on the outside to have it all together. This isn’t something written for them. Because their story has never been my story. Nor has it been yours. Your story is messy like mine. There are lots of books that sell by falsely encouraging you, the reader, to flee church, community, and God altogether. They say to flee the faith. Flee Christianity. Flee it all. Flee the mess. Become your own person. You don’t need those crutches anymore. And those books are right about one thing. The mess. But what’s so surprising is how those who have left God, left the faith, left community, are still screwed up. They’re just screwed up without God, without faith, without community. What they’re disgustingly wrong about is how central the mess is to being a human. And how the mess is necessary.

And how it is what it is.

I wonder if this the hardest thing for a Christian to do? To accept the ambiguity, the messiness, the weirdness of their life. To accept and be cool with the scariest reality that their life isn’t all put together in the perfect way they want. And that God is somehow in there.

If Christianity is all about that then I’m right at home.

My favorite lyrics have always been the last verse which say:

Exposed beyond the shadows
You take the cup from me
Your dirt removes my blindness
Your pain becomes my peace

The song has always resonated with me because of it’s comfort with recognizing human frailty and failure. While I have loved and pursued God for most of my life, it rarely looks pretty and put together.

As I’ve been finishing some of my final edits to the book manuscript the past few weeks I’ve been camping a lot on the idea that God makes a masterpiece out of our mess. It’s my experience that the model Christian always has his or her life put together in an immaculate way. And my frustration with that is my life never seems to be match up. I tend to always feel inferior to the “Godly” people around me. They seem to have perfected this whole faith and life thing a lot better than me.

The model Christian often presented and placed on a pedestal never seems to have a messy closet. The dishes in their kitchen aren’t stacked up in the sink. They have don’t have huge piles of laundry beside their bed. Their hearts seem to rise and set with motivations to love and pursue Jesus. Their stories of struggle always end on a positive note.

It’s all disconnected from my life and my mess. I’m continually drawn toward the things of the flesh, or the sins that can easily entangle my life. I always find ways to remove Jesus and my love for him away from the center of my life to focus on empty and fleeting things.

I love what Mandy Steward says about our messes in her book Messy Canvas. Our lives are about “believing in a Master Artist who created redemption and loves us so much that He paints over our imperfection with His perfection. It is seeing the real, the mess, in light of the ideal, and so transfiguring it. It is accepting mess and then challenging it to become something more” (page 38).

We have a Savior “whose dirt removes our blindness.” He is for us. He loves us enough to not only see past our failures, our mess, our sin, but He loves us enough to transform us in the midst of it. He extends His hand to us in the darkest hours of our lives. Through the incarnation of His Son, Jesus, we see that God cared enough about us to enter into the mess of our lives.

The model Christian is not the perfectly tidy man or woman. The model Christian is one who continually seeks after Him in the midst of mess, wading through the murky and muddy waters of life scouting after the divine. It’s this process that makes something beautiful.

He’s making a masterpiece out of our mess.

When we’re at church, we become our good Christian self.

When we’re at school, we become our smart and intellectual self.

When it’s the weekend, we become our fun-loving, have a good time self.

And rarely do any of these personalities we’ve created ever cross paths.

Somehow we’ve bought the lie that if we are our good Christian self enough of the time, God will have mercy on us and take us to heaven. He does love us with an unending grace right?

So we choose to stay as little baby Christians who go to church to hear great music and be convicted by great teaching, and once we leave the church we’ll enter into another one of our personalities and leave everything from church at church to pick it all up again a week later. When our faith becomes nothing more than leaving our normal life to attend church to make sure we’re good with God and forgiven of our sins, we’ve completely misunderstood our calling.

We’ve bought into the idea that the total and complete Christian message is that we’re sinners and God, through his great love, saved us. Christianity then becomes just something we accept, nothing else.

It doesn’t take much of us to simply believe in Jesus. In fact, that doesn’t cost us anything.

But following Jesus, that’s another matter. There’s no greater cost than following Jesus.

The challenge for us is for all of who we are to be wrapped up in Jesus.

The challenge is for us to lay down our lives for him.

I wanted to posted about this last week but I didn’t want to bring more attention to something that was only taking away from where the focus should have been on the 10th Anniversary of September 11th, 2001.

A few weeks ago the Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, announced that no clergy would be allowed to speak at the official New York City commemoration.

As you can guess, this has caused quite the uproar from people about how it is representative of everything that is wrong with our country. Many pastors, politicians, and various other religious leaders have petitioned to Bloomberg in the last few weeks to no avail. The same decision has been made by the city in all commemorations in years past. Here’s a few reactions from various people:

“This is America, and to have a memorial service where there’s no prayer, this appears to be insanity to me. I feel like America has lost its way.” -Rudy Washington, a former deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani

“This is one of the pillars that carried us through (referring to religious leaders). They were the spiritual and emotional backbone, and when you have a situation where people are trying to find meaning, where something is bigger than them, when you have a crisis of this level, they often look to the clergy.” -Fernando Cabrera, New York city council member and pastor

I certainly understand the push-back because I am someone who sees life through my faith, but I will say I disagree with it.

To me, this issue is a part of a much larger one, where Christians view the United States as turning away from God and becoming evil. Whether it’s Obama not taking part in the National Day of Prayer, a crack in the Washington Monument as a sign from God (op-ed piece here), or Muslims desiring to build a mosque near Ground Zero, we get upset rather easily when something doesn’t go our way (here’s a great video from Fox News with a seminary President talking about this).

For too long, many American Christians have operated out of fear about their country turning away from God. What’s our motivation for making sure God and Christianity are at the forefront of public policy? Is it to make sure we’re still front and center, or for a great opportunity to show God’s love to all people?

We didn’t get upset when the freedoms of many people of Arabic decent were threatened after 9/11, even many Christians. Would we fight for the voice of Muslims to be given an opportunity to be heard, or just ours?

America was founded as a nation with pluralistic values. All people are created equal, and all viewpoints are allowed to be held.

People can still come to know the truth of who Jesus is without our government pushing our same values.

In fact, they might even come to see Him more easily.

(Photo: Zimbio)

I never realized how selfish I was until I got married. And it’s not like I’ve figured it out in the past 4.5 years either. I still don’t like to do a neighborhood walk with Rose if it isn’t my favorite route. I still hate to watch her favorite TV shows (they’re awful). I still hate it when she moves my stuff around. I do everything I can to fit her into my preferred life.

I do this with friends too. I imagine I’m not much different than many others.

And somehow we think if we do this with everyone around us, we’ll still submit to God. That’s almost laughable. We think we can put God on this fringe section of life, as if how we manage with the rest of our lives doesn’t change how we relate with God.

I don’t think we act selfishly on purpose very often. It’s something reinforced by our culture as normal. “What I want, I get.” So we act selfishly without consciously doing it, but clearly that doesn’t make it right. No one views selfishness as a quality characteristic to have.

Part of the reason the overall story of the Bible is intriguing to me is that it shows us a God who is willing to give us his most prized possession to be closer to us. He does this out of love. He does this out of selflessness. Much of why we view selfishness as a bad thing, despite our culture teaching us otherwise, is that we are drawn to this God who loved and lived selflessly.

In John 14:10 Jesus says,

“The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.”

How do we break the selfish cycle we live in today? Drawer nearer to the Father.

We don’t associate selfish behavior with God, so in our acting for ourselves first we only prove to be distancing ourselves from Him.

As we draw near to Him, He begins to work in us.

And we begin to live selflessly.

I can’t remember exactly when, but somewhere in middle school or high school being innocent was no longer a “cool” thing. And not just at school, but also at church. As the buzzword of authenticity became a more popular goal for churches, the value of innocence continued to go down.

By the time I entered college, innocence was a bit of a social death sentence. People either want to take advantage of you or make fun of you.

Most people today walk around wearing their “lack of innocence badge” with immense pride. They’ve lived real life and they’re better for it. After all, what would life be if we lived with a bunch of regrets?

I am not a parent, but I know many who are and I sense there are two main camps when it comes to parenting. 1) Protect your child at all costs from experiencing horrific life events. In other words, help keep the child at least somewhat innocent. 2) Love and care for the child but don’t shield the world away from them. Nothing is off limits. In other words, losing innocence will help them mature more quickly.

I don’t see anything terribly wrong with either camp. In the end, how we view parenting is likely how we view our own lives. We either embrace the brutal nature of living in our culture today or we try to protect ourselves in strategic ways.

But I wonder if we haven’t considered the repercussions of our loss of innocence enough. By losing it, we are clearly giving something up. But what is it? I’ll take a stab at the answer…

The innocence lost through life begins to spill over in how we relate with God and we begin to approach God with an agenda and an expectation that he will let us down.

Jesus talked many times about the importance of a childlike faith:

“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (Mark 10:14-15).

Children don’t have all the baggage most adults carry with them when it comes to relationships. They pray to God, with an expectant joy that he will answer.

Those of us with an innocence lost “know” that God rarely answers our prayers on our time.

Authenticity and life experience are important values to pursue, but I hope the goal never becomes to lose our innocence despite how popular doing so might be.

Our innocence lost is pushing us away from the ultimate life experience through God.

Read some of the initial reactions from its debut at the Cannes Film Festival via Brett McCracken.

The movie is The Tree of Life. Here is the synopsis of the plotline:

The Tree of Life is the impressionistic story of a Midwestern family in the 1950′s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith. Through Malick’s signature imagery, we see how both brute nature and spiritual grace shape not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life.

Here is the trailer (and a separate clip from the movie here):

Make no mistake, this is not a Christian movie. But I like how one of the stars in the movie puts it:

“You see this movie and you can’t help but think about some kind of spiritual being” (read the whole article here).

This is an opportunity. Not an opportunity to shove beliefs down the throats of our culture, but an opportunity to join in a conversation surrounding faith, life, and God that will be taking place.

Don’t miss it.

I’ve been reading The Gospel in a Pluralist Society by Lesslie Newbigin the past few weeks. I really appreciated how he tackled this subject of election and how it should cause us to live and it is easily one of the best and most challenging things I’ve read in months:

“To be elect in Christ Jesus, and there is no other election, means to be incorporated into his mission to the world, to be the bearer of God’s saving purpose for his whole world, to be the sign and the agent and the firstfruit of his blessed kingdom which is for all.

It means therefore, as the New Testament makes abundantly clear, to take our share in his suffering, to bear the scars of the passion. It means, as Paul says elsewhere, to bear in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of the risen Jesus may be manifest and made available for others.

It means that this particular body of people who bear the name of Jesus through history, this strange and often absurd company of people so feeble, so foolish, so often fatally compromised with the world, this body with all its contingency and particularity, is the body which has the responsibility of bearing the secret of God’s reign through world history.

It is the calling of the Church to bear through history to its end the secret of the lordship of the crucified.”

“Bearer of God’s saving purpose for his whole world”

Now that’s an election, whether we agree with the doctrine of it or not, we can all embrace!