so Google Reader has informed me that it's blog action day

judging from the number of posts on the subject that have popped up on it. has something to do with poverty, and making a difference, and all that. I've read some excellent pieces on looking at addressing the root causes before the symptoms, and to heck with the root causes, but treat a symptom anyway, and prioritizing our church budgets, and what the Epistle of James has to say on the subject. I'd commend them all to your reading. Even a cursory reading of the old testament prophets should clue anyone off that when we don't help those who can't help themselves, it really pisses God off.

that said, I think I'd like to add a quote from my grandfather, who died just over a year ago now. He liked to say, "you can't take it with you, but you can send it on ahead." Increasingly, I'm becoming convinced that money is really just a figment of our imaginations, that if we try to build wealth, that we're really just locked in some sort of psycho attempt to work the system for poker chips. What I mean is this. If you're at a casino, you don't gamble with actual money. You go in, buy chips, and the chips are good at the casino. You gamble for those on the assumption that, before you leave, you can cash your chips in at the register for something of real value. The actual prize, if you will. The thing is, there isn't any cash register for life. Our wealth, and works and lives will be submitted to the fire at the judgement, and that what is good and lasting will be purified, but that the chaff and rubish will be exposed for what it is and consumed by the fire.

We have the opportunity to turn our worthless little chips into things of Real Merit. But to do that, we have to put them to work. We have to use them. Not hoard them. For a limited time, we can do certain things with our money while we are here in this world. They're not any good when we walk out the door of the casino, and do we really know when closing time is, anyway? A biblical understanding of money starts with recognising its truly ephemeral nature. A stock market crash can obliterate it. Thieves steal it. Moths destry it. And it does not do us any good on that day when our soul will be required of us.

All we have to do is be good stewards. To trade value for Real Value, instead of perceieved. Am I using my money to meet real needs, or perceived ones? Am I using my money in ways that is loving to others, or only to myself? Are my actions loving, or selfish? All those nice, easy questions. Jesus is going to obliterate rich and poor in the coming kingdom. We're going to see ourselves and each other as the equals that we always were. Question is, have we clued into the reality of how much Jesus values each one of us, and been busy being his hands and feet in our time here?

warning to all coffee addicts

um, yep. :)

You Spin Me

I love this song about the same way that I love marshmallow peeps. No merit. So what. :) I had never seen the video though before I went looking it up for this post--it has to be one of the all time worst music videos ever. It's a song that's just begging to to have as its only visual those random neon swirly patterns that Microsoft's video player throws up for any audio only. Anway.



If you want to spew your drink all over your monitor, pop over to the Deconstructed Christian, and jump in on the discussion of idiot worship leader inserting Jesus into this piece of techno fluff and using it as worship music. Appalling. It makes me think of Jesus putting his face in his hands and shaking his head. Why the church should not be about catering to the desires we already have . . .

sketching worlds larger than ourselves

One of the reasons I so appreciate Neil Gaiman as a writer is the depth and breadth of the worlds that he builds. They're bizarre, multi-tentacled things, and there's always the indication of much more beyond the edges of the page. They reflect reality that way--there's more here than any one of us can understand. Too many fantasies fall into the trap of wanting to explain everything. Of wanting their characters and readers to understand how it all fits together. But when an author contracts her story-world into something that I can understand, with nice neat squared off corners and no messy remainders, it rings hollow to me. This "ordinary" world is already boundless. If you're going to add in magic, fantastical creatures, futuristic technology, and the like, why should it shrink? I like that Gaiman's characters neither know it all, or expect to know it all. That we as the readers tend to know rather more than any of the characters, but still get the sense that there is much, much more that we do not know.

Gaiman's newest book is The Graveyard Book. It's an homage of sorts, to the Jungle Book, about a boy whose family is murdered, who is taken in by the ghosts of the local graveyard and raised with a somewhat different understanding of reality than most of us have. It is much less macabre and horrifying than such a descripton makes it sound. Gaiman's dry, observant humor and keen insight of human nature and of children and how they go about life make for a great read or listen. Neil Gaiman is currently touring the U.S., promoting the book, reading a chapter each evening which is being recorded and posted. There are currently four chapters up. You can listen to them here.

In chapter 2, (around the 11-13 minute mark), Gaiman neatly reminds us of how much of what we take as fact, we in fact take on faith. (Bod is the boy, Scarlet his new friend)

Bod would introduce Scarlet to some of his other friends. That she
could not seem them did not seem to matter. She had already been told
firmly by her parents that Bod was imaginary, and that there was nothing at
all wrong with that. . . . So it came as no surprise to her that Bod also
had imaginary friends. He would pass on their comments to her.
"Bartleby says that 'Thou dost have a face like unto a squished plum.' . . .
Scarlet was happy. She was a bright, lonely child, whose mother worked for
a distant university teaching people she never met face to face, grading English
papers sent to her over the computer, sending messages of advice or
encouragement back. Her father taught particle physics. But there
were, Scarlet told Bod, too many people who wanted to teach particle physics,
and not enough people who wanted to learn it. So Scarlet's family had to
keep moving to different university towns, and in each town her father would
hope for a permanent teaching position, which never came.
"What's particle physics?" asked Bod.
Scarlet shrugged. "Well," she said, "there's atoms, which is
things that is too small to see. That's what we're all made of. And
there's things that's smaller than atoms, and that's particle physics."
Bod nodded and decided that Scarlet's father was probably interested
in imaginary things.

instructions on how to imbed a link

Thanks to Erin for these instructions! I've had them stashed away as a draft and have found them very useful. It's only recently occurred to me that I may as well post them, and let others benefit from her instructions as well!

The html tags for imbedding are "a" with the usual carats, so

1. [a href="URL"] text [/a]
2. So if I wanted to imbed a link for my homepage in a comment box it would be
3. [a href="www.coffeerandoms.blogspot.com] Coffee Randoms [/a]
4. Except, of course that instead of using [square brackets], proper html code takes right and left carets (the "greater than" and "less than" signs above your comma and period on your keyboard . . . .<>. . . blogger doesn't have any way for me to type out instructions on how to imbed the link without actually then imbedding it. :P
5. My husband notes that if you're ever commenting on board that uses UBB (Universal Bulletin Board) coding, it actually is done with the square brackets instead of the carets

Happy commenting, everyone!

the post that's not going to get finished

I've been trying to put this post together for days. But the rock tumbler that is my brain is refusing to disgorge any neatly polished little stones this time round. If you're interested, here's some of the gravel that's been filling my thoughts of late. I keep thinking that I ought to be able to actually get some conclusions about all of it--but if they're there to be found, it's by someone smarter and less distracted than me. And less prone to ruin the joke by over-analyzing it. :P
• God invented laughter
• some of the best comics are those who invite us to laugh at them
• Jesus--God's own fool (Thank you Michael Card)
• Jesus does not protect his own dignity
• humor is critcally situational and ephemeral (I guess you had to be there)
• look at the historical theology we're doing these days--we hardly understand the culture, even if the jokes of the time had been recorded, would they ever translate?
• to laugh at myself requires that I not take myself too seriously . . .
• humility is not the same as thinking badly about myself
• but it is seeing myself truly--and we're all ridiculous and have mortal faults. (xkcd's undignified)
• the concept of sputten--we take truly holy things too lightly
• in part because we take truly ridiculous things too seriously?
• God as our Father . . .
• we delight to make our children laugh
• we play the fool and silliness for them
• it's part of how they know we love them
• we make jokes around them that they don't get
• it's neat to see when they understand enough to get the joke
• it's one of the best things in the world for your kid to make you laugh
• laughter is based in large part on surprise and the unexpected
• we can't surprise God . . .
• but I think we can delight him
• but surely Jesus could be surprised? one of the confines of living within time would have been to not know every detail of the future . . . we know that the Father limited his knowledge within his time on earth
• God obviously invites us to take joy in him . . . enjoy him
• laugh with him? laugh at him? Jesus's role of holy fool and sacrifice invites us to be in on the joke . . . it is Satan who is defeated.
• he is the clown . . . the one who pulls off the impossible . . . (Bello Nock) . . . when laughter is the only response to the jaw-dropping wonder that they actually just did that . . .
• where do funny and joy and awe and all that meet?

once upon a time

I signed up for a class on classic movie comedy. The class was at the university where I was doing a semester abroad, and I knew nothing about it except what was in the course description book. It promised a semester of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, and I could transfer the credit to slot in my major.

When I showed up for my first day of class, the prof turned out to be one of the most obnoxious jerks you can imagine. He liked offending people. He liked getting in your face. He wasn't going to put up with anyone in his class who wouldn't just swallow whatever he wanted to dish out. He also had about twice as many people signed up for his class as he wanted in it--the university refused to classify the course as a seminar and cap enrollment at 15 . . . so his method of dealing with this was to drive away as many of his students as possible in the first week while they could still re-jigger their schedule. I was one of the students he succeeded in driving away. While disliked letting such tactics "work" on me, and letting the prof succeed in his ugly little game, I also decided that anyone who would use such methods was not someone I probably wanted to study under.

Despite all that, there are still days when I regret not sticking to it with that course. The little bit of content we got on that first day was hilarious--and fascinating. I have the NT's classic instinct of wanting to take everything apart and see the insides of why it works. And while I know that some people think that humor is ruined by such analysis, I really don't agree. (For a great, ongoing discussion on this topic, see Jane Espenson's blog.) What makes a joke work? Why did that one fail? Can we name different humor types as we do personality types? Can we make actual technical distinction between nasty humor and clean? Smart and dumb? And how does character play into all this? Our expectations? What does it take for us to be able to make a joke . . . and take one?