How I Fight Everything Everywhere All at Once

Chris Cox
Sabbatical Sketches

Yesterday I took advantage of a gap in my schedule and finally went to go see Everything Everywhere All at Once, which last week landed 11 Oscar nominations. My amateurish review: It is really, really good and deserving of all those nominations. I had a broad idea of what the movie was about going in but I was in no way adequately prepared for what awaited me. As such, I am going to need awhile to fully digest a movie so deeply bizarre, funny, and moving. Also Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness should have its title stripped because EEAAO has way more multiverses and way more madness.

Yet I did want to write for a moment about something that deeply resonated with me while I was watching the film. Ke Huy Quan plays Waymond, the husband to Michelle Yeoh’s protagonist Evelyn. Throughout the movie, Waymond (the first one we meet anyway) is not taken very seriously. He is kind, but seems goofy and is perceived to be less responsible than his wife. Yet on the margins, you can see all the ways in which he is trying to better everything around their family.

Late in the movie, (another) Waymond acknowledges how others perceive him and gives a short speech about how he sees the world. It floored me to the point that I had to go find the film’s screenplay when I got home to make sure that I got down what he said:

Monday Mixtape: 2002-2009

Chris Cox
Monday Mixtape, Sabbatical Sketches

2002-2009
Who says we have to go in chronological order? We’re going to fast forward from the 60s to our playlist from last week: 2002-2009. Why not just the 2000s? Well, EA wanted to curate a special playlist for 1998-2001 (not so coincidentally our last two years of high school), which meant our decade journey took stops in 1990-1997 and 2002-2009. So welcome to the 21st Century. These are in order by the year released.

1. “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton (2002)

That piano line. Apparently Vanessa Carlton was working on the riff in her home and her mom told her it was a hit. Mom was right. That thing is imprinted into my brain and I love it. I am also fully convinced that any guy in the early 2000s who could play the riff from “A Thousand Miles” on piano had an unfair advantage in the dating realm over the rest of us.

2. “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé (feat. Jay-Z) (2003)

Twenty years on, the horns that kick off this song feel like an announcement and a coronation.

3. “Hey Ya!” by Outkast (2003)

A stone cold classic. The internet is still arguing over what time signature this song is in. Polaroid had to release a statement asking people not to shake their instant photographs. Plus there’s the music video with 8 Andre 3000s, which I promise you aired about 50 times a day on MTV International when I was on foreign study my junior year of college.

Simple is Not Easy

Chris Cox
Weekly Lectionary, Sabbatical Sketches

Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God.

The prophet Micah describes what God asks of us in the most straightforward way possible. Three steps with little room for interpretation. Though I imagine as a prophet, Micah had a decent amount of experience with people trying to shoehorn interpretation into any crack of daylight. Yet at the end of the day, it is all very simple: Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God.

Pastors frequently go to the well of Micah 6:8. I have quoted this verse to my students more times than I can count. Steven Curtis Chapman wrote a song using this verse that I absolutely could sing the chorus to right now despite having not heard it in like two and a half decades (with a Kentucky twang, “You can run with the big dogs…”).. Do justice. Love kindness, Walk humbly with God. What is so hard about that?

Well…apparently everything?

The Power of Ritual

Chris Cox
Sabbatical Sketches

On Wednesday, I went to the midweek Eucharist service at St. Bart’s Episcopal. It was a short, simple, and meaningful 30 minute service. Guided by the Book of Common Prayer, we stood up, knelt, read scripture, and prayed together. As the one non-Episcopalian in the room, I was always a beat behind but not in a way that made me feel embarrassed.

One of the aspects of these rituals that I appreciate is that it does not allow those in the pews to be passive observers to the service. We do not just hear someone offer up prayers from a pulpit, but we all kneel in prayer. We do not simply listen to someone speak of God’s grace, but we say words of confession and then are reminded that God forgives us. The liturgy of the service was a literal work of the people.

I am a bit of a worship omnivore. I love the use of creative arts and spontaneity in church. Indeed, I often miss the high energy of bands leading in worship that I experienced for so many years serving at summer camps. But I also feel a deep connection to these ancient practices of reading and kneeling together. It allows me to jump into the river current of the church and be moved with those around me. There is something in those rituals that can resonate deeply.

Monday Mixtape: The 60s

Chris Cox
Monday Mixtape, Sabbatical Sketches

A few months back, I realized two things: 1. My sons get along a lot better when we listened to music on the way to school; 2. They have not had wide exposure to music. So we started doing theme weeks where would listen to an artist, genre, or decade in the car on the way to and from school. Each Monday for the next few weeks, I am going to whittle down one of those playlists of 40-60 songs into a 12-14 song playlist. This is Monday Mixtape.

The 60s
The 60s playlist was the first decade that we did in our car-based music education series and it is our youngest son’s absolute favorite. There have been times when I’ve had to go run an errand and asked Liam if he wanted to go with me. If he waffled, all I had to say was, “You can listen to the 60s playlist” and he was in. As such, his favorite song will be on this list. These are in order by the year they were released.

1. “Runaround Sue” by Dion (1961)

On one hand, I feel bad for kicking off this list with this song since it follows the tired trope of the girl who dates a bunch of the other guys. If a guy went around dating a bunch of girls, he would get a song celebrating his magic with the ladies. But the music just moves; doowop evolved into something actually cool. When I was growing up, our family would typically listen to either Christian music or the Oldies station and even as a 6 year old I would have told you that “Runaround Sue” was a jam.

2. “My Girl” by The Temptations (1964)

It’s the first song EA and I danced to at our wedding. It’s my ringtone for her (even though like a good millennial, my ringtone has been on silent for about 12 years). It is simply a pop masterpiece. When those strings take off right before the key change and the last verse? It’s magical. Plus “When it’s cold outside / I’ve got the month of May”? That is the month of my wife’s birth.

3. “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” by Stevie Wonder (1965)

This song is on the list purely for the reason that the jubilant horns in this song are how joy sounds in my head. It’s really hard to feel down when those things hit.

Walk Before You Run

Chris Cox
Sabbatical Sketches

One of my goals during this sabbatical is to re-ground myself. When life is going a hundred miles a hour, it is easy to get swept up in the next thing that has to be accomplished. I am going to try to slow down and do those things that resonate with who I am.

Ironically, one of the ways that I am hoping to slow down is to run. In addition to being a physical exercise, running has always been a spiritual and mental practice for me. I feel more like myself when I get to run regularly; when I first moved to Nashville it was 3 or 4 runs a week of 4-5 miles. Since Covid that regularity has eroded to a 5K run every week or two.

When my therapist asked me what I was going to do on my first day of sabbatical, I replied that I was going to drop my kids off at school and go for a run. I wanted to get out there and get going.

I did not get out there and get going yesterday morning; at least not in that way. I like to believe this is a sign of maturity. When I was younger and I would go for a run after a long layoff, I would push myself and then I would run sprints afterwards. I would be panting with my hands on my knees saying out loud, “Christopher (my reasonable voice calls me “Christopher”), why are you doing this?” And then I would respond super dramatically, “Because I can.” Then I’d will myself to do another sprint. It was dumb, but you can often get away with dumb when you’re in your early 20s.

Begin Again

Begin Again

Chris Cox
Sabbatical Sketches

I am going to try something that I haven’t done in quite some time. In fact, I don’t think many people do it much anymore: blogging. Remember blogs? They were kind of big in the 2000s; like podcasts that you read. It was great.

I remember firing up my first blog on Blogspot when I was just out of college. Was it named after a line in a Jars of Clay song that my 22 year old self thought was incredibly deep? Yes. Does that song still make me tear up if it catches me at the right moment? Also yes. Does that blog still exist on the internet? Horrifyingly yes. Am I going to link to it? Heck no. You’re going to have to hunt down the ramblings of my early 20s yourself.

I wrote fairly consistently for about a decade, but fell out of the regular habit when I moved to Nashville to take a job as a youth minister. And I have missed it. Writing about faith, life, and the often nerdy thoughts that amble through my mind was a way to ground myself and reckon with a world that can often bewilder me. It was also an essential part of my relationship with God, a spiritual practice that nourished me.

Till Kingdom Come (Acts 17:16-34)

Till Kingdom Come (Acts 17:16-34)

Chris Cox
Sermon Manuscript

Six and a half years ago, we were still living in Spartanburg, SC and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with my life. I had just graduated seminary. I had worked for about 10 years in a ministry where I thought I would serve my entire life, but had come to the slow and difficult realization that I wasn’t supposed to be there. Trouble is, I had no clue where I was supposed to be. I left for an ellipses; the dot dot dot of something to be determined. To help feed a young family, I substitute taught and served as an assistant teacher at our school district’s early childhood center. I gained a huge respect for people who hold down those vocations and I was not happy. I felt lost and adrift.

One evening I went for a walk by myself in our neighborhood and I found myself standing by a pond talking out loud to a God who I wasn’t sure was even there. “Where in the heck are You?,” I remember saying, “I don’t know if I can do this much longer.” I didn’t get an answer that night and went home with nothing more than the catharsis that comes with admitting that something sucks. An answer did eventually come that kept and still keeps me holding on. We’ll get there but to make that journey we need to talk about the stories that Jesus told and still tells.

Throughout the last couple of months, we have been doing this series on the parables of Jesus found in the gospel of Luke. These are legitimately some of my favorite stories in scripture because they are so sneaky brilliant. Jesus tells these of profound religious truth yet the stories themselves are hardly ever in a religious context. These parables are not stories of priests and rabbis and worship services and synagogue meetings. Instead Jesus tells stories of seeds and crops, crooked accountants and weeping tax collectors, runaway sons and stubborn widows. In fact, when Jesus does include the religious in his stories it is often to subvert his listeners’ expectations like when a priest and Levite sidestep a victim of violence to setup a despised Samaritan being the hero. What I love about this way of telling stories is that by taking the things of God and hiding them within these stories of earth and the everyday, Jesus is demonstrating how the holy is all around us.

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