All Things Go, All Things Grow

All Things Go, All Things Grow

Chris Cox

One of my favorite things in the world to do is to travel to new places. I love driving roads I have never driven before. I love seeing new sights even if they are completely ordinary. I love remembering that the world is bigger that wherever I spend most of my days.

There are so many times that I have experienced new locations as a sacred place. God grabs my attention a little bit better because I am thrown out of routine. Getting out of your comfort zone has a knack for opening your eyes and recreating you.

It is Fall Break and today our family started the first leg of a journey to some brand new places. Before we head out into our personal frontier, our first destination was a city that all of us have been to before: Chicago. EA and I spent a Spring Break there many years ago and then we brought the boys along for another Spring Break that was cut short when the world began shutting down for Covid.

The Middle

Chris Cox
Weekly Lectionary

Today has been a good day in spite of also being a very heavy day, which means there is not much in the tank for Ye Olde Weekly Lectionary. So I simply have two thoughts that Rev. Sides shared this morning and the inevitable weird pop cultural direction my mind immediately went with one of those thoughts.

The passage today is about the people quarreling with Moses because there wasn’t water after last week the people quarreled with Moses because there wasn’t enough food. And this is kind of the carousel of regress that keeps the people wandering in the wilderness for forty years. It is very easy for us—centuries later and very comfortably removed from the narrative—to shake our heads. But that’s not exactly fair.

Rev. Sides shared an insight from a seminary professor that God will let people wander in the desert for forty years just so they can get their heads on straight. The sermon looked at this story from a perspective that I had not really thought about before: the fact that some of God’s best work takes time. Experiencing freedom and grace takes time. Growing into who God wants us to be takes time.

The Beautiful Letdown

The Beautiful Letdown

Chris Cox

Last night, EA and I saw Switchfoot perform the entirety of The Beautiful Letdown in celebration of the album’s 20th anniversary. It was one of the best concert experiences of my life. Those songs came out right in the middle of our sophomore year of college and it was one of those albums that is inextricably tied up with a specific time. It was special to be in the room singing along with a sold-out Ryman Auditorium to every lyric of an album that meant so much to us when our relationship was beginning.

There was a simultaneous healing and ache as we soaked in those songs twenty years on. Lyrics like “This is your life / Are you who you want to be?” hit different for a 40 year old who has seen some crap versus a wide-eyed idealistic 20 year old. There is a certain cynicism that can sand down the hope of a song like that if you’re not careful. I remember sitting on a dormitory balcony with EA and earnestly talking about who we are and who we want to be. The songs were an invitation into what he hoped would be a better world. When Jon Foreman sings “I want to see miracles / to see the world change,” we were right there wholeheartedly.

Singing those songs last night made me miss the kid I used to be a lot.

Quailderness

Chris Cox
Weekly Lectionary

When people ask me how I’m doing, I don’t really know what to say. Or at least, I don’t know what to say if I’m being honest. I am not good or fine, but I am certainly not doing poorly either. I wonder if this is a limit of the English language. Other languages like German seem to have these words for the really specific situations that we find ourselves in. For example, waldeinsamkiet is a word for the peace and spiritual stillness that one feels by walking through the woods. I love that. English doesn’t seem to have those kind of words.

I want a succinct way to say, “I am surviving and doing as well as I can in what has been a very challenging season.” It’d be great if there was a word for that. Because when you cue up that mouthful I just wrote out, people aren’t going to ask you how you’re doing again. But that place (whatever you call it) is where I am, where I’ve been, and maybe where I’ll be for awhile.

With that in mind, my ears pricked up during the first reading in church this morning. The Israelites have made it out of Egypt, which is great. Yet they are also now in the wilderness and it is definitely a challenging season. They don’t know how long they’re going to be out there. As most of us are wont to do, the people start complaining. “It would have been better if we had just died in Egypt.” Over dramatic? Yes, but I think we’ve all found ourselves there at some point.

A Whole New World of Grace

Chris Cox
Weekly Lectionary

When I was a more literally-minded child/youth, I was terrified of the 77 threshold. Because we were reminded regularly that all of us sin every single day and there are 365 days in a year then surely the math would eventually catch up with me. I am going to screw up in at least one particular way seventy-eight times. Then what? Is that it? Grace is going to run out. I got a little reprieve when the footnotes told me that Jesus could have said “70 times 7 times” which would get us to the number 490. BUT WHAT IF WE LIVE LONG ENOUGH THAT WE HIT 491 FOR SOME SIN? How could God ever forgive us of something like that?!

(I have come to realize that my overactive imagination made me a very anxious child.)

Jesus was not giving a number to loom over our heads. He was not warning us about some sort of expiration date for God’s mercy. He was kicking down the door into a world of grace that we could not even imagine. That becomes more clear when you find out that the unmerciful servant in the parable that Jesus tells was forgiven a debt that was worth 20 years worth of wages.

The numbers are not the point. It’s like when we tell kids that we love them 3000, to the moon and back, or times infinity. Quantifying it does not do any justice. I know that “Amazing Grace” is the one hymn that everybody knows, but when you really sit back and think about grace, it truly is something staggering. And I forget that sometimes having been in church my entire life. Yet God’s grace and love for us is unfathomably amazing.

Inigo Montoya, College Football, & the Limits of Words

Chris Cox

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” - Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride

I don’t like to go all “old man yells at sky” but I am going to indulge for a moment: College football is presently hellbent on rendering parts of the English language meaningless. It all started back in 1990 when the Big Ten Conference added Penn State and raised their membership to eleven. It was actually kind of cute and fun back then; they even hid a number 11 in their logo. But those were simpler times.

That conference is collecting school like Pokémon and the Big Ten will soon have 18 teams. The Big 12 Conference, which had recently dipped below a dozen members, will have 16 teams next year.

The Southeastern Conference did their damage in the realm of geography. They stretched the concept of the southeast by adding Missouri and Texas A&M several years ago and are soon adding both Oklahoma and Texas. “But wait,” you might say, “isn’t Texas a part of the South?” No. And that question is how I know you are not from the South or Texas.

Yet the most egregious offender for my money is the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Brand New Colony

Chris Cox

There are times when a song will take root inside my head. Sometimes it is because the tune is catchy. Others because the lyrics resonate deeply. Often it is some combination of both. For the last two weeks, that song has been “Brand New Colony” from Give Up, the Postal Service’s one and only album.

Writing about the strange chemistry that makes you like a song is a fragile thing. Let me dissect something that is ineffable and lay it out for you. Yet songs often get their hooks in us because they are telling us something. Truth is, songs usually stick with me when they accidentally trip into the holy.

Not that “Brand New Colony” is actually a song about God. Ben Gibbard—who sings the song and is its main lyricist—does not seem to have anything ethereal in mind other than love here. His main gig, Death Cab for Cutie, came out with the song “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” which is a deeply gorgeous and firmly agnostic song about love, death, and what happens next.

“Brand New Colony” is about that very human kind of love, but I think that sometimes people find themselves inching closer to the sacred when they sing about “human” things than some do when they aim to sing about God. It’s not always the case, but I think it happens more often than we’d think.

It's Never Too Late

Chris Cox

There is a quote in a recent feature in the Washington Post that I have not been able to get out of my head for a few days. The story is a bout a group of mothers from the Covenant School who have been doing the hard work of trying to get Tennessee state legislators to hear their stories in hopes of some sort of reform to the Volunteer State’s gun laws. There is presently a special session of the Tennessee Legislature that was called in the wake of the March school shooting in which three children and three adults committed to serving children were killed.

You should read the entire article just to get a sense of the grinding boots-on-the-ground efforts that many people have taken up in the midst of tragedy. But the quote that I cannot get out of my mind comes from a state senator by the name of Todd Gardenhire.

In a pair of quoted interviews, Gardenhire declared, “Where were these young, rich white mothers when the Black kids in my district and Memphis were getting slaughtered?…It doesn’t mean their issues aren’t valid, but it’s a little hypocritical.” and “They’ve never been involved until it hits them, and now they want to change the world. I’m not minimizing the pain and agony that they felt. But where have they been in the past?”

First, the man is absolutely minimizing their pain and agony. Secondly, you would think that someone actually concerned about the Black kids in his district getting murdered would be more sympathetic to…well, anyone. But instead he is using the victims of tragedy as a prop to discredit other victims of a tragedy. I do not know Gardenhire’s heart, but his comments read as extremely callous and cynical and insulting to mothers of both Black kids and white kids. Like Gardenhire, I am a white, college-educated male and I am aware that we are way over-represented in governing bodies. If you would like to remove all of us from legislatures for one term, go for it. It would probably do some good; kind of like turning off your computer and turning it back on.

Like Sun Upon My Face

Chris Cox
Weekly Lectionary

“May God be gracious to us and bless us
and make his face shine upon us,
that your way may be known upon earth,
your saving power among all nations.”

God, this is all I ask right now. I ask for grace and blessing. And more than anything else, I want to know that You see us, hear us, and are somehow, someway doing something about all this. God, I feel so lost in the world sometimes. I don’t know what words mean anymore. I don’t know what church means anymore. It has been a long day. One of those days that is hard because the present is tough and the past is too because the body keeps the freaking score.

I just want to feel Your warmth upon my face. Like the sun rising after a dark, cold night. I want to feel the breeze of Your Spirit. I want to know that things are going to be alright. And I know that I cannot know that. Yet I ask that You help me to hope that beyond hope. Grant us grace, blessing, and let Your face shine upon us.

The Sea Around Us/The God Who is With Us

Chris Cox
Weekly Lectionary

Water is chaos.

I feel like that is one of the first things I learned in my college Intro to Biblical Literature class. When Genesis 1 describes the Spirit of God hovering over the waters, it sets the stage for God to bring order out of chaos. When the Great Flood swallows the earth, it is the chaos of pre-creation consuming life. When the Children of Israel cross the Sea of Reeds on dry land, they find God’s peace in the midst of chaos. When Jonah tries to run away from God rather than go to Nineveh, he finds himself sinking into the sea until a great fish provides an unexpected respite from chaos and death. The stories we see in the Bible have God bringing life out of the madness.

Until I started writing this, I had never considered the juxtaposition between the Spirit of God hovering over the waters in the Genesis 1 creation account and Jesus walking on the water in the gospels. Jesus touches the water. He is not removed from it. The chaos splashes around his feet, the waves soak his robe. It is true that he walks on the water, but Jesus is in the thick of it.

And really? Thank God for that because we find ourselves at sea often in our lives: the illness of a loved one, a child going through a difficult time, a broken relationship, a lost job, living with depression or anxiety, tragedies that seem to happen repeatedly in a sick cycle, hurt, loss, death, uncreation, the dark and stormy nights of the soul when you wonder if God is even real. In the midst of that, I want a God who does more than hovers over the waters, but one who is in the midst of the stinging spray of the sea.

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