Easter, Resurrection Day…

Hope your guy’s Easter was grand!  At my home church in the Midwest we used to call it Resurrection Day, to remember exactly Who and what this celebration was about.

That was kind of the gist of our sermon at Angelus Temple.  On a day when EVERYONE checks in, and just about everyone checks out…mentally…Pastor Matthew managed to make the message relevant to seat warmers and pew owners, alike.

Have you ever thought about the power of an icon?  That whole, “Picture says a thousand words,” deal?  Symbols that have become synonymous with organizations such as McDonalds, Nike, the Olympics, Microsoft Windows have impressed themselves into our consciousness. They have an impact when we look at them…they mean something.

But, the cross has lost its impact…probably because we forget what it meant; that it’s actually a tool for a humiliating, extended and certain death. 

 

Most people don’t wear a guillotine or mini-hanging noose around their neck.  Or get tatooed with a symbol for the Chinese water torture.  That’d be wierd.  And, people would think either you were really insane, or “OMG, like, tooootally cool. Love your chains, too.”

Point being, that the icon that symbolizes Christian life is a tool for death.  Like the very exposed kind of deliberate death.  Like the kind of death we get to put to those sins we like so much, if we can gain the courage to nail them there; and let the only One capable of conquering death set us free. 

Hip Hop and You Don’t Stop

 

So I was on the bus, watching their television, drooling because that’s what you do when you’re on the bus and staring blankly at the sparkly screen flashing before you on your way to some stop.  Suddenly, a clip flashed of some break dancers and it got me thinking…which is a good alternative to drooling.  The clip compelled me to reflect on the video I’d just watched the day before covering graffiti techniques (I’ve never been into spray art, but the tutorial video “G4: Graffiti Techniques,” may have won me over.)   I thought about how the two different expressions related.

Hip-hop culture has been distilled down to pants, rap and rear-shakin’ dancing.  But, genuine hip-hop heads have expressed that that’s not how it started.  Hip-Hop was not a gimmick or an image, but a lifestyle.

I’d been steadily seeking in my heart the right way to approach the vision that God’s shared with me of a Christ-centered art renaissance and, just then, it dawned on me that that was the response.

Because, worship is not a 9-5 thing.  It’s not something you wear and take-off.  It’s not a song that lifts you up out of a bad moment.  It is the way you look at the world, the way you live in that world.  The way you interact with people, the way you love, the way you hurt, the way you heal.  It is life, and it is that culture that our work will reflect.

 ”so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” Eph. 4:17-19 NIV