Noli Me Tangere

Heritage, USA

When I was a young boy, my mother would sometimes have The Praise the Lord Club on the tube. I began to recognize Jim Bakker's face, and my young mind saw his cherubic good looks and the reverence given to his words and realized he was obviously somebody special. Eventually, I asked my mother to confirm my suspicions:

"Mom, is that God?"

This story resides today in the "kids say the darndest things" pantheon, but it probably says something about what was being communicated--intentionally or not--through that TV. Needless to say, I also remember the scandal breaking. I remember the air-conditioned doghouse. I remember the nervous breakdown during the trial. I remember Bloom County taking some vicious shots at the Bakkers. "TV church", as we cynics call it, never recovered. It was a classic fall-from-grace tale, with characters that are awfully easy to mock, until you remember that that was a real family, not a cartoon. A screwed-up family, perhaps, but a real family nonetheless. So I came to church yesterday with piqued interest, curious to hear what Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye, would have to say to us. Surely he's had a uniquely dramatic childhood. I can't imagine how something like that would shape you as an adult.

Jay is a good speaker. He's prone to tangents and escalating ironic jokes, but he's engaging, unaffected and candid. He doesn't seem like a showman, but he's very comfortable behind a mic. His chosen passage: Luke 15; the parable of the prodigal son. It suits him because his life is one of where the distinctions between grace and good deeds have been brought into unusually sharp focus. The images that caused me to mistake Jim for the Almighty were straight out of the older brother's recipe for success. Except that they were just images. Meanwhile, Jay began to abuse alcohol and drugs and was convinced that God hated him because he fell so far short of those images. He took his cues from the younger son.

I don't think he said so specifically, but it's easy to imagine that this story carries special meaning for him. The parallels are there: squandered blessings, humiliation, and for Jay, a dawning realization of God's grace. Now, his message seems to be primarily one of Grace. He seeks those who would grasp it most readily: the paxil and ritalin-dependent; the cultural outcasts; the oppressed; the profoundly dysfunctional. Jay's life took a turn when he grasped that God's love, unlike that of His followers, is not contingent.

My story doesn't have quite the same dramatic arc, but I can relate. It took me years to see that behind my good behavior--I never took more than a sip of alcohol in high school [pats self on back]--was geniune dysfunction. I don't necessarily mean the familial sort, or the emotional sort. I just mean an inability to do what I should, and to love the way I am supposed to. It became increasingly clear to me that something is profoundly wrong with the way I relate to God and the world around me. As the good kid, I used to wonder, 'what's so amazing about grace?' But when my rough edges came into clearer focus, so did Grace. "Oh, wow, I'm really f---ed up. How is it that I'm still loved?" Sitting at the great banquet, the younger son must have had this same sense of joyful bewilderment.

A couple points from Jay's sermon stood out for me. One, he admitted that he easily adopts a bad attitude toward evangelical culture. While it's understandable why he would feel this way, to acknowledge it as an ongoing blind spot shows a lot of maturity. There's a good dose of humility mixed in with his rebellion, without which you end up angry and isolated.

The second highlight was his application point. He said most people identify with one brother or the other. I nodded my head in agreement; I can relate to either, depending on who I'm comparing myself to. But we ought strive to be the father, he said. It struck me that lately I've neglected this. It's easy for me to get caught up in my own goodness or even my badness and forget that there are people who need compassion. It makes me grateful for Jay's sense of mission. Somehow, out of the ruins of that sordid affair came a genuine life-giving ministry. With his tatoos and piercings and "Religion Kills" sweatshirt, Jay probably won't be mistaken for God anytime in the near future. But if the erstwhile prodigal son grows up to be anything like his compassionate Father, that would be even better.

Posted by aokie at June 27, 2005 07:12 PM | TrackBack