My Morning Jacket – “Look at You” – This is a really cheesy video. Pink background, and the text appears to be my pet peeve font of papyrus. But, the song is beautiful and the lyrics are gorgeous…
Page France – “Jesus” – A great song, and a nice little quirky video…
The Velvet Underground – “Jesus” – I always hear this song in conjunction with the Page France song. The one always makes me want to hear the other…
kapten röd – “stjärnorna finns här” – This one is just a lot of fun. I haven’t got a clue what this guy is saying, but Sweedish Reggae is awesome!
“[Moses] said to Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?” “Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”" – Exodus 32:21-24
“No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.” – Luke 16:13
“Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch!” – Allen Ginsberg: “Howl”
We look at this verse in Exodus today and we wonder, how could Aaron and the Israelites have been so stupid?! Here their leader is on a mountain top talking with the God of the Universe, and in no time at all they have created an imitation god in the form of a golden calf. We also have to wonder, how stupid did they think Moses to be? Was he truly to believe that they threw their gold into the fire and miraculously this calf jumped out? Yes, surely these people were primitive nomads who lacked the sophistication that we hold today…surely.
I’m afraid that when we look at these verses we do not have the luxury of chronological egotism. I’m afraid that we too have lost our faith in the God of the Universe. We have not carved a golden calf to worship. We have formed a tower of gold bars. But we bow down and worship that tower with every bit as much shameless awe, and arrogant devotion as the Isralites did with their golden calf. We have created a false god to go before us. We have created a deaf, dumb, and blind god whose only worth is the worth we ascribe to it. Now, when faced with an economic crisis, we are crushed when our god turns out to be the lump of cold metal that it always was.
When the people of God become dependent on their own abilities and their own fleeting sense of security, perhaps God chooses then to lead them into the wilderness. Maybe this wilderness is not a punishment, but a wake up call. Maybe this wilderness is the only place in which we can truly commune with God Almighty. Maybe, just maybe, it is in the dark, beneath a blanket of stars, listening to the crackle of a campfire, in a communal relationship with those around us, that we can finally be the children of God, dependent on Him for all that we have.
I’ll leave this topic for now with a song that sums this up better than I can. Here’s Bob Dylan’s “Gotta’ Serve Somebody”…
I just read a post on a friend’s blog that made me step back and wonder. The post was a short recounting of a dream. My friend dreamed he was standing with Jesus on the shore as He called out to the disciples to cast their nets on the other side. My friend awoke with the understanding that often we are fishing with our nets on the wrong side of the boat.
This post coincided with the culmination of a 3 week long “discussion” I’ve been having with an atheist I met online. My atheist friend enjoys posting plagiarized quotes (no quotation marks nor credits) to as many Christian YouTube videos as he can. I took the bait several weeks ago. I began writing comments addressing the inconsistencies, the fallacies, and the misunderstandings in his posts. His responses were abusive, personal attacks, or more plagiarized copy/paste comments. As I read my friend’s blog entry about fishing with our nets on the wrong side, I saw myself clearly as if for the first time.
It is painfully obvious that my atheist friend has zero interest in a real conversation. Yet I continue to answer his abusive comments. I had convinced myself that I was posting retorts to his comments in the hopes that he or one of his readers might read the response and come around. I have finally realized that what really has been happening is an ego clash. It has been a contest of wits (and one not unlike beating my 11 month old son at basketball). I have, at least in part, been posting responses to him because I want to be right, not because I want him to have right understanding. It is becoming clear to me the principal that my father so wisely tried to teach me. If the devil can’t get you to do the wrong thing, he’ll get you to do the right thing in the wrong way.
I ask any of God’s children who read this, please pray for a confused and angry man who calls himself “TeslaSagan.” And pray for me, I’m a sinner.
“There they stand…there they laugh. They do not understand me. I am not the mouth for these ears…” – Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.
“Do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.” – Jesus Christ
(note: The above sketch is from my journal. It is what it looks like when I mistake my need for right-ness with my need for righteousness.)
Sometimes in this world the only proper response to the absurdity we’ve made of God’s creation is to laugh until we cry. That is what I did when I saw this video.
In case you are new to the phenomenon, there is a thing on the internet called “Rick-rolling.” It is where a person posts a video claiming to be something…anything…but it turns out when you click the link to be the video for Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up.” A very clever person has edited Barack Obama into this mix. Hillarious!
I promise, my next post will be back to the serious work at hand. Maybe it will be a post about the beauty of Grace, in that it helps us to quit taking ourselves so seriously…enjoy the video…
“[Moses] said to Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?” “Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”" – Exodus 32:21-24 
