#could be why Nickelodeon was so big on rebelliousness

[darkfrog24]

This was utterly normal treatment of kids in the 1980s and 1990s. There was even a stereotype of annoying kids who "ask too many questions."

Suddenly hit with the vivid memory of when a cat had kittens and I was maybe four years old, and an older kid (I think a cousin?) kept saying with disgust and horror that she was "eating the afterbirth" (as mammals do), but I didn't know what that meant and started asking, only to be ignored or dismissed by the adults, who also wouldn't let me see no matter how FRANTIC I got with my questions, even when I started bawling my eyes out. Because, see, my interpretation of that sentence was that she was eating the kittens. What else would you conclude if you don't know the word "afterbirth," you're too little to know anything else comes out with the babies, and everyone is acting like it's something too nasty to explain to you in words? I don't remember when I figured out that they meant something else but I remember four-year-old me being devastated all day and terrified the next morning that all the kittens would be gone. All they had to say was "it's yucky stuff that was on the kittens, so she's cleaning up!" but no they could evidently not come up with anything more creative than just "it's nothing!" And worse yet my questions made them laugh. They LAUGHED at the unfathomable violence I was sure had happened in that cardboard box. Can you even imagine how demented I thought these people were. I was four years old already thinking I was the only rational compassionate being in a house full of sick sadists. Please try to entertain the questions of children, especially if they seem upset. You never know when they just think you're a fucked up asshole hiding a kitten massacre.

[wesleyhill]

Justice for All

A homily from Micah 6:1-8, preached at Trinity School for Ministry, February 1, 2017

If you poll any average group of people today and ask them for their primary image of God, chances are one of the first answers you’ll hear is judge. God, it is often thought, is like a judge sitting imperiously at a great high bench, robed in black, with a scowl or at least an expression of dull dislike.

And, it must be said, this image is not without biblical support. God is often portrayed as a judge who holds the fate of kings and nations in his hand, who will call all of humanity to account at the Great Assize.

But in our Old Testament lesson for today, the prophet Micah chooses a different image. God, he shows us, is indeed in the courtroom, but he’s there on the floor as the prosecuting attorney:

Hear what the Lord says:    Rise, plead your case before the mountains,    and let the hills hear your voice. Hear, you mountains, the controversy of the Lord,    and you enduring foundations of the earth; for the Lord has a controversy with his people,    and he will contend with Israel.

Much of the Bible’s portrayal of the Lord’s contention against Israel takes this form. God has filed a lawsuit against his people, against the nations too, and he is not prepared for any easy dismissal of his concerns. As the New Testament scholar Mark Seifrid has emphasized, we often go wrong if we try to interpret the Bible’s “legal” imagery through the lens of a modern democratic courtroom. Rather, the Bible more often imagines God “as a party to the dispute, who seeks vindication over against idolatrous humanity: the justification of God entails our condemnation.” God, standing opposite rebellious Israel, lodges a complaint; or, more accurately, God makes an accusation, disputes Israel’s character and actions, and ultimately charges Israel with total corruption and injustice. God brings charges against Israel. God is not neutral or aloof; God is invested and aggrieved.

Furthermore, God’s contention is especially aggrieved because of his history with his people. Like a long marriage that suddenly comes to an end, the tragedy here is compounded by how sweet the romance had once been.

“O my people,” God exclaims, “what have I done to you?” The question is a cry of bewilderment, a spurned lover’s lament. What had God ever done to deserve such rejection? God had only ever provided for all of Israel’s needs. He had led them out of slavery: “For I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery.” He had given them shepherds to protect them: “I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.” He had prevented one of Israel’s Moabite foes from cursing them and had raised up heroes like Phinehas to avert his wrath: “O my people, remember now what King Balak of Moab devised, what Balaam son of Beor answered him, and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal, that you may know the saving acts of the Lord.”

In spite of all this, Israel had persisted in rebellion and often tried to assuage God’s wrath through religious manipulation. The prophet imagines the kinds of questions Israel has posed to herself:

With what shall I come before the Lord,    and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,    with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,    with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,    the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

In the face of divine contention, this is the kind of question we often ask, isn’t it? — How can we make it up to God? How can we grovel convincingly so that God will relent and be merciful? Israel’s prophets relentlessly critique the way that even God’s own prescriptions of temple worship — burnt offerings and rams and oil — can so often be a cloak for unchanged hearts to masquerade as pious. Even if the offering is a firstborn son — even if Israel were to go as far as Abraham did and offer her very offspring and future to God — even this is so often twisted into a kind of bargaining chip whereby Israel can avoid giving the one thing God wants: integrity and uprightness of heart.

How often do we find ourselves taking Israel’s language on our lips, too? How often do we use religious commitment — if not burnt offerings and sacrificial rams, then volunteer work or Bible study leading or what I’m doing now, preaching! — as a distraction in hopes that God won’t notice the one thing we’re loath to give up: our duplicity, our love of injustice, our clinging to our own privilege and comfort at the expense of the poor and the marginalized.

The prophet is blunt in his reply. “No, Israel,” he says. No, God doesn’t want any more blood sacrifices or appeasements. God wants justice, as he has already made plain time and time again:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;    and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness,    and to walk humbly with your God?

It is all very simple at the end of the day. What God requires of Israel, what Israel’s Lord indeed demands of all nations, is the doing of justice, the loving of kindness, and the humility to acknowledge God as one’s creator and sustainer.

It is hard to read this text in our current cultural moment without cringing. How often are we Christians ready to offer God our hymn-singing and our church attendance and our personal morality if only he will permit us not to have to face the question of whether the societal structures which we so happily inhabit may in fact perpetuate deep injustice and unkindness on a massive scale. How often are we ready to preach sermons and be virtuous as long as we don’t have to come in contact with people we despise.

Like many in this room this morning, I’m sure, I am haunted by that photo of 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh who was rescued after an airstrike in Aleppo, Syria. In the photo (taken from a video), Omran sits on a chair that is too big for him, his feet dangling off the edge, barely longer than the seat. His face is smeared with dried blood and a layer of dust and soot from the bombing. He wears a t-shirt with the Nickelodeon cartoon character CatDog on it. If the word shell-shocked were ever appropriate, it would be as a description of his vacant, numbed, and disfigured face. And looking at that face, I can’t help but imagine it as the face I will see at the final judgment. The question God will ask me, I imagine, as he points at that face, is, Why did you focus so much on right religious observance while neglecting the cry of the refugees, the victims of war and famine, the poor, the unborn, the hated, the assaulted, the last, the least, the lost, and the dying?

These words from the prophet Micah — “what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” — are one of Scripture’s touchstones. In the Westminster Shorter Catechism, when the question is posed, “What do the scriptures principally teach?” and the answer is given, “The scriptures principally teach, what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man,” one of the proof-texts offered is this verse from Micah: what the Scriptures principally teach about the duty God requires of man is this — to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God.

And Israel, according to Micah’s indictment has failed to do those things.

But here, at this point, comes the true shock of Micah’s prophecy. What one would expect at this point is that God the prosecutor, God the contender, God the judge would abandon and imprison and execute his people Israel. That, after all, is what oppressors deserve. Anyone who can stare in the face of an Omran Daqneesh or the lifeless body of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, another Syrian victim, washed up on a Turkish shore, and not abandon her indifference and repent and seek justice deserves the most extreme punishment the law affords. Every fiber of our being knows this: we know our own guilt, and our conscience condemns us, and the moral fabric of the universe demands that we be called to account.

But here, at that crucial juncture, is what Israel says of her condition:

I must bear the indignation of the Lord,    because I have sinned against him, until he takes my side    and executes judgment for me. He will bring me out to the light;    I shall see his vindication. (7:9)

In an utterly astonishing, even unsettling turn of events, when Israel knows she has been complicit in perverting justice, she imagines her Lord, the God of Israel, taking her side and vindicating her. She imagines the prosecuting attorney standing in as her defense lawyer. She imagines the one who filed a suit against her taking up the role of her defendant and justifier. The final image Micah gives us of God is not as judge, not as prosecutor, but as advocate: God is Israel’s defense lawyer!

How in the world can this be? How can it be that a people who dutifully sacrifice calves and bulls but ignore the cries of refugees and victims of oppression are vindicated? It is certainly not because God is deaf to the cries of Omran Daqneesh and Aylan Kurdi. It cannot be that! If that were so, then there is no God and no justice in the world. Rather, it must be that God is going for broke and imagining a scenario in which victims are healed and restored and oppressors are brought to their knees in repentance and are reconciled and recreated as agents of justice and mercy. God is not content to save only a few: God wants the biggest, worst, most beyond-the-pale, most evil people reclaimed and redeemed as trophies of his grace.

Any normal religion, any religion of human devising, could well imagine God restoring the broken and the oppressed and destroying the tyrant. But Israel’s faith, as announced through the prophet Micah, is much more shocking and disorienting than that. Israel’s God is one who, apparently, against all normal expectations, is determined to restore the oppressed and the oppressors, the victims and the tyrants, the poor and the unjust, the humble and the unkind and proud. Israel’s God evidently wants all to come to repentance and restoration. That is the deep heart of Micah’s prophetic message for his people.

On this side of the cross of Jesus Christ, we can now see how Israel’s God has accomplished this unthinkable reconciliation. He himself has taken the place of all: born into poverty, fleeing his native land as a refugee, he has become familiar with the plight of the oppressed. And calling the unjust and the cruel and the bigoted to follow him and promising to replace their stony hearts with contrite, compassionate ones, he has taken on their plight as well, bearing their sin in his own body on the cross — and bearing it away. He has opened the door to salvation not only for the lamenting victims of our world but for the arrogant religious hypocrites as well. He liberates the captives even as he judges and restores captors. There is no other gospel in the world that is so inclusive, that stands a chance of breaking the cycle of retribution that threatens to engulf us all.

What Micah wants us to hear today is that we are all now set free — for God in Christ has set us free — to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.

Amen.

[lindyhunt]

We Spoke to Drake Bell About His Growing Music Career and the Possibility of a Drake and Josh Reboot

Even as a child actor, Drake Bell always seemed like a music artist ready to break out. From singing skits on The Amanda Show to wielding a guitar on Drake and Josh, it’s no surprise that Bell has started releasing some killer tracks. After all, he’s the guy behind Drake and Josh’s catchy theme song, “I Found a Way.”

We got a chance to chat with Bell about everything from refusing to sign with a label, to his biggest inspirations, to the Nickelodeon days that catapulted him to fame.

It seems like music has always been a part of you but how did make that official jump from acting into music?

In the past year and a half I’ve really just been like, well if I’m going to really get to where I want to be, whether it’s television or music, I’m going to have to go 100% into one or the other. And I think I just have a lot more fun making music. I love being out on the road and being able to control what I create. You know, it’s not just sitting on a set waiting to be called, sitting in a trailer, auditioning… If I shoot a movie for eight months, then I wait nine months to see it and then it takes another two months to come out. It’s a long process and I’ve been doing that for so many years. I’ve also been making records for so long and every time I’d get away from the TV studio I’d be in the recording studio making a record and then going on tour. For me, going back to TV was almost like, ‘Aw man, school’s starting back up?’. Being on the road and playing music, there’s nothing that compares to that.

Because you’ve been doing this for so long, do you think your sound has changed over time?

I was heavily influenced growing up by The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Queen… you know all these big vocal groups and harmonies. So my first couple of records were very influenced by that. The new records… I don’t know, it’s so hard to say where you’re drawing inspiration from because it’s not really a conscious thing. It’s just what happens in the studio. My music is super eclectic and it’s always evolving. I guess I get bored! It’s like the same thing as sitting in that trailer, I’m like ‘Okay, cool that was awesome, but let’s try to do something different!’. I never want to repeat myself.

Who do you look up to right now in the industry?

Post Malone is awesome. I like his stuff. I really love Rufus Wainwright. I always loved punk rock growing up and I kind of see Lil Xan and Lil Pump as being not so much hip-hop, but more punk rock. Like whenever I go to a Pump or Xan show, I’m more reminded of the Sex Pistols than the ’90s hip-hop that I grew up with. There’s something rebellious and angsty that really draws me to that new trap stuff.

You’re doing this all without a label behind you. Why did you decide to go that route?

Just control, you know? I just want to be able to make the records I want. Like the other day, I made a cover of “Gucci Gang” and it was just for fun. I was able to just release it and not have anybody say anything about it. I can put out records when I want, how I want, tour when I want and make the album artwork look like I want. I mean, yeah there’s a lot of opportunities that labels bring, but you just become a puppet. I’ve been signed, I’ve been on labels and released records that way… but things have changed, especially in this day and age. I couldn’t just talk directly to my fans back in the day. I couldn’t go on Instagram Live and be like ‘Hey, what do you guys think of this new song?’. I can directly connect with [my fans] now and it’s been a lot more rewarding and artistically gratifying.

From all the new stuff that you’ve been producing, do you have a favourite song that you’ve worked on?

Probably “Call Me When You’re Lonely”. I really dig that one.

Why is that one your favourite?

I don’t know, it’s just cool vibes. It’s got a cool drop and I love Lil Mama’s part on it.

I saw that you recently played at a tribute concert for the victims of the PULSE nightclub shooting in Orlando. Why was that an important cause to you?

I grew up in Los Angeles in the entertainment industry and I also have a lot of family in Orlando. That community and the fact that it happened in Orlando, it was just one thing on top of another thing. I had family members who had friends and family that were at the event and it also happened the night after Christina Grimmie was shot, so I was still reeling from that. When I started to hear about the PULSE shooting, I thought they were just continuing to talk about what had happened the night before and then I was like wait, this is something that’s active right now. It was just a lot of things compounding and it really hit home.

Do you think you’ll ever get back into acting?

Yeah, definitely. It’s when I have time. Right now I’m focusing on the music but I’ll definitely still act. I’d love to do something with Josh [Peck] eventually, that’d be really cool.

There have been so many reboots happening recently, from Charmed to The Hills. Do you think Drake and Josh could get another shot? 

I think it’d have to be something more interesting than, ‘Oh, Drake and Josh go to college’, you know? And knowing Josh, I think he would be down with it too but it would just have to be something different that isn’t what everybody expects. You can’t just give the audience what they want. If we did something together then it would be something completely new, but a the same time, an homage to the past.

I read that you went to go visit the old Drake and Josh house to find it had been destroyed, how did that make you feel?

It was kind of a bummer but we only shot there a few times because that was the exterior. What’s a bigger bummer is when I go down to Nick on Sunset, which was our actual home. That’s where we shot and that is just gone. They just tore it all down. That’s where I spent every day of my youth. But yeah, going up to the house and seeing that it was also gone was a bummer. Like the Brady Bunch house is still there! I mean, there should’ve been some kind of historical society… the Smithsonian should have been involved or something!