Sweet Poesy

Poesy

καὶ ἔλεγεν αὐτοῖς· ὑμῖν τὸ μυστήριον δέδοται τῆς βασιλείας τοῦ θεοῦ· ἐκείνοις δὲ τοῖς ἔξω ἐν παραβολαῖς τὰ πάντα γίνεται,

12 ἵνα βλέποντες βλέπωσιν καὶ μὴ ἴδωσιν,

καὶ ἀκούοντες ἀκούωσιν καὶ μὴ συνιῶσιν,

μήποτε ἐπιστρέψωσιν καὶ ἀφεθῇ αὐτοῖς.

Mysteries for gospel morons Mysteries for students,

Granted by the rabbi with assurance

There will be a reprieve from your confusion

And a time for comfort and kind words

The rabbis in waiting sit wait eagerly in expectation

Joying in their cerebrums at Yeshua’s kingly disposition

His hard Hebraic disposition, momentarily softening for his disciplined idiots

But the package form of the allowance?

Μυστήριον

The promise of the absence of resolution

And an unresolved theory from whom no theology returns unpunished

Yes theology has no quittance from the device

Softened by its blanket confusing axioms

War t orn by myriads of mouths whose lips and tongues

Have tasted and seen the ruder now tumurous

Trappings of Yeshuas thought

But have not tasted of the blue, the delightful Hypocrene

Of the same, the unsung undersong

Born up in thought by the vigorous thrusting of

Discipled action the laboring and weekly meditations of monks

Now at the vantage of two thousand years

I pronounce our failing humanity

The prophets words distorted by us

I do not like you Yeshua when you speak this way

But let my thoughts remain a pox and a tizzy

On personal sense of right conduct and display

For Iyyob in time thought thoughts as blasphemous

But piety right poisoned his hagagah transgressions

And now only remains memory of his better days

His chaster ways and the chronicle of turpitude and frailty

That led him in the rightness of action and discourse so

Available to readers to day in that memorable chronicle of his

Outcome in the forty third chapter of his book

Readers everywhere rejoice as they slap the book cover on the table

Iyyob go’eled by Elohim at last

Human unwisdom surpassed

And everything stupid and us drowned pebblelike in the stream

Poem #2

Sucky talk and discourse is disgusting

Maelstroms of uneasiness barren pleasures

Variated digressions by arrogant freaks

The pleasure their own not to ours tethered

Tigress of conversation why do you chide

At the roarers and belchers that clear the path

Thy yawnings are alike good for nothing

Pointless screams at conversational gas

If you had tasked them for their laughter

And had the bourn of their witless woes

Would there be time for your correction

Or a space for your correctional crow

Tigers sit company tight with hyenas

Een in sunny sun drenched peopled arenas

Poem #3

Apple glasses and plum desktop monitors

Drinkable pellucid venomous expensive

Quadriform eidolon meaningless poesy-riddle

Tedium in writing yes tedium read

Poesy sweetened tight mannered crafted

Stradivarius obsidian countertop blinged

Precious for purchase for life also precious

In fact much too precious for my likening

Beliken away fat brother and self

The worst that results is flacid confection

One without width substance or zing

Take your example from the Pharoahs erections

Erections starry pointing awe-spiring murtherings

Of body of alma of napsh why not cuerpos

I suppose theres time on land for any fat thing

Poem #4

It is very hard to write well

Pull up the bucket and theres nothing but sand

Abrahams offspring much outnumber my

Attempts at remembrance untidily lammed

But wait theres a jewel in the pail in the back

Next to the blooming rosens grown fine in the dirt

Hairy Old weed but sure family favorite

At least to unconcerned with truth-telling folk

Harold Bloom was the jewpher too plain

Yes its that imprecise whining fat Shem

Introduction to plays master Cakebeer the one

Crows nest king of my poesy barkening

Barken on bark on cries my better mentor true

Poem #5

Cake and beer unmitigated pleasure poet

Ostrich feathered courtesan of my fire offering

Bier up beercake you know no homegoing

I tell you youll remain at home with me

My home is long wide open and chapped

Like my kneese uglier as vacationess as can be

But trust me a roll in the hay is not for her making

The violent they say do bear it away

But beercake learn quick u are to concerting

To amicable to playn gayms to fun

Develop a solitude I should quoth emerson

Hes better at saying shit in the long run

Preaching got boring

Poor preaching inevitably abounds.   As long as preachers are taught to engage in uniform processes of exegesis and then spit their product out in four-point sermon fashion onto the heads and shoulders of their unprivileged listeners, as long as preachers consider themselves “preachers” and not teachers, MOST OF ALL, as long as preachers find their selected passage as boring as their congregation does, sermons will suffer, invective and hymn-sermon alike will pass in and out of memory, and I will get more and more mad.  It makes me mad enough and guilty enough as it is (for feeling so mad), that I will probably find myself rounding about on the madness every really bad sermon in a month or so, finding myself just as mad as before, just as inexplicably, just as stupidly.  Certainly, my main concern, my primary criterion for good-sermon manufacture should be truth, right?  Shouldn’t orthodoxy pump me up with as much good feeling as any Shakespeare sonnet?  Why should I feel a profound sense of rupture and disconnect every time I hear Hebrew poetry read in lisped, affected English?  Why should I bridle every time I read YHWH and hear Lord?  Why should I find myself stung at these re-appropriations, this way of referring to God and thinking about God that has become dead and hollow?  Why should I feel jaded after I see eyes behind the pulpit follow their English translation and look up to greet onlookers with a mouth full of clichés about said passage, clichéd ways of talking, clichéd ways of thinking, clichéd ways of feeling?

If listeners greeted pastors’ sermons in the same manner that they might a commentary, we would have a more valuable way of dealing with and thinking about the preacher.   Preaching is teaching.  So let the preacher’s words be hailed as teaching.  The few examples we have of preaching in the NT (I will make the claim that the idea barely exists in the OT), always occur in the context of the spread of the good news, the euangelion.   The listeners are most frequently non-converted individuals, or at the very least, individuals that remain non-converted with respect to a specific action, like dealing with Judaizers in the later parts of Acts.  --- The preaching of Jesus is a kind that I have never heard from the pulpit, one that fattens the ears and makes sluggish the eyes and heart.  It batters up the understanding, and prevents truth from making an entrance.  It’s told parabolically, a word that has its backing in the foregrounding Hebrew the word mashal, which makes it a likening or a tokening.  

I suppose someone might also suggest any of the epistles, especially those titled hortatory, as something resembling what an ideal preacher might attain to.  But what variety we have!  Even among Paul, the difference in style from passage to passage (and book to book) is extraordinary.  Contrasting Romans 1 with Romans 8 or Ephesians 1 with the long, beautiful close of Romans should produce many poor attempts.  Rhetoricians  SHOULD want to aspire to such models.  How about Hebrews?  Highly cryptic, radically different in its conceptualization of Christ as great high priest, written in a high style, and with a fair amount of allusiveness and quoting.  James is a book of fire, and only a theologian could find it an epistle of straw.  Its style is gorgeous, its tropes memorable, and its thinking is new and old (new in all the best ways – new troping, new style – and old in all the best ways – plum full of ancient truth, like the dangers of the tongue bits).   

But of course, even if these writers had been taken as models by the modern preacher, even if they had aspired to their rhetorical fireworks, we should have only more anxious failure and probably, even quite frequently, disastrous failure out of their mouth.  The problem would be the same, though perhaps less urgent and clear.  What is the problem again?  Poor sermons that seem like the boiled down channelings of a Sibyl who spent all her days poring over the blandest of Bible commentaries. 

So, what, then, is the solution?  The solution is for the Sibyl to channel the matter of her heart, the pulse of her interest, to the congregation.  Now the sermonizer is paid, so hopefully the matter will not stray inordinately far from the passage at hand.  The Sibyl is paid to be interested in the passage, let’s hope, more interested than her congregation.  The Sibyl should devise the sermon around her interests, her fixations, her doubts, her hopes, her aspirations, in all their disgusting and puny particularity.  The more pecuniary and embarrassing, the better.  The more fundamentally the personality of the speaker is received, the more easily the sermon is judged.   If this type of sermon-casting abounded, orthodoxy or truth would be the only standard by which one would need to judge a sermon.  All sermons would be listenable, and those that would find themselves less memorable and less listenable, would merely find themselves that much less pleasing and memorable.  Not all personalities are equally well-received by all.  One person deems one speaker a petulant bore, while another sees the makings and foundation of a dry, delightfully caustic spirit.  Another finds in a demurred girl a right model of a caring and sympathetic individual, while another sees in the same quiet figure, an individual empty of thought and controversy.  This is not to say that there must of necessity be some sort of relativity in these personalities.  By no means are all personalities equal. 

I suppose I am also setting up a model for a preacher full of individualized sentiments, who says things like, and I have never heard this and most certainly regret never having heard this, “Well, I’m really not actually that fond of verse 7 of psalm 118, but I have tried to get myself into the spirit of it.  It presents moist difficulties to my heart.  My heart wants to cut and moan, but this verse blandly presents me with the love of God.  I will channel .  I will tap into its natural reserves…etc. etc.”  This individual might speak quite faithfully with respect to his disposition, but quite pointlessly to a congregation that shares none of his sentiments.  The truth is that even in a situation like this, with such an individualized, selfish speaker, we have at our behest an individual, IN THE FLESH!  He has not been translated for us.  He has not been taken from his natural habitat, force-fed acai-berry juice, and planted in a cage with occupants of suspicious species relation.  So, and I do not think this thought is that radical (but I do not know how to explain it), the individual will find individuals.   There is more sympathy in the 4D instantiation of a female mind then in an internet, pixilated caricature.  Mind has been bodied forth carnally.  Let us take a sip of that carnality.  Let the children take a sip.  Let us have the whole pot, scrape the grub and fur from the bottom and put it in the cup! - the solidity will only add texture to the vintage. 

What I suppose I am preaching is, let the teacher channel his inner Emerson and let the congregation do the review of the personality.  Let the congregation judge the character of the preacher.  I look forward to a day when it could be said about a particular preacher, that his deceitfulness has ruined his sermons.   His deceitfulness will be so much all up in the congregants’ grill that they will grow tired of this old sinner and send out to the farm for a better hand. 

I was going to end this with a quote from Emerson’s Self-Reliance, but it’s easy enough to find online legally, so I feel no need to quote tidbits from that gorgeous prose-poem to satisfy any lingering sense of duty.  Go read it yourself.  Especially if you happen to preach.  Especially.