eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Maybe God doesn’t speak through prophets as often these days because he knows people wouldn’t listen. Maybe God speaks to us in different ways—and in the places he knows where we congregate: in our movie theaters, living rooms, iPods, and smartphones. Maybe God still longs to connect with us, and so goes into the places where we’re most likely to listen.
Burning Bush 2.0 is a whimsical and sincere examination of the ways God communicates with us—sometimes subtly and secretly—through our media and entertainment streams. Asay examines how faith and God’s fingerprints mark movies and music, television and technology. Through word and picture, God still speaks to us through unsuspecting voices—in ways we’re best able to hear—even if we don’t fully comprehend it completely in the moment. God is everywhere, and doesn’t ask permission to speak, shout out, or whisper his name.
Includes study guide for individuals and church groups.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781630887971 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abingdon Press |
| Publication date: | 04/21/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Burning Bush 2.0
How Pop Culture Replaced the Prophet
By Paul Asay
Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2015 Paul AsayAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63088-797-1
CHAPTER 1
PROPHETABLE ENTERPRISE
God Doesn't Speak Just Through Robed, Bearded Guys Anymore
The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
—Muriel Rukeyser, The Speed of Darkness: Poems
IIt's tough to be a prophet.
It wasn't always so. Back in the day, prophets—real, bona fide, Old Testament prophets—commanded respect. No one cared that they dressed funny. No one made fun of their hipster beards. Never mind that they rarely had much good to say—people would still (mostly) listen to them: kings would beg for private audiences, the rich and powerful would plead for insight. Prophets could change national policy or upend a country's very soul.
They were, in short, a lot like economists. Which might explain their shared affinity for beards.
But while economists are still widely respected, folks who claim to hear directly from God—like, through awesome cell phone service or something—don't get a lot of traction these days. Dress in sackcloth, and you'll be directed to the nearest Old Navy. Snack on locusts, and, unless you're living in a truly cutting-edge neighborhood in New York or L.A., you'll just gross people out. Visions and messages from God are things you talk about with your psychologist, not proclaim to the world. In some ways, yesterday's prophet would seem to be today's homeless schizophrenic.
This is not to invalidate the messages of Old Testament prophets. It's just that—well, times have changed. We've changed. We're not the same people who spent most of our waking lives farming and shepherding and stoning the occasional infidel. We've got the Internet to occupy our time now. Smartphones. Netflix. In a world filled with a million LOLcats and where "following" someone is a matter of clicking a button, a loud guy with ashes on his head wouldn't be worth a dozen YouTube views. We see way weirder, more seemingly relevant stuff on our Facebook feeds. Burning bush? You need an exploding bush to get someone's attention.
But God still wants to talk with us. And it's not like he's the sort to get stuck on just one form of communication. While the prophet might've been his go-to mode of dialogue for a millennium or two, God has spoken through other means as well: through dreams and visions, through singing angels and talking donkeys, through scrolls and books and stone tablets and scratches on the palace wall. God is remarkably versatile when he wants our attention. He knows we're not capable of communicating on his level. So he bends down and talks to us on ours.
So if screaming prophets are a bit passé now, how does God communicate with us in the twenty-first century? Through the very same tools we use to communicate truth and beauty and pain and everything else worth talking about: through music, through movies and television shows, through words written and spoken and sung.
Oh, I don't think he's abandoned the traditional prophetic route; he'll play that card when it best serves his purpose. But mostly, I think God talks to us through channels with which we're familiar, using a technique he knows we've always been particularly receptive to.
He speaks to us through story.
STORYTIME
When I was a teeny kid, I'd climb into my mommy's lap and force her to read to me. I'd carry a whole bunch of books in my arms, plop them beside us on the couch, and we'd start going through them, one by one. Sometimes they were books with lots of pictures and very few words. Are You My Mother? by P. D. Eastman and Curious George by Margret and H. A. Rey were particular favorites. Sometimes (just because she was that sort of mommy), she'd read something with very few pictures, which forced me to pay special attention to all the words—such as Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne or Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. And very often, we'd read Bible stories, either from a big, intimidating-looking book or smaller, picture-heavy paperbacks. They'd be about Jonah and the whale, or Jesus feeding five thousand people, or the good Samaritan.
I was in church and Sunday school almost all the time then too, but I don't remember a single sermon. I didn't keep a single picture I made, no matter how much macaroni I glued onto the thing. But I do remember the stories my mother read to me ... the pictures, the feel of the heavy pages, the rise and fall of her voice.
God likes stories. He must. The Bible has a lot of stories in it—more, I'd wager, than almost any other major religious text. If you're Muslim or Buddhist, you hear a lot about what these leaders said. In Christianity, it's just as important what Jesus did—the true stories that made up his own earthly life. And even when Jesus taught, he often taught through parables, stories of poor women and prodigal sons and even mustard seeds.
And for me, story has always brought me closer to him—even when more traditional avenues of Christianity sometimes pushed me away. In junior high, when I felt awkward and alone at church, I found God by reading and rereading and rerereading C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. In college, as I was dealing with questions and doubts, I found him lurking in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and speaking in Augustine's Confessions. When life is hard and things go wrong, I find that I want to hear a story. And God always seems to hand me one—whether it's in book or song, on big screen or small.
If a guy rushes up to me on the street and hollers, "Repent!" I'm likely to cross—quickly—to the other side (perhaps while dialing security). But stories hit a soft spot in me. When nothing seems to stick to my Teflon brain, stories have a way of worming their way inside.
And I think God doesn't just restrict himself to explicit tales of his grace or power or whatnot, where he actually lands in the credits. He's not found just in Bible narratives like Son of God or pretty clear allegories like Aslan in Narnia. He's in places we might never expect. Sometimes I think that he must be in every story somehow—stories told in print and picture, on our iPods and Xboxes.
What, you thought God might avoid those things? Does he have something against the Kinect?
SACRED CREATION
That's a pretty bold statement, saying that hints of God can be found in everything. In fact, just suggesting that would be enough to get me smacked down (perhaps literally) by many a pastor. And true, God's sometimes almost impossible to find. It's hard to feel God's presence when watching, say, a Two and a Half Men rerun.
But I think it might be true. Let me try to explain why, beginning at the beginning. The very beginning.
"And the earth was without form, and void," we're told in the first chapter of Genesis, King James Version, "and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light" (vv. 2-3). Pretty fascinating, this tiny little passage: so much mystery, so little science.
Could God have given us a bevy of complex physics equations in Genesis, explaining the Big Bang and the expanding universe and the bizarre nature of dark matter and why in the heck he made the whole place so big? Probably. But I don't think that he was really interested in giving us a dry, scientific lecture. He knew that, as time went on, we'd learn more about that stuff ourselves (and, like any good father, God knew that learning is so much more satisfying if it feels like we're doing it on our own). Plus, most of us nonscientific types wouldn't have remembered much of that sort of biblical lecture anyway. (The only thing I remember from chemistry class is how quickly a Bunsen burner can set a book on fire.)
But stories stick with us. And here, in Genesis, the how of the universe is less important than the who (God) and the why (because it was good). And you can't get that stuff across in an equation. For that, you need something else: you need a story.
And it's really interesting that, according to Genesis, God makes the universe just like we might make a story. He tells it into existence. He didn't shape the light with his hands or blink it into being. He spoke, and it was so. In a sense, God told a story, a true story—not of something that had happened, but something happening, something that was going to happen. It's a story told in future tense—where the Narrator speaks and it comes to be.
Nifty trick, that.
An act of creation was a story. And in a sense, every story is an act of creation.
In God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis wrote that "miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see." But the reverse is also true. The stories we tell are little miracles in and of themselves—miraculous in that we're even able to tell them at all. They, more than anything else, draw the line between us and the animals, between us sentient bags of flesh and our ever-more-intelligent machines. Our stories speak of our free will. They prove our ability to reason and to express our appreciation for wonder and beauty.
When we're told that we are made in God's image, this is what I think of: our ability to craft a good story. It's not so much that we resemble God physically (although it may be that too), but that he somehow imprinted a part of who he is on our minds and spirits and souls. God speaks to us through his creation. And we, his greatest creation, were given the ability to create as well. And we don't craft these stories just in our traditional language, but in the language of picture and sculpture and music. When we create something—anything, really, even if it's a two-line "poem" that everyone including your mother hates—we surpass every other living, breathing thing on the planet, every computer ever programmed. We are telling stories. We're creating. We're reflecting, however badly, part of God's own character.
We can't just conjure up a tree from nothingness, of course, like God can. But we can make up a story about a tree from a handful of letters. We can't make a man or a mountain. But in our stories, we can make a man climb a mountain and have him do almost anything we want him to do—build a house or sing a song or find buried treasure.
I think that this act of creation—storytelling through word or song or art—is God's greatest gift to us. J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, called our storytelling an act of "sub-creation." No wonder that throughout history, some of our greatest artistic achievements have been focused on the ultimate Artist—returning a little bit of the favor, as it were.
But even if our works don't seem to be explicitly focused on God, he sneaks in sometimes, even without our permission. If we write a story about a bush, he can set it a-burning, whether we want him to or not.
GOD: LET'S TALK
They don't call it the House of Mouse for nothing.
Go to Disneyland or one of the theme parks in Walt Disney World, and you'll see Mickey Mouse everywhere. His face is plastered on shirts, ties, playing cards, and cookie tins. His ears sprout on the heads of overstimulated six-year-olds and half-ironic teens. His oversized self wanders oh-so-tidy Main Street or sits like Santa Claus in Mickey's Toontown. If you're not cheerful enough, he's likely to chase you down, shake you, and stare at you with those strangely dead eyes of his until you promise to smile and laugh and enjoy the happiest place on earth ... or else!
But even when Mickey's not thrusting his black ears and nose directly into your business, he's still everywhere. Secret references to the guy are found in every Disney theme park—so many, in fact, that it's become a pastime of some true Disneyphiles to locate and catalog these "Hidden Mickeys." There's a Mickey-shaped lock on one of the treasure chests in the Pirates of the Caribbean. A skeleton wears a set of Mickey Mouse ears in the Indiana Jones Adventure ride. Mickey's image is hidden in the queue of Expedition Everest and can be found as you exit the Tower of Terror. He's probably hiding in your corn dog if you look closely enough. Nearly a thousand of these Hidden Mickeys have been found thus far, enough to fill up books and websites and entirely too much spare time of some otherwise productive adults.
For me, finding God in entertainment is a little like those Hidden Mickeys. He's everywhere if we bother to look. It'd be almost impossible for him not to be.
We've already talked about God's creative streak—how he spoke the universe into being and how the whole thing is really just part of the impossibly awesome story he's telling. And the Bible tells us that we're the best thing he's ever done—God's own Anna Karenina and Mona Lisa and Symphony No. 7 all wrapped up in these skin wrappers of ours.
I've suggested that one of the things that makes us so great is that God has given us our own ability to create. Sure, our abilities are inherently a little downsized: we can't whip up star systems or a Crab Nebula. We can't even piece together an original bit of shrubbery. But when we make stories through word or song or art, we're most closely tapping into what God does—creating something out of nothing but our own mental and emotional faculties. We create sometimes to illustrate a point or touch an emotional nerve, or to express beauty or horror or wonder. We create because, on some level, we have to. It's part of our nature to express our love in this way—a love of the creation and, hopefully, a love of the one for whom we're creating it. And that desire to express love through what we make, whether it's a sonnet or a symphony or a handmade construction-paper card with maca-roni glued all over it, hints, I think, at God's own (and ultimately unfathomable) desire to create: he made us because he already loved us. He made us because he wanted us to love him. And everything we see originally was designed to express and illustrate that love, to us and for us and for everything around us. Creation itself is, on some level, a great big Valentine's Day card.
So if creation is integral to God's nature, and if God—loving us as he does—passed a hint of that nature on to us, that must mean our own humble creative achievements are, in a way, sacred acts. Whether they're horrible or wonderful, whether they're meant to honor God or not, they still reflect part of his nature. Just as we were made in God's image, our creative images reflect that divine instinct to create. God created us. He gave us a desire to create too. And so, because we're all products of that master blueprint, I think that a bit of God's nature gloms onto whatever we make—a little like a Hidden Mickey. It's tucked into the pages of a book. It's lurking in the second verse of a song. It's hiding in a game's fourth level, just behind that lurching, groaning zombie you can't get by.
Sometimes we acknowledge that spark of God. Sometimes we don't. Lots of atheists, after all, write stories and screenplays and design video games too, which can be just as good and effective as anything Christians create. But just because they don't see God in their work doesn't mean he isn't there. God doesn't need their permission to speak. He has used and worked through lots of nonbelievers over the years. I don't see why this age of ours should be any different.
God is all around us. And we'll see him if we look.
Not that we should look everywhere, mind you.
THE DEVIL: MIND IF I HORN IN?
I have an old Christian pamphlet at my desk titled "This Movie Menace!" in which the author insists that the only good film is an unwatched film. Writes author Holland B. London,
If you were asked the question, What is public enemy number 1? What would you say? Some would say the Liquor Traffic, others would name the modern dance, others would name the cigarette habit, others would name gambling. There is no question but [t]hat these things that I have mentioned have polluted and distorted our age, but in my opinion the modern movie could well be classified as Public Enemy Number 1. It is positively immoral and rotten. It defies reform, destroys standards of right living and depletes the mind.
The pamphlet, as near as I can figure, was written in the 1940s—a time when something called the Hays Code forbid in movies any overt references to sex, almost any sort of swearing, and if someone was going to mention God, it had to be in the most wholesomely reverential way.
Makes me wonder what Mr. London would think of, say, The Wolf of Wall Street.
But the guy has a point. I work for a ministry (Plugged In) built around the idea that entertainment can be deeply—and often detrimentally—influential. Studies suggest that problematic content, whether it's sex or violence or just plain worldview issues, can have an impact upon how we think about sex, violence, and the world. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "'I have the right to do anything,' you say—but not everything is beneficial. 'I have the right to do anything'—but not everything is constructive" (1 Cor. 10:23 NIV). Entertainment, I think, fits into that dynamic. We have to understand our own strengths and weaknesses. We have to know how seeing or listening to something not only might impact us but also influence those around us. For example, don't take whatever I say in the chapters that will follow as carte blanche to watch, say, The Walking Dead.
We've already talked about how God is the ultimate Creator, and how creation is an expression of both his nature and his deep, endless love. Evil doesn't have that ability. If it did, Satan probably would've crafted his own alternate universe and gotten, quite literally, the hell outta here. This means that every aspect of God's creation has a part of God's perfect design in it—including our stories.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Burning Bush 2.0 by Paul Asay. Copyright © 2015 Paul Asay. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,Chapter 1: Prophetable Enterprise,
Chapter 2: Flying High,
Chapter 3: It's the End of the World (as We Know It),
Chapter 4: We're Gonna Need a Bigger Book,
Chapter 5: Something's Rotting in Denmark,
Chapter 6: Drawn of a New Day,
Chapter 7: The One Who Knocks,
Chapter 8: Well, That's Different,
Chapter 9: A Joyful Noise,
Chapter 10: Ethical Choices in Video Games,
Chapter 11: A Still, Small Voice,