Logan Robertson
Sky’s the Limit
This is all part of the Pop Evangelical redemption narrative. The script goes like this:
Learn to play guitar. Maybe get a couple tattoos. Buy an expensive pair of jeans. Hit the gym.
Now you’re gonna want to start a church. If you and your bros don’t totally suck at playing bad Coldplay knockoffs spun as praise music, people will start hanging around because American society’s number one product is loneliness. At the very bottom of the culture is a giant sucking hole of despair and death. You know it and the lonely people who’re gonna join your church know it. And they know there’s no safety net to catch them if they fall. But that’s where you come in.
Now here’s the important part: as you get started you really wanna get the best looking people who show up to keep coming back. Make them feel special, make them feel loved, make them feel like they’re part of something they can’t find anywhere else. You don’t just love them because they’re beautiful. No, you love them because you can see Jesus Christ inside them, and to you this is the most beautiful thing of all.
Just ignore the uggos. Hotties attract more hotties and the hotter your gatherings are the more people are gonna show up.
If you have a youth group, get a leader in there ready to identify the cool kids and the tastemakers. Probably best not to think of the youth group as full of hotties, but you get the idea. Make the cool kids the heart of the youth group.
Eventually, you’ll start to attract celebs, ballers, professional musicians, even politicians—anyone who can benefit from being associated with something vaguely about Jesus is fair game at this point, bro. You are on your way, bro.
You’re gonna want to be vague about what you believe. When pressed, talk about “just loving on people,” like, in a general way. And talk about “giving it up” to Jesus. You have vibes, not theological influences. You project purity, but in a sexy way. Your jeans are tight. You’re vaguely accepting of gays but you never actually say so. You’re just loving on people. You’re more interested in love and unity than division, bro. You totally have women leaders in the praise band and on staff, and sometimes they’re even invited to speak on stage if they’re hot enough.
Being surrounded by so many hotties is tough, bro. Totally. Now, you’re gonna screw around on your wife. Your kids will stop talking to you by the time they turn 16, but you are crushing, bro. Yeah, some of these women are on staff and maybe they’re a little reluctant but, bro, you’re the center of this thing. You can see Jesus Christ inside them.
Hang on, bro. It’s about to come crashing down. The people you loved on are going to the media. Pray. It’s time for you to be reborn. You’ve served the Lord. You’re chagrined. You have regrets. You confess. You apologize. You repent. You ask for forgiveness. You ask for grace. It’s time to retreat for a minute. It’s time to reconnect with God, and Jesus, and your wife and kids.
Just like the Lord you’ve experienced death and rebirth. Just like Paul, you’ve been blinded and seen the light. You have a podcast, a redemption narrative, tattoos and tight jeans. And now, bro? You have a TV show on FX. Sky’s the limit.
Our kitchen drain needs to be replaced today. A costly fix at over $2k. But the plumber said something yesterday that amazed me, “These old pipes have cared for your family and a lot of people before you. Now they’re tired and need to be replaced by new pipes.” Beautiful
James Beard’s Famous Onion Sandwich – Jacques Pépin youtu.be/53zD6i5zG…
One of my theological bugbears is “what if” theology. Someone will suggest an ideal, usually a belief or behavior, and ask, “What if we all believed/did that?” It almost never goes beyond that. Just a cold, dead fish laying on the table. What if this fish was alive?
My global climate change plan: • 4 day work week • New 10 month calendar • Each month has 30 days • The other 65 days are organized into 1 Super Month • During Super Month everyone stays home and plays outside—no driving allowed
$20.84
On a lark, the last couple of days I’ve been running a GoFundMe campaign to replace my broken Xbox series S with an Xbox series X. It’s a $500 goal which seems like an enormous amount of money to ask other people for, especially for something frivolous like a video game console. I set up the campaign partially because I am frustrated that this piece of hardware that is less than two years old is broken, partially because I thought it would be something fun to pay attention to, and partially because I thought it was kind of funny.
Maybe surprisingly, maybe not, a few friends have donated to the campaign. As I write the total stands at $244. I was talking to a friend who put funds toward the campaign and she said something interesting: “I think we should do this more often as a people. Because how often do your friends want something that’s like, $500, and you could throw $25+ toward it and help?”
And the thing is, if a friend had something frivolous or impractical that they wanted but otherwise probably would not buy for themselves, I would absolutely toss a few bucks their way. Why not? I want my friends to have the fun stuff they want. If it makes their life a little better, or helps them get through the week with a little more sanity, or just makes them feel delight, I want to support that.
We should be doing this for each other all the time, for everyone, for complete strangers, but honestly? We should especially do it for our friends.
So that got me thinking, if you had a group of 24 people who all put $20.84 into a pot every month, then every month a member of the group would get $500 to blow on literally anything they could think of. I’m not talking about very practical things but on things you would otherwise hesitate to buy, or one of those “maybe someday” purchases, or something that you’d just dismiss as a little bit silly, or extravagant, or even embarrassing.
As it stands, 5 people have donated to my Xbox fund. Those five people, if they want to be, are automatically in the $20.84 club. Anyone else who donates to the fund can be in the $20.84 club if they want to be. And if we can find 18 more people to be in the club then we’re off to the races.
I can think of a lot of reasons it’s naive or stupid to put this out among total strangers on the Internet. Maybe it’s one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever had. But hell, life’s too short to worry about five hundred bucks.
How do you emotionally decompress from heavy stuff?
I put up this anonymous question app thing on Instagram and received the following question:
“You deal with some really heavy things at work, how do you emotionally decompress from it?”
Work in this case refers to work among homeless folks, I assume. Here’s what I said:
I notice my personality disassociate when something really fucked up or violent happens. In these moments I try to just be a good audience member: notice what’s happening, what I’m seeing, look for details, remind myself in that moment that it’s ok to feel whatever I feel later.
With the more run of the mill stuff that piles up I try to keep my ego out of it. The work and the people aren’t about me.
Yeah I’m there but if I get too in my head about my special part in it it’s corrosive.
Finally, against current trends re self care, I think focusing on feeling better is a mistake. Fucked up shit making you feel bad means something is right with you. Feel bad, experience your emotions, let them wash over you and through you. Hold yourself close. Grieve. Tell someone.
I have Martin Sexton tickets for February. I had tickets to see him in Nashville in 2010 and we had the flood. I saw him in February of 2020 like the next weekend stay at home orders started. So I’m real sorry if anything bad happens.
The Short King
Recently I led a group through a close reading of Lk 19:1-10 (Jesus & Zacchaeus). I wanted to challenge familiar interpretations, so I started by asking, “Who is short? Jesus or Zacchaeus?” Some translations decide Zacchaeus is short, others are not so clear. The Greek isn’t clear at all. People found the question kind of funny and they were willing to entertain the idea that Jesus was so short that Zacchaeus had to climb a tree to see him in the crowd. But ultimately I could tell people were going to fall back on tradition that says Zacchaeus was short.
I told them that imaginative engagement w/ the text can be really fruitful. “So, let’s keep that in mind and see what comes out of our discussion.” Then I had a series of questions about Zacchaeus’ social location, status in the community, what being “lost/found” means for Zacchaeus, what “salvation” means for someone like Zacchaeus compared to, say, Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31), etc:
- Zacchaeus is rich! What does he need saving from?
- How would Zacchaeus experience salvation in his life?
- Is Zacchaeus afraid of Jesus’ condemnation?
- “Zacchaeus is a sinner.” Who says?
- How was Zacchaeus lost? And is he found; how?
- Based on this, is salvation a contract that gets signed out in heaven somewhere?
In the course of the conversation with a group that would call itself “liberal/progressive,” I was struck by something: there was almost a demand among some in the group that we hold on tight to certain perspectives on sin/salvation so that we can continuously reject them. I didn’t foreground doctrines of original sin or penal substitutionary atonement but they were very live in the room. My attitude is, “Ok, you rejected them. Let them go.” Let’s listen to the invitation to welcome new (to you) imaginative possibilities presented by the story.
Far from deconstructing, people build identities on top of old accumulated stories. The foundation of their new identity ends up being like the compressed strata of an ancient city. Then they find themselves years later still sifting through the detritus. Especially for dominant groups within their societies we must always be introducing ambiguity, multiple perspectives, and nuance into our interpretive frameworks.
People born into marginalized social locations understand competing perspectives basically on instinct because their experience of the world doesn’t match the dominant narrative about the way the world is. Navigating these competing frameworks ends up being necessary for survival, but it can also be a gift. Witnessing someone contend with these perspectives is certainly a gift to anyone stuck inside the brittle bones of a rigid worldview on its last legs.
For many, the instinct is to rest on received wisdom. Maybe Zacchaeus was a short king* so excited to receive Jesus that he climbed a tree just to catch sight of him. But isn’t it more fun to imagine it the other way around?
*Cringe: “Or maybe Jesus is THE Short King, ready to be received by all.”
Jeff
Something about having a lot of contact with people who find shelter in public, who make a place for themselves on the streets—homeless people—is that you watch a lot of them die.
I learned this morning that my friend Jeff died early Sunday morning at one of our Safe Outdoor Space camps in Denver. Jeff was not much older than 65. He was one of the funniest, cleverest people I’ve ever known with a unique perspective on the world. He easily could have worked as a professional standup comic had his capacities been a little different. Jeff was smart as hell and he knew his way around a chess board, where kicked my ass whenever we played. I would make moves and he would just sigh and shake his head, “Oh, Logan.” Jeff was a kind, steady presence. He loved his friends and had patience and understanding for people around him even when he found them misguided or annoying.
Last time we spoke we got to talking about the Holy Spirit. He said, “I always thought about the Holy Spirit as the Holy ‘Way of Being.’’
I said, “Yeah like a connection to what’s real.”
He nodded, “Exactly. Not some ghost. Like the Truth.”
Maybe some of our street folks are connected so closely to what’s true that they look around at the way we construct reality and the tremendous gulf between the two causes such pain that they’re forced to take refuge wherever they can find it. I will miss Jeff. In so many ways, he was one of the good guys.
Tomatoes are popping’ off right now so I’m here to drop some science about the so called BLT. The name BLT gets the order wrong and has its priorities crooked. The sandwich is a tomato sandwich with lettuce and bacon. People think the bacon is the main thing. But they’re wrong.
Think about a bacon sandwich for a second. Nobody wants that shit. Just imagine yourself sitting down to tuck into a delicious bacon sandwich. Just bacon, bread, and the desiccated husks of all the people you’ve killed and dried like beef jerky hanging all around the table.
Finished reading: The Cruel Stars by John Birmingham 📚
Enjoyed this one a lot. Ripped through it. Think space opera + military scifi + sentient ships + Firefly somehow + there’s also a Princess.
Oh, also, space Nazis.