For Mike's Dad

I pumped gas into my little pick up truck this morning. I wore a black suit with a white shirt and a navy blue tie. It felt like I was in Pulp fiction or something. People look at you when you're pumping gas in a black suit. They wonder, "Why's that guy pumping gas? He's wearing a black suit...Curious." I guess it's the juxtaposition of the formal and the mundane. Black suits are for special occasions not for Citgo stations

A lot of stuff happens in my black suit. It's the suit I wear to weddings. I take my wife to parties in my black suit. I used to wear it to preach in when I worked in a traditional church. It has seen a lot of cologne and a lot of sweat - handshakes and hugs. I am wearing it as I write to you now. I wore it to Mike's dad's funeral this afternoon. It was cool and breezy so I didn't have to sling my jacket over my shoulder. I re-tied my tie in the bathroom and splashed some water on my face. I heard twenty one gun shots and watched an older woman receive a folded flag.

I guess ordinary life happens in between the black suit moments. And as I am growing older, it seems like there are less of these moments. I remember the day I got married. I didn't wear a tux. I couldn't afford one. I wore my black suit and my friends wore theirs too. I wore a baby blue tie I bought from a guy in downtown Los Angeles. We took a picture on my dilapidated front porch. Our young faces were smooth and firm and our eyes hadn't yet been dulled by time. The porch was scabbed with peeling paint chips. An old man with white hair and a thick mustache took our picture. He must have seen the juxtaposition. He was wearing a black suit.

a whole lot of Truth all at once. (R-rated post)

It is late May in Milwaukee. Custard lines are long with grinning gawky teenagers and gray haired middle aged men imagine they are cowboys every time they crank up their Harleys. Downtown, the gentle zephyrs created when the strong southern winds meet the cold waters of lake Michigan, propel small fluffy white willow seeds upward to the tippy tops of the skyscrapers. And all along North Ave, from the freeway to 47th St, the prostitutes are out.

I awoke panicked in a cold sweat last night. I had seen one particular woman the night before on my way home at about 9pm. She must have been new to this life because she still put effort into her "sexy" outfit. She was wearing a miniskirt, stilletto heals and a tank top. She stood next to a phone booth in front of a boarded up store. It was in the low 50s and she was trying her best to look "alluring" while shivering in the cold. She was really young. The ambient light reflected off of her shiny blue heels. Her awkward pigeon toed posture betrayed that she was in her early teens. She was no woman - she was a kid.

There in the cool night room, a sick feeling crept from my stomache into my chest. I started to quietly weep in my bed. I turned away so my wife wouldn't wake up. Sometimes you can see something and not really see it until a long time later. And when you finally do, you wish you hadn't. This is the first time I have lived in a neighborhood where there are prostitutes. I am not used to it. I hope I don't get used to it.

I was a middle schooler when I first learned about the glamorous world of prostitution. I learned most things from a movie called Pretty Woman. Among the lessons I learned were:

1) Prostitutes look like Julia Roberts.
2) Prostitutes are well paid and 22 years old
3) Men generally fall in love with prostitutes and then lavish them with gifts and love.
4) Prostitutes keep the money they make.
5) Prostitutes make the decision to sell themselves and can decide to change their lives at any point.
6) Prostitutes are drug free

It turns out that these axioms of the sex trade don't really play out in my neighborhood. Perhaps they use a different business model here in Milwaukee.

My friend has started to do a little "recon" in one neighborhood not too far from my own. She says that on one block, there are a group of young girls who charge five-dollars for sex. They are young high-school aged girls. They operate in the mornings because they've found a unique business model. She tells me that suburban businessmen, on their way to work in downtown Milwaukee, stop along the block, pick out a young girl and have sex with them in their car in a vacant lot across the street. The whole process takes only a few minutes. It's like fast food. Most guys get starbucks on the way into the office. A few rape kids and give them a green piece of paper with the Great Emancipator on the front.

I couldn't believe it. I didn't want to. It was a whole lot of truth all at once.

Saturday Morning Beating

I heard sobbing -wet sniffling, mouth breathing and little groans. It was coming from behind me. It was far away but unmistakeable. I looked and couldn't see anything. Then from the vacant lot, next to a trash-filled alley behind two foreclosed houses, I saw a small figure.

He is limping. Blood rides his panicked breath and almost hits my flannel shirt. He is ten years old and I know him. His left eye is swollen terribly. It is almost shut. I imagine him getting punched. I can see, smell, almost feel the beating. He is making a line for his house where he can feel safe again. I try and grab him and find out what happened. He doesn't say anything. He is afraid. He fears that they will get him worse if he tells someone. He goes inside. His mom isn't home.

Before I heard the sound, I was digging a hole with a young kid from our church. He witnessed the whole interaction. He was wide-eyed and frozen when I got back. "Are you ok?" I asked him. "Yes," he replied. In his world young kids don't get mercilessly beaten. He was in disbelief. "That was scary for me," I admitted to him. "Was it scary for you?" I asked. "Yes." We kept digging quietly thinking about what we just saw.

The kid just wanted to shoot some hoops. There is an old basketball goal in the alley behind one of the boarded up houses. Kids play there because there isn't anywhere else to play. Illegally dumped trash, broken glass, old tires and used oil containers line the court. It is no place anybody should play. If you're an elementary school kid on the block, there is no place safe to play. You just take your chances. Parks are the opposite of safe in the city. There are old guys who talk loud and drink out of brown paper bags. Older kids want to test you and hassel you. It is better to stick close to your house most of the time.

But even sticking close to your house is no guarantee. Later I learned that group of high school boys beat him up for fun because they were bored and there was no one to stop them. The beat him to a pulp, for no reason, on a Saturday morning.

Two hours later, he came out - cleaned up, still red marks on his face that would soon be black and blue. He helped me replace a bad brick in the foundation of the house our church owns. We were chipping it out with a hammer and pry bar. I let him swing hard and wild even though it might hurt my hands. He needed to hit something, to break something, to know that he wasn't always the one getting hit, the victim. He chipped the bad brick out with a few powerful smacks of the hammer. He gave it a real beating.

S'more Community

Last Sunday night I got a hankerin' for S'mores. But I didn't want to have them alone. It is strange how something really fun like a barbeque or a swimming pool is terrible if there aren't others to share it with. S'mores are the same way. They are the type of food that is really an excuse to get together and spend some time talking, laughing and chasing your brother with a flaming marshmallow at the end of a stick. They aren't made for singular consumption. How depressing it would be to make s'mores on your own. I almost did it. But I came to my senses and invited some friends to share them with me.



I initially decided to share my s'mores with the dudes from our church that live a few blocks from my house. But then it occurred to me that maybe some of the kids in their neighborhood might have never had a s'more before. Something about the combination of sugar and fire delicately masked in the inherent responsibility of a stuffy graham cracker was sure to be fun for the kids. So I packed up the marshmallows, wood, firepit, chocolate and graham crackers in the back of my truck and drove the 3 blocks to the community house. We set up the little clay firepit on the concrete walkway in front of the house a few feet away from where we found a hypodermic needle a couple weeks ago and where there is still some gang grafitti on the sidewalk -The Great Outdoors. Kevin got a five gallon bucket of water in order to prevent anyone from burning alive and we got busy building a fire.



Sometimes I overestimate some of the experiences of kids in the city and underestimate others. For instance, most of the littlest kids know the word "foreclosure" and "eviction" but very few have ever seen a wood fire in real life before. None had tasted a s'more. A few of the kids mistook the fire for a grill - others acted like they knew what was going on but most of them didn't. They were acting cool but were really curious about the wood and smoke. One of the kid's moms had to explain that we were having a "real fire" that could hurt you if you touched it. So we roasted marshmallows - in reality most of the kids burned them to crunchy, bitter sweet ash. As the little white pillows sizzled and glowed, the kids, in a joyful panic, blew on the them to extinguish the sugar-fueled flames. When the chocolate all ran out, and it was getting as dark as it gets on a city street, a ring of kids began to form around the fire. They were loud and obnoxious, fun and free. They burned a bunch of sticks even after I told them not to. They all tried to make the funniest animal sounds they knew. One person started a story and the next person around the circle added to it until the plot grew too ridiculous to continue. And we all escaped the neighborhood for about an hour. We were the loudest. We were the coolest. No booming car stereo or big wheels or even goofy obnoxious teenagers could compete with our fire. We were the neighborhood for an hour. We were it. People gawked at us. I only wish we could have seen the stars past the street lights. They're up there even if you can't see them all the time. Glints of crystal brilliance dulled down by the glare of the city. I guess the stars are a lot like the kids. I saw them that night and it was beautiful.

Some Drunks Guys Out Front of my House

I struggle a lot with the idea of community. My church title is "Community Pastor." But sometimes I don't really like people as much as I should. They can be a real pain. Pastors aren't supposed to say stuff like that but all of them feel it.

My wife and I live in a large house in the 'hood. We like to think we bought the house to use as a "ministry tool." We have self-righteous delusions of gradeur about the house. Dreams that it might one day house haitian orphans, hurricane victims and single moms with blacks eyes and five kids. But most of the time, it is just a large heating bill for rooms that we don't use. It's not that we don't want to have more people stay. We just don't want the "wrong people" in our house. It is our space. Our sanctuary. Our belonging.

Yesterday some guys invaded our space. At about 6pm as I was leaving out the front door, a guy in his twenties yelled something incomprehensible at me from a maroon minivan with no license plates in front of my house. It was cold and raining so I went over to his car and asked him what he wanted. Three heavily tattooed men stared back at me from the minivan. A woft of alcohol air immediately annoyed me. One of them was smoking a joint. Their car wouldn't start. I secretly thought to myself "You bums - get off my street. Get out of our community. You are what is wrong with my neighborhood. You are the problem. You are why kids can't walk down their own street and why old people have to buy bars for their windows." But I used my most manly deep voice and asked what was the problem.

They had run over a tree branch and the wires under their car had pulled apart. And there the car came to rest, in front of my house. Like a wounded skunk in our front yard - I didn't want them there and I didn't really want to deal with them. You just want it gone before something bad happens. And the three drunk thugs were enjoying their high directly in front of my house. Master grammarians, they were using the F word as a noun, verb, adjective and participle with vocal inflection in much the same way Papa Smurf might employ the word "smurf." If I called the cops, they would know it was me and I would get retribution. If I didn't call the cops, they might be out there all night. If I fixed their car, I would be helping them to drive drunk. My two next door neighbors were freaking out. "If you help them, they'll rob you. Don't help them." The worse part is that these dudes knew where I lived now. If I made the wrong move, they might break into my house, steal and vandalize it like some guys did to the house next door to mine. So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I left. Sommer and I went and ran some erands and hoped they'd be gone when we came back. Like the levite in the story of the good samaritan, I pretended to be too busy to help. "I can't help you guys. I have to go."

When I returned an hour and a half later, they were still there. In fact, they had called some friends to help them. And profanity filled the air like fireflies on a hot July night. Finally, their friends pushed the van to the next block and they were gone. And I couldn't be happier. They were out of my neighborhood.

"Who was a neighbor to the man?" Jesus asked.

Community is difficult. We might get robbed and vandalized. We open ourselves to be victims. And it would be great it if weren't for the "wrong people" always getting in the way.

"Merci" Mr. Tarantino

I know pastors aren't supposed to watch Quinten Tarantino flicks. We're supposed to wear v-necked sweaters with leather patches on the elbows, sit in wing-back chairs sternly reading manuscripts of 19th century sermons by guys with thick ideas and thicker beards - carefully weighing the theological implications of their systematic discourses. But sometimes the deep truths of God are found not in bound volumes but in the thinly veiled holiness of a movie. Movies are the parables of our time. They are the new stained glass illumining the dusty truths we proclaim in church. You really ought to watch Inglorious Basterds and then read the rest of this entry. Beware - it is disturbing.

The bottom line of the film is that we are the real Inglorious Bastards - it is not Bradd Pitt or the Nazis. It's us. We are the shameful Bastards because we prefer revenge to mercy. As an audience we want a whole roomful of Nazis to burn to death, we want a Nazi Hollocaust. We want a bloodbath. We want lex talionis (eye for an eye). It brings us banal pleasure to imagine people who have betrayed us suffering.

The first thing I noticed in the opening scene was the number of times the French word, "merci" was spoken. It was the only word not translated to English in the subtitles. It would be easy to overlook except it is translated "thank you" one time to clue us into the fact that is wasn't translated before. In the opening subtitles, Tarantino gives us the sublimal message of the film "Mercy."

But the world hates mercy. From the beginning to the end of the film, the characters are bent on revenge for the brutality they've suffered. The Jewish-American characters decide to murder anyone in a Nazi uniform - they then scalp their victims in order to mentally torment the Germans as a form of revenge that breeds fear. The young Jewish woman who runs a movie theater gets revenge for the murder of her family by plotting the death of the Nazis. Everyone gets revenge and the movie is a bloodbath. (Most Christians focus on criticizing the violence but the violence is meant to criticize us.) If we had the power to get bloody revenge, would we?

Are we Inglorious Bastards? Would we like to see a Nazi Hollocaust? Would we like to torture the people who torture us? Do we take pleasure when our enemies suffer? Do we embrace mercy and forgiveness or do we want revenge? But is there a different way to live - a Jesus way? In this way we are called to be the opposite of an inglorious bastard - we are invited to live in the unforced ways of grace as a glorious child.

All Hale Whale Jail

So yesterday a lady came in and gave a workplace trust and respect presentation. I had prepared mentally for this - I would be on my best behavior. No jokes. No snide or sarcastic remarks. Still, I think I offended the trainer but it really wasn't my fault. In this case, the blame rests rather firmly on the Killer whales. But they can't help it. They're natural born killers.

Some of you may be aware of the recent killing perpetrated by an orca at the Orlando Florida Seaworld. Tillikum, the killer whale, murdered his trainer by pulling her in by the pony tail and drowning her. Apparently their warning labels fail to dissuade people from the reality that they might get killed. I am not sure what this means but with a slight re-arranging of the letters in the name Tillikum, you end up with "U Kill Tim." Luckily Lake Michigan is whale free. But it does seem weird that people would be shocked that a killer whale, killed someone. It just makes sense.

For instance, if everyone called a particular guy "Domestic Violence Bob", I am pretty sure I would steer clear of Bob. And I am certain no one would go swimming with Bob or have him entertain a large stadium full of young children and their families. You would probably think: "Man, Bob must have done something to deserve that name." But for some reason with marine mammals, we don't hesitate to put lunch wrapped in a wetsuit into their tank and expect them not to eat us. Tillikum committed his third murder at the end of February. We all suffered the unbearable irony of hearing the public relations people at Seaworld defend the orcas saying, "It isn't in the character of killer whales to kill." And in Florida, where Tillikum could get the death penalty, his sentence was commuted to life at Sea World - a fate worse than death. But back to the training.

Everything was going well. I sat up straight, was respectful, participated and even asked an insightful question about gender differences and body language. But no amount of self-restraint could have prepared me for what came next. It was a video called Whale Done: The Power of Positive Relationships. It featured, you guessed correctly, the killer whales of Seaworld Orlando. The mantra of the video between every segment was, "If you can learn to trust a Killer Whale, you can learn to build trust and respect in the workplace." The silence of my disbelief prefaced any observable reaction. The video was a management video - about how you could control employees in the same way the trainers control the killer whales at sea world. I began to wonder if the woman I supervise would ever murder me during a routine updating of the database. The video continued to talk about how the whales felt respected so they performed. I couldn't believe what I was watching.

And then it happened. Like a submarine under extreme deep sea pressure, I sprung a leak. Air shot out of my notrils and I made a snorting noise. I tried to hold my mouth so I wouldn't spring more leaks but nothing could be done - the ship was sinking. And then I started laughing muffled and uncontrollably. Luckily I was in the back on the room. A couple people looked back and apparently they too felt the giggles. The guy next to me started laughing and rocking back and forth in his chair. One of my other co-workers blurted out a warning to one of the sea world trainers in the video as the whale jumped out of the tank, "Look Out!" Soon the room was aroar in a disrespectful and raucous laughter. It was just too ridiculous. The lady giving the presentation looked dismayed - these whales had turned on her. They were all laughing at her presentation on respect. We couldn't help it. We were not made for cubicles and presentations on respect. We were meant for laughter.

I guess there are certain things that we just can't help. For killer whales, it's murder. For guys like me it's uncontrollable laughter at things ubsurd.

You can't keep people in a tank when they were meant for something bigger. They might be cool for a long time, even years. But sooner or later, they want to break free, laugh and dance and snort. At the end of the day, I couldn't help but think the orcas of seaworld had brought us closer. The presentation wasn't a total loss. So to the orcas and to the downcast facilitor. I must tip my hat and exclaim for the world to hear, "Whale Done!"