In Acts 9:43 we’re told that while Peter was on an itinerant ministry tour, he stayed for “many days” in Joppa with a tanner (i.e. someone who tanned hides and prepared them into leather), a tanner named Simon. This is just an offhand line, but it’s really interesting to me, because a tanner, of course, handled animal carcasses (which is where the hides came from), and according to Jewish Law at the time, anyone who handled a dead body was unclean; and so culturally, and traditionally, being a tanner was considered an unclean profession. We know from 10:14 that Peter is quite particular about Jewish cleanliness laws (nothing unclean has ever passed his lips, he says), and yet here we see him lodging at the home of an unclean tanner, of all people. God, of course, is about to explode his whole notion of cleanliness and uncleanness, by sending (gasp) some non-Jewish Gentiles to him, requesting an audience, but in a way, this has already begun when he came under Simon the Tanner’s roof. God, it turns out, does not share our concerns when it comes to keeping ourselves safely in our comfort zones, is my point. As uncomfortable as it may have made Peter to be surrounded by so much “ritual uncleanness” (according to Jewish tradition), this is precisely where serving God has brought him, his own hang ups about human defined comfort zones be damned. Where might we find ourselves serving God, if we shared the same indifference about our comfort zones, I wonder?
And then comes the interesting line: then, it says, “the church throughout Galilee and Samaria enjoyed peace.” I say it gets me thinking, because Paul’s clearly a rabble-rouser for Jesus, and once they finally ship him off to Tarsus, that’s when the church experiences peace. But, of course, Paul’s more than just a rabble-rouser, he’s also a world-shaker for Jesus, and though his ministry might ruffle feathers (even some of his fellow Christian feathers), God intends to rock the foundations of the Roman Empire through him.
I’m pointing that out because sometimes in church life (or even our own individual discipleship), the people who disrupt our peace are the ones God most uses to move us, shake us and form us. We need the rabble rousers, is my point, even though it’s not always fun to have the rabble roused; and sometimes the worst thing we can do is to rest in a false, complacent kind of peace. And as difficult as it sometimes is, still I'm thankful to God for the rabble-rousers he’s used in my life and ministry, and even (tremulously) praying that he’ll send more my way.
Early on in this theological analysis of Bruce Springsteen’s music, I shared how I was never really much of a Springsteen fan growing up. In that post, I explained how it was the song “Born in the USA,” in particular, that kept me from boarding the train bound for the Springsteen fandom.
I was 10 years old when “Born in the USA” “went nuclear” (as Spirngsteen puts it in his autobiography), and it’s maybe to be expected that this angry heart-cry of a down-and-out Vietnam vet, shaking his fist at a nation that took from him everything and offered him nothing in return, would be lost on a 10-year-old boy. Add to this the fact that I’m Canadian, and the best I could make of Springsteen’s passionately bellowed verses was a naïve ode to the good-ol’-U-S-of-A, a sentiment that I sort of prided myself on not being able to relate to. Like Ronald Regan, who once used “Born in the USA” as a campaign song, I entirely missed the point of this politically charged bray of protest against the Vietnam Draft and its aftermath. Springsteen himself called “Born in the USA” one of his greatest and most misunderstood pieces of music, and at ten years old, I was one of the misunderstanders.
As an adult I’ve come to appreciate the song. Even though it’s still not anything I’ve ever sung in the shower (and truth be told, I find that synth hook annoyingly repetitive), I can relate to its passionate desire for roots and rootedness, for community and belonging, for a shalom-oriented re-weaving of the social fabric. The singer in “Born” is more like an estranged son, clinging to a father who’s disowned him and refusing to scorn his birthright, than he is like some red-ball-cap-wearing jingoist, blindly chanting “Make America Great Again!” at some campaign rally or other. Inasmuch as this need for rootedness, this ache for community, this longing for a shalom-oriented rend in the status quo is a universal experience, and not just a sentiment made in the USA, it is something that can and should resonate with every human heart, regardless of where it was born.
In commenting on “Born in the USA,” Springsteen has said, “It was a GI blues, the verses an accounting, the choruses a declaration of the one sure thing that could not be denied … birthplace. Birthplace, and the right to all of the blood, confusion, blessings and grace that comes with it. Having paid body and soul, you have earned, many times over, the right to claim and shape your piece of home ground."
Here we get intimations of the theological meaning of a song like “Born in the USA,” I think, and the many other songs in the Springsteen canon that convey the same attachment to one’s “home ground,” and one’s right to “claim and shape” a piece of it. Songs like “My Hometown,” “American Skin,” “My City of Ruins,” “Death to my Hometown,” though none of them so bluntly as “Born in the USA,” all ring with the same root note: that the place one calls home is worth loving and celebrating and grieving with and agonizing over, simply because it is home. As screwed up as it sometimes is—and to be clear no one’s hometown isn’t screwed up, when you really get to know it—but as screwed up as it is, that only makes it all the more worth the agony.
I’m suggesting this as the theological meaning of “Born in the USA”—that one’s home ground is worth all the heartache it takes to love it—because it is certainly the kind of sentiment that a Christian with a robust understanding of the incarnation of Jesus Christ would take to heart. We know, of course, that the incarnation is about the Creator’s passionate commitment to this world; but often, I think, Christians read this in the abstract. God may have loved “the world” as a general construct, but he didn’t necessarily love this or that specific neighbourhood in the world, did he? My home town, your street corner, this or that stretch of grass?
In Jesus, the Promised Land is now the promised hope of New Creation, healed and renewed and coming soon to a theatre near you.
Through the incarnation, then, God has demonstrated a passion for the welfare of “my hometown” far deeper and purer and more profound than any Springsteen song could ever convey. And through the incarnation he calls us to share that passion: to love our various strips of “home ground”—my street, my neighbourhood, my corner of the globe—with the redemptive love of Jesus, and then get to work re-weaving the social fabric into a beautiful tapestry of Shalom.
This is why, though it’s unlikely I’ll ever sing it in the shower, nevertheless I’ve come to appreciate Springsteen’s greatest and most misunderstood piece of music: because it reminds me of something that the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt: that there’s no corner of the Creator’s world that isn’t worth all the agony and heartache, the blood, sweat and tears it costs to love it well.
The other day I was reading the story of Stephen in the book of Acts, and I was struck by the description of Stephen at his trial before the Sanhedrin. Stephen is famous among Bible Trivia buffs for being the first believer to be martyred for his faith, and in Act 6:15, he’s about to give the incendiary sermon that will lead to his summary execution. But right before he speaks, it says, “All who were sitting [there] looked intently at Stephen, and they saw that his face was like the face of an angel.” Such a strange and yet powerful image: in giving his testimony for Jesus—the testimony that will cost him his life—Stephen was so filled with the glory of God that it shone in his face. Shone so clearly, mind you, that it was like the face of an angel to his interrogators. It got me thinking: does my witness for Jesus—my testimony to his love, his grace, his mercy, his truth—does it shine in my face with anywhere even near that kind of a heavenly radiance, when I’m sharing it? And how can I be so filled with His Spirit, like Stephen, that it might?