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leonard sweet :: Log On!
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Log On! Leonard I. Sweet
When Jesus called his first followers, he first saw what
people were doing, how they were making a living, and
then spoke to them using their language. For example,
Jesus saw two brothers fishing. He called to Simon and
Andrew and said, "Come with me; follow me and I will
make you fishers of men." (Matt. 4:18-19)
If Jesus were here today, what would he say? Not many
people are making a living fishing. I believe Jesus
would once again see what people are doing, how they are
making their living, and use the language of this
culture to invite them to be his disciples.
If Jesus were here today, he would say "Log On!"
Not "Click on." Make a commitment. Put your name and
money where your life is. "Log on! Log on to me." That is
the way to log on to life, and log on to the future.
"Put your faith in me," Jesus says. This doesn't mean
that you've got everything figured out. But it does mean
that you've committed to living, you've committing to
loving, you've committed to acting, you are committed to
forgiving . . . even before you figure it all out.
Can the church "log on" to ministry in 21-C? And if it
does, what are the features of a logged-on life, a
logged-on ministry, a logged-on church?
What do you find when you log on--to postmodern culture,
to the Internet, to the "real"?
You find cockroaches. That is right. Wherever you look,
you find cockroaches.
Cockroaches are everywhere, literally and figuratively.
They both disgust and delight postmodern culture. In the
modern world, to find the cockroach in either high or
low culture you had to hunt down Aesop's Fable "The
Grasshopper and the Cockroach."
No longer. Two of the greatest writers of the 20th
century both have written classic accounts of the
cockroach. Franz Kafka wrote a story about a man who
woke up and found he was a cockroach--The Metamorphosis.
Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector is best work contains a
classic account of an encounter with a cockroach called
The Passion According to G.H., recently translated from
the Portuguese (my favorite section is on p. 40). 1
You can't go to the movies in the 90s without insects,
especially cockroaches: CONSPIRACY THEORY, ERASER, THE
ROCK, STORM TROOPERS, STRIPTEASE, A. S. Byatt's ANGELS
AND INSECTS. Pixar Animation Studios?second film in its
partnership with Disney--their first was Toy Story--is
code named "BUGS." MTV's first movie featured a cast of
cockroaches (JOE'S APARTMENT). The entire movie Mimic is
based on giant cockroaches taking over the world.
You can't watch television without hearing about
cockroaches--in an interview with Cher, she boasts
"After a nuclear holocaust, there will be cockroaches
and Cher." You can't read newspapers without front pages
being devoted to article on roaches (USA Today 15 July
1996). You can't play CD-ROM games without cockroaches.
"Bad Mojo," a favorite CD-ROM game for busters, is also
known as "The Roach Game" since it revolves around
attempts to "crawl your way back to the human you once
were."
Some of the most visited sites on-line are dedicated to
cockroaches. There is the New Jersey-sponsored (why New
Jersey?) Cockroach World
(http://www.nj.com/yucky/roaches/index.html); there is the
"Yuckiest Site on the
Internet"(http://www.nj.com/yucky); there is the "Most
Obnoxious Site on the Web"--Crazy Larry's Roach Ranch in
Worm World (http://www.jn.com/yucky/worm/). Yahoo!
Internet Life rated the Web page for Joe's Apartment
(www.joseapt.com) the "funniest, the subtlest (and
therefore best) movie promo page we have seen yet." ROL
(Roach Online) 2 [www.joesapt.com/rol.html) parodies net
luminaries.
What is going on? Cockroaches are part of the
phytophagous species of insects, which include 5000
species of cockroaches worldwide. In a world where, by
1900 one species became extinct every year, by 1990 one
species became extinct every five hours, and by 2000
some estimate one species will become extinct every 20
minutes: these "poison pellets" on legs that can give
you asthma, boils, abscesses, diarrhea, dysentery,
gastroenteritis, leprosy, lesions, typhoid fever,
urinary tract infections and bubonic plague, these
filthy creatures called cockroaches inherit the earth.
Among the oldest fossil insects, this most ancient of
pests was here from the beginning. It looks like it will
be here at the end with no one to pest.
Cockroaches are virtually indestructible. The cockroach
is the canary of planet Earth. The canary tells us when
humans can't survive any longer. Cockroaches tell us
when life can't survive any longer.
Cockroaches are virtually everywhere. If there are three
quarters of a ton of termites for each human being on
earth, I would hesitate to guess how many tons of
cockroaches there are for each one of us. One of the
questions I am going to ask Noah when I get the chance
is why when he had the chance didn't he swat those two
mosquitoes and stomp those two cockroaches like Mel
Gibson did in Conspiracy Theory. One is reduced to
wondering: Was the "Big Bang" something God did to try
to kill roaches?
Even America's #1 merchant of cockroach death, Austin
Frishman, admits defeat. The insect world's George
Patton who has traveled the world in his war against
roaches, racking up 2 million frequent flier miles, with
nine books under his belt to his credit, 3 concludes
that they are unbeatable.
You can't catch them--these speedy little critters run
up to three miles an hour, as clocked in yearly Ivy
League races.
You can't sneak up on them--one giant nerve connects
their tails to their heads, which alerts them to danger
from behind.
You can't trap them--they have 18 knees and breathe
through their sides--not their noses; their mouths work
sideways--try it.
You can't starve them--they'll eat about anything (dog
food and toothpaste being their two favorite
delicacies); they can go without eating for a month, and
an empty Coke can in a recycling bin has enough
nourishment and fluid to fuel a roach for weeks.
You can't poison them--roaches fed highly toxic
carcinogens die of old age; a single female roach can
birth as many as 44,000 babies; a single male can spawn
400,000 descendants in a single year.
You can't step on them--they can live a week without
their heads, and they puff back to life after you squash
their skeleton.
You can't freeze them--they simply thaw out and keep on
going. 4
About the only thing you can do with them is eat them.
In fact, cockroaches have been used in sauces,
condiments and appetizers since early antiquity.
You've never eaten a cockroach? Ever eaten a lobster?
Turn a cockroach upside down. If you can't find a two,
three, four or even five inch roach, spend the $1 to buy
one from your local biological supply company. Remove
its foot-long wingspan (if it's a male), and what do you
see? What does it look like? A crustacean is nothing
more than a non-insect arthropod (i.e. an ocean
cockroach). Both lobsters and cockroaches wear their
skeletons on the outside of their bodies; if you see a
white cockroach, it has just shed its skeleton; they
bleed white blood. Now you know why the Hebrew
Scriptures outlaw the eating of lobsters.
We might as well admit defeat. We are not going to rid
the world of cockroaches. If we can't beat them, then
let's at least deal with them. Perhaps they have
something to teach us. At least Agur in Proverbs
30:24-28 thought so. In Agur's "least-of-these"
four-point meditation, the only poetry outside of Psalms
that is included in the poetry anthology specially
selected for teenagers called Four Winds, 5 he argues
that the locust is one of "Four things on earth [that]
are small, yet they are extremely wise." A relative of
the grasshopper, what locusts were to the ancient
Israelites, cockroaches are to us.
What might the cockroach teach us about a logged-on
ministry? Might it be something as elementary, but
elemental, as this: a logged-on church has to deal with
a lot of unpleasantries, uncomfortableness, and
queasiness if it is to "serve the present age, our
calling to fulfil" (Charles Wesley).
There is the wonderful story of the kid who all was the
proverbial slob. No matter what threats were made, or
carrots dangled to get him to clean up his room "Now!,"
nothing worked. After high school, he joined the
Marines. On leave after basic training, his father asked
him what he had learned so far: "Well, Dad, I learned
what NOW!?means."
A logged-on church knows the meaning of "NOW." NOW is
the accepted time; NOW is the day of salvation. In
Jesus?words to his disciples, "Your Time is NOW." (John
7:6b). Not the "NOW" we wish we had, but the "NOW" that
we actually have. Not the world-without-cockroaches we
would prefer, but the cockroach world we actually have.
A logged-on ministry has the willpower of the NOW.
Our kids have a saying: "Deal With It, Get Over It, Or
Get Help."
One can't log-on to postmodern ministry without getting
one's hands dirty in the yuck and muck of the NOW. To
build the body up, we've got to break the walls down,
bridge the gaps across, and bring the poles together.
All that deconstruction and construction work scatters
cockroaches everywhere.
Are you willing to get your hands dirty in the moral
muck and yuck of our day--its racism, its sexism, its
technism, its consumerism, its addictions (violence,
drugs, work)? Princess Diana was killed by two of the
driving forces of postmodern culture: media and drugs.
Can we design ministries that approach this muck and
yuck redemptively?
There is a whole of postmodern culture I don't like. If
truth be told, this is not the world I would have chosen
to do ministry in. Guess what, Sweet? "Get Over It." Get
a ministry for the cockroach-infested world you actually
have, not the cockroach-free world you'd rather have. In
fact, we might even learn something from researchers at
Tsukuba University in Japan, who have implanted
cockroaches with biorobotic devices that allow
scientists to control the pests?movements. "The
potential applications of this work for mankind could be
immense," says Isao Shimoyama, one of the Japanese
researchers. 6
Nothing as immense as what a truly logged-on ministry
could do to help invent and prevent this postmodern
future.
--Leonard I. Sweet
ENDNOTES
1. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H.
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 40.
2. Yahoo! Internet Life, September 1996, 15.
3. Austin Frishman and Arthur P. Schwartz, The Cockroach
Combat Manual (NY: Morrow, 1980).
4. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H.
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 40.
5. Four Winds, comp. Jean Edwards (Great Neck, NY:
Granger Book, 1939), I, 105. The third volume has one
other selection--the Saul and David exchange.
6. Newsweek, 2 January 1997, 17.
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