Reproduction

Part I
Part II
Part III

I was going to write one long post, but I saw as I wrote it that it really is a series.; so be looking for additional posts on this topic in the next week. I suppose my dry spell is coming to an end as I begin to see the future and hope again.

Did you ever see Grease II? The ill-fated and overwhelmingly dumb sequel to one of the greatest musicals ever? Starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Maxwell Caulfield? It's OK if you don't want to admit that you've seen it. Just think it to yourself.

In that movie there was a song called 'Reproduction'. One of the choruses goes like this:

"Reproduction, reproduction!
Put your pollen tube to work.
Reproduction, reproduction!
Make my stamen go berserk.
Reproduction!
I don't think they even know what a pistil is!
I got your pistil right here...
Where does the pollen go?"

For those who don't know, in the film the song is spurred by a school lesson in plant reproduction, but it quickly dissolves in to a raunchy and tasteless diatribe about human sexuality. Unfortunately this is a very catchy tune and comes to mind from time to time, even against my will, and even though I haven't seen the movie in over 20 years. Lord take me if I ever venture to watch it again.

However, I think there is more than one analogy here. The first being obvious...in all of film history, sequels rarely do well. Sometimes they come close to matching the original, but more often they are tired at best and abominable at worst. Something new attempts to play upon the success of the old thing, and fails.

For those who don't know, we have been working on our kitchen. We decided we wanted a tile floor, which meant tearing up all the old layers of vinyl. Layer after layer of vinyl, plywood and mold came up, all they way to the subfloor. We could have stopped after just a layer or two, just enough that the tile would be level with the carpet in the other room. But we knew it wouldn't have turned out well and we decided to go all the way, to strip it down and start over. The only thing left was the foundation of the floor, the joists. Then we built up again from there.

In the forests there is something called a nurse log. That is a tree which has died and fallen on the forest floor is rotting, and in the process it is hosting the growth of ferns and other plants. From time to time a tree will begin to grow on a nurse log, which works well for awhile. But eventually as the nurse log rots away from underneath the roots of the new tree, and we are left with a tree who's roots are supported by nothing but air for several feet. While these new trees can survive for a long time this way, they are far more prone to toppling in a wind or ice storm than other trees.

How can we expect to reproduce something well on the carcass of the old thing? How can we take the existing idea of church and turn it into something organic and life giving if we are still just doing the old thing with a different look? In Christianity, I do not believe we can grow something new on the nurse log of the old way of doing church. We can, but we will not end up with something stable and healthy and long-lasting.

The other analogy I see is this: Something good can easily evolve into something bad, simply because we are selfish human beings. We have our own motives for things, we want what we want. So we still want church to be something to meet our needs (i.e. human sexuality) rather than it being a process by which something new is constantly being created (i.e. reproduction in the plant world).

How can we begin to see church as something by which we create new life, rather that something that gives us pleasure for the sake of it?