Allowing for the possibility that God may be at work in both my community and TBN is not the same as conceding that TBN’s theology and methods are sound. When I realized this, it disturbed me, but I haven’t been able to shake the idea. I wrote once in a prayer, “Dear God, your work in the world is always done by sinners, or else it would never get done; help us to realize this and practice the grace and forgiveness you first gave us.” But when I was talking about sinners in that case, it was just the broken beautiful people like myself and the others in my community, not my theological “other.” Rather than fortifying my theological and ecclesiastical entrenchment, the experience of writing this book has strangely done the opposite. While maintaining that the prosperity gospel, the rapture, and Christian Zionism (all TBN fare) are up there with the selling of indulgences and the existence of purgatory as the stinkiest Christian ideas in history, I still must admit that God’s redeeming work in the world does not happen only when we get all the theology and method right. As much as I hate to admit it, our theology, even when it’s “good” theology (like mine, seriously it’s so good; just ask me) does not save me from myself. One of the unexpected results of this project for me personally is that, surprisingly enough, I have developed a new friendship with an evangelical pastor. If you told me a year ago that this would happen, I’d say it would only be a sign of the end times, but there you go. We do not see eye to eye theologically, and likely we never will, but that’s not the point. What my friend and I get by being in a relationship is an exposure to that which we do not get from our own traditions, and there is a lot missing on both ends. Sometimes the body of Christ is so busy trying to pretend that our particular form of Christianity is the most faithful, or the most biblical, or the most liberating (I include myself here) that we don’t bother taking advantage of each other’s traditions to help fill the inevitable holes in our own.
♦♦♦
Now might be a good time to explain something. I did this whole thing twice, not by choice but by necessity. On a Friday-Saturday last August I sat in my living room with about twenty-five of my friends (not all at once) and watched twenty-four hours of TBN (all at once) for this book. During the twenty-four hours I recorded the conversations onto my laptop and the twenty-four hours of TBN programming onto a digital video recorder in my cable box. (We actually had to get cable so I could do this project). Nine days later the hard drive on my DVR died. As in gone. Poof. Nothing. If you had come by my house that day you would likely have found me on the floor of my bedroom crying like a spanked child. After Kübler-Rossing my way through the stages of grief, denying the recording was gone, magically thinking maybe it had been erased due to a buildup of unconfessed sin on my part, and pleading with the cable company, my sweet editor suggested maybe I should just do it again. Some of my viewing friends from round one couldn’t do round two, but some new folks could. The new date: November 2, 2007. I would have loved to schedule it sooner, but at the time I was commuting from St. Paul, Minnesota, to my home in Denver and my options were limited.
Putting together the guest list proved easier than I anticipated; all of the guests from round one whose schedules allowed agreed to come back, God bless ‘em. I filled in the time slots with as random a mix of people as I could muster: Bible scholars, Lutheran pastors, a couple of Jews, a gay Episcopal priest, a lesbian Unitarian, a stand-up comic turned Methodist minister, my non-Christian ex-boyfriend, my evangelical parents, my old preaching professor, my eight-year-old daughter, and three people I had never met until they came to my house to watch some televangelism. Twenty-nine people in all. These are simply people in my life and do not even vaguely represent America, Christianity in general, the TBN audience, the Denver populace, or any other desirable cross-section. They are just my friends (well, except those three I’d never met before, but they’re friends now).
♦♦♦
The night before I try to think of all the details. I stock the house with snacks and beer, set up the DVR to record for twenty-four hours, talk my parents into providing a back-up recording, set my alarm, set up my computer and microphone, place the guest list next to the computer, recheck that I set my alarm, and then pray. Now all I need is a decent night’s sleep.
The Stranger
(Seriously, my Savior would not wear bangs) 5:00 a.m.
In defeat I turn off the alarm, which has been rendered useless due to the fact that I am already awake and tragically have been for the past two and a half hours. I awoke at 2:00 a.m. thinking, “If you don’t go back to sleep you’re screwed tomorrow,” which produced just enough adrenaline to keep me awake.
Trying not to wake my husband, Matthew, I get out of bed to face the twenty-four straight hours of Trinity Broadcasting Network. Again.
So here I am, and there just isn’t enough coffee in the whole world. My friends Jay and Annie, who’ll be watching the 5:30 a.m. show with me, are asleep in the guest room downstairs, but I’ve decided I need to start this day on my own.
Coffee. Shower. Coffee. Pray. Coffee. Turn on the TV.
♦♦♦
Mysterious, who could this Stranger be? I wonder.
This show appears to be a made-for-TBN drama. We open on an African American diner. Chaos is swirling around this busy breakfast joint with the requisite cranky floor manager and flirty waitress. In walks a white man with an insidious smile and long, chlorine-damaged blond hair with, and I couldn’t make this up, bangs. Is it really possible that a guy who looks like a creepy middle-aged yoga teacher from Boulder, Colorado, could be the second person of the Trinity? Well, maybe Jesus would wear a white V-neck sweater.
The flirty waitress (Mary) sits down with the Stranger, who is on his third or fourth cup of coffee (so he’s clearly not the Mormon Jesus) and tells him how the diner used to belong to their dad before he died, but now she and her sister, the cranky floor manager, are left to run the place. She’s distressed about the fact that unlike their dad, her sister opens the diner on Sunday to get the church crowd. She tells the Stranger that while she never misses church and she prays a lot, she has a lot of questions. “I wish Jesus would just come down and answer a few questions for me.”
The Stranger: “Really? What would you ask him?” The camera pans down to a closeup of his crucifixion-scarred wrists.
“I’d ask him why Daddy had to die so suddenly and why Martha’s fiancé moved away and never came back, and why I had to quit school and sling hash for two-dollar tips.” I’d have to add something about why Growing Pains lasted seven full seasons on ABC, but that’s just me.
The Stranger: “No discipline seems pleasant, but painful But later
it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” It’s hard to believe that Jesus would go the “redemptive suffering” route. Didn’t he go through that so we wouldn’t have to? Still, the most difficult disbelief to suspend is that my Lord and savior would have bangs.
Their conversation is interrupted by Martha — “Excuse me,” sarcastically to Mary. “Are we closed now? Those lunch menus aren’t going to put themselves out.” Oh my gosh. I get it now, Martha and Mary. Just like the gospel narratives about Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus. This family was close friends of Jesus, and the story goes that one day Mary was hanging out with the guys listening to Jesus when her sister, Martha, started to passive aggressively slam dishes around in the kitchen to show how hard she was working in comparison to her slacker sister. When the passive thing didn’t work, she implored Jesus to rebuke Mary for not helping out more. He, of course, told Martha to chill out. So this is a modern retelling of that story. I actually like the idea and, I almost hate to say it, other than creepy-Jesus, it’s not too bad.
Mary sits in Jesus’ booth again and after telling him charming childhood stories about how her daddy never turned away homeless folks from the diner but gave each one a sandwich and a cup of coffee, she confesses that Martha isn’t quite so generous. Martha predictably interrupts their conversation to task Mary with filling