The Box Pop

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I knew I was in danger when I started this series of posts because writing about lyrics is like trying to collect a jar of smoke – You can look really stupid and invariably when you get your jar home it isn’t that impressive anyway.

And so I’ve been mulling on this one for a while. Because the obvious place to conclude is with Ben Folds’ Rocking the Suburbs album with the song Not the Same. The difficulty is that this song has caused people who have tried to analyse his work some of the most confusion. What’s actually happening through the ballad? Did he become a pastor? What’s the deal with the waterslide?

I know it’s highly likely that I’ll end up looking like an idiot talking through these questions but here we go.

In the couple of times that I’ve seen Folds play live he’s told us that this is actually based on a real guy he knew. He went to a party that Folds did and got high on acid, climbed into a tree-house and didn’t come down until the next day. But when he did come down he had become a ‘born again’ Christian.

In fact this guy became a pastor. A pentecostal pastor. His church got huge, but it wasn’t big just beause he was an amazing preacher. He set up a quasi-amusement park at his Church (he said at one of his shows it was something like this).

The ‘someone died – on the water-slide’ line was a reference to… someone actually dying at this guys church and it really signaling the end of this guys ministry. Folds commented “I figure if he had just been preaching instead of installing water-slides perhaps he wouldn’t have been in that mess.”

I think there are some real treasures here in this song.

From the outside Folds can see where this guy goes wrong. The pressing refrain of the song is “and you were not the same after that”. This isn’t just a line, Folds is signaling transitions in this guys life.

1. He climbs a tree and after that he isn’t the same.
2. He becomes a Christian and after that he isn’t the same.
3. He becomes a pastor who is eventually too well respected (idolised!) by his people and he isn’t the same after that.
4. He thinks too highly of himself and buys lots of stuff and he isn’t the same after that.
5. A tragedy happens at his Church which signals his downfall and he isn’t the same after that.

As someone who is studying at the moment so I can work in ministry there’s a massive lesson here for me. When did this guy’s problems start? Folds’ might answer “when he became a Christian”. But the real worry for me is at point 3, where after ‘taking the word and makin’ it heard’ he allowed himself to be immortalised in the eyes of his people. Paul, one of the main writers of the New Testament was pretty quick to quash this kind of pride. In the church in Corinth liked to do this with their leaders. Paul wont have a bar of it insisting that it isn’t with eloquence that he came but humility and anyway – God gives the growth.

Moreover – I am terrified by the line “you bought it all”. This may be a reference to the prosperity theology that grips so much of the church, but it might also just be a reference to this man defaulting back to materialism. I don’t think I’m at risk of preaching the prosperity gospel, but I am at risk of forgetting the gospel because I want a new toy more than I want relationship with Jesus.

Once again Folds taps into something in this song. He can see the failings of the church and we who are Christians need to know that our failings are visible and not just to our family or our church but to people who aren’t believers.

But there is something about that line. I know Folds meant it as an insult – But if there is one thing that I would like people to say about my life, is that after I met Jesus, I was not the same.

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I have an apology to make to any people who don’t identify themselves as Christians who are reading this right now. Sometimes Christians are really patronising and think that they know you better than you do. I’m really sorry about that.

This was brought home to me the first time I heard the song Mess from the album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. The chorus makes this astonishing claim:

No I don’t believe in God

So I can’t be saved

All alone as I’ve learned to be

In this mess that I have made.

The thing that blows me away about this is that this is the way the Bible describes our situation apart from God. In the letter to the church in Ephesus Paul puts this just as succinctly. It makes sense really when you think about it. If God is the source of life and we cut ourselves off from God then we’re in trouble! We are all truly alone in our mess.

But Paul doesn’t end his prognosis where Folds’ does. Not “believing in God” is only half the problem. I could believe that God exists and still know that I have cut myself off from him and he is mad with me.

By rights the song could read:

I believe in God

Yet I can’t be saved

All alone as I’ve learned to be

In this mess this I have made.

We all reject God and so God would be totally just to reject us. But he doesn’t. Because of his mercy (or grace) he saves not because we’re good enough or because we’re religious enough or neat enough or rich enough but because of his mercy towards us through Jesus. Interested?

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I don’t think you could start considering the theology of Folds’ music without beginning with Jesusland, originally on the Songs for Silverman album and covered on the Ben Folds Presents: University a Cappella! album.

The song takes the listener on a journey through the streets of the American South imagining that Jesus came and visited the Bible belt.

Folds’ spends the bulk of the song critiquing the southern-US culture. Folds takes the opportunity to take pot shots at the middle-class, American lifestyle, illustrating that, for many people Christianity is more of wardrobe addition rather than a heart transplant.

But it’s Folds’ Jesus that captures my attention the most. 1. Jesus is presented as a wandering loner, someone dismayed by the culture around him – a culture that claims to give him honour. 2. Folds’ Jesus is something akin to a “gentle Jesus – meek and mild”. He’s a loner who doesn’t understand how things work (trying to sleep on someone’s front lawn, but the security light comes on).

Most Bible believing Christians would immediately spot the problems with this second point, but leaving this to one side I think the first point holds water. In fact the amazing thing about Folds’ insight here is that this is what it was like when Jesus actually came into the world. Jesus was born into a society of religious people. People who honoured God with their lips. Who diligently studied the scriptures. Who travelled around looking for converts.

In fact if you read the Gospels (and if you haven’t, you should) one of the overwhelming themes is that all the signs pointed to Jesus being the One God’s people should have expected, but they refused to see it. It was only the uninitiated, the outsiders, invalids, the half-casts and the ill-reputed who knew there was something more to Jesus when he walked with us.

Folds’ also seems to be concerned that we live in a society that twists Jesus’ words. Once again, this was also a first century problem. God had given the nation of Israel the law, which was to help God’s people stand out as belonging to him. The religious leaders then took this law and tweeked it, so that rather than building a society that was set apart for God, it lined their wallets.

So I guess with this whole discussion here I’m trying to show that Folds’ is on the money. If Jesus were to come back today (that is in the way the song describes, not in the way he actually will) he would seem alien – even in Christianised societies. Moreover, His message of sins forgiven and reconciled relationship with God without us having to work for it would enrage us and we’d kill him all over.

What Jesusland helpfully reminds us is that the trappings of religion and the fakeness of consumer-Christianity are a perennial problem that we’ve got to constantly be weeding out of Christianity.