Church Voices

Townes Van Zandt is one of my favorite singer/songwriters and I’ve been on a kick listening to him recently. One of his songs, Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold, is about a high stakes poker game told from the point of view of the cards who, led by the King of Clubs try to bring Mr. Mudd to ruin.

While I like the song I’m not much of a poker player and so while I understood how the song ends, I didn’t really get how the individual hands played out. So I went in search of much knowledge, which I found.

In the song, what turns the day against Mr. Gold (and against most of the deck of cards) is the Queen of Diamond’s mercy that she feels because she’s lost her son the Jack of Diamonds.

The diamond Queen saw Mudd’s ordeal;
began to think of her long lost son,
Fell to her knees with a mother’s mercy;
Prayed to the angels, everyone.

There’s also references made to the “outlaw Jack of Diamonds” earlier in the song.

As I read through the analysis offered by the poetic card players at the previous link I was struck by how long it took for them to correctly interpret this lyric:

When the outlaw in the heavenly hall turned out to be her wanderin’ boy.

There was confusion.

There was speculation.

And finally there was clarity.

The confusion and speculation came because the card players initial reaction was to interpret this lyric in terms of the rules of stud poker. They put forward speculation that it was a joker, which would be a wild card. The problem is, if Mr Mudd has a wild card then he’s showing 4 aces to Mr Gold’s 4 kings, and there’s no way that Mr Gold would continue the game, he’d simply fold and the game would continue. But if “her wandering boy” is the Jack of Diamonds then Mr Gold is going to play the odds and continue to bet because his four kings is going to beat three aces and a Jack of Diamonds.

“Her wandering boy” isn’t a reference to cards. Its a reference to the raw humanity of a mother who is missing a lost son. It wasn’t until the interpreters put down the rule book and culture of poker playing and see what the song actually described through the lens of human experience that they were able to really see the story that Van Zandt is telling.

I think we sometimes do the same with scripture. When we read a story of a Roman soldier with a dying servant, or a Samaritan at well, or a gentile woman with a demon possessed daughter and we miss the motivations and actions of these people are driven by the raw emotions common to humanity. Every time a preacher or teacher says something like “in the original language” or “in their culture” to explain away* an odd, or difficult reaction we beat a little of the humanity out of the scriptures. Even worse, we can miss entirely the story being told, and end up with a story that has been distorted and warped out of shape.

For example, in the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman in which a gentile woman living in a gentile place comes to a Jewish Rabbi for help we often see taught here that this is a story about the faith of this woman. And, to a certain extent, it is. But we miss something if that’s all we come away with.

This is a story that is at least as much about desperation as it is about faith.

A woman, raised to worship pagan gods comes to a Rabbi of the living God for help. This is a desperate woman turning her back on what she was raised to believe to find help from a man who was an ethnic member of a people her people had likely warred against in the past.

That’s desperation.

And we miss that common emotion that resonates across centuries and culture if our goal is to hammer this story into a pre-fabricated, injection molded template of Prozac tainted scripture. But if we let her desperation echo across the years to our churches today, maybe we’ll see that churches should be places for the desperate.

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