God is, afterall, part Pentecostal

Editor’s Note: We continue our look at the people’s view of Eschatology. If you’ve missed the previous posts, click here.

PASTOR TIGGER

 Donald Miller convinced an entire generation that God prefers jazz. I mean no disrespect to Don but I’m pretty sure that God is a Blues man. Consider that Muddy Waters often sang of being broke, hungry and imprisoned. Or Muddy’s admonishment that we ought live and think so God can use us anywhere, anytime. Perhaps Muddy Waters was channeling the Apostle Paul, if you believe that sort of thing.

Miller might be right. Perhaps God prefers jazz …some of the time. They don’t call them the New Orleans Saints for nothing, but there are times when God needs a Hoochie-Coochie tune. God, is after all, part Pentecostal. 

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Blues Alley was not on my mind that Monday morning when I pulled out of Starkville. I was thinking instead of Batesville, home of the casket company. Did you know that you can get a designer casket of your choosing?  I’m serious as a heart attack. You can buy caskets at Wal-Mart now. There’s even a casket store called Till We Meet Again (tillwemetagain.net) at the mall in Wichita, Kansas, which makes sense, considering the weather in Wichita.

There’s a casket for LSU fans, for KU fans, for NC fans, and even for Duke fans.  If you’re a fireman, there’s a shiny chrome casket. And if you’re a fireman who prefers cremation (you’d think a fireman would want to avoid that) there’s a fire extinguisher urn to hold your ashes.

You can take those family photos that you love so much and have them put right directly on top the casket lid so all your friends can see you at your picture-perfect best, the way they probably never saw you in real life. Shoot, you could probably put a picture of Jesus on the lid if you wanted. It might creep out the grave-digger, burying Jesus that away, but then a gravedigger once told me that the wind blowing scares him.

Driving roads between the Batesville Casket trucks makes a girl’s mind wander aimlessly. In a box on the back seat of my Honda was a book I’d been reading – Remember Meby Lisa Takeuchi Cullen. Cullen penned a journalistic look at the changing practices in the funeral business.

It’s a fascinating study of a different sort of End Time. A friend gave it to me after I told her about an awful tale I’d heard of a man who was cremated and his ashes were sprinkled over the funeral food, unbeknownst to the guests. Take my word for it – you don’t want to be eating that funeral food unless it’s an open casket funeral.

That’s what I was thinking about when I came upon a sign about the Blues Museum ahead. Obviously, I needed a break. All this End Time thinking was messing with my head.

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The museum is located in the former train depot in Clarksdale. Across the alley is Ground Zero, the Blues restaurant and bar owned by actor Morgan Freeman. When I pulled into the gravel parking lot, there were nearly a dozen people lounging in the chairs and the sofa on the porch at Ground Zero. They were laughing and speaking in tongues.

I walked past them, opened the screen door and stepped inside the darkened den. Colorful neon Budweiser lights and round orange Japanese lanterns hung from the rough-hewn ceiling. So did Christmas tinsel. A chalkboard behind the bar to my right advertised the specials – Bud Light $1.50, Smirnoff $3.50. A TV above the bar was tuned to CNN.

A white sheet of paper clipped to the chalkboard offered Liquid Cocaine for $5. Hanging precariously above the bar was a white guitar in a Plexi-glass case. It was signed by John Lee Hooker. Glossy yellow posters announcing the Hambone Festival were stapled to beams throughout.

I made a bee-line for the bathroom where I met up with a group of ladies from Belgium. They were part of a tour group traveling throughout the Southeast soaking up regional music. They’d been at Graceland in Memphis the day before. I would encounter them again, outside.

One of the fellows in the party had pulled a white Camry up alongside the museum and cranked up the radio. Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers were singing Islands in the Stream and the Belgium folks were dancing hip-to-hip, chest-to-chest, over the hot asphalt like it was the floor of Grand Central Station. They were singing with abandon, right there before God and the Blues Museum, tweaking their Belgium accents to mimic Dolly and Kenny.

It was a joyous moment. I stood there, next to the Blues Alley sign and considered one other thing I’d seen inside Ground Zero – every pillar, every post, every white space, everywhere was filled up with the black graffiti of someone’s name. Names were even scribbled atop the toilet seats, one name on top of the other. Somebody had scooched on their belly like a snake to write along the bathroom baseboard “We miss you Rose.”

No wonder the End of Time intrigues us so much – we humans are created with a longing for the eternal.

Surely that’s not all happenstance, is it?

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Salvation comes to us in the form a tired traveler, says Henri Nouwen. Yes, but for the tired traveler, salvation comes in the form of a gracious host. Pastor Tigger and his lovely wife were my salvation that night. That they invited me into their home during one of my many stops across country was beyond, gracious given that we didn’t meet each other until 9 p.m. after I wrapped up a visit with a local book club. 

This father of three sons is by nature a protector, a shepherd. Mess with his flock and you’d better watch out. Pastor Tigger is a defender of the defenseless, the two-legged and four-legged sort.

Try though she might to understand his affection for all creatures, great and small, his wife doesn’t share his passion. Her dark-hair falls into corkscrew curls over her plush bathrobe as she pours a cup of morning coffee. She leans in close, concern creasing her forehead, and says, “You should see the way those goats follow him. He calls them by name and they come running to him.”  She has an accent but it is not one common in the Land of the Razorbacks. She was born and reared in South Africa, she explains.

The goats graze in a pen near the family compound. That’s what Pastor Tigger calls it – the family compound. The fertile land along Sugar Creek was originally purchased by his wife’s father. Family members all live within a hog’s call of each other.

It’s a beautiful spot to raise boys and goats. Lush green trees hem them in on all sides. A mountain rises in the east, providing ample shade on warm summer mornings. A dog of fluffy white curls bounds in and out of the doggie door that leads to a fenced part of the spacious backyard.

On this morning, the day the youngest of the three sons turns eight, the boys are allowed to skip school. They sit in the living room playing the latest version of Mario, bouncing electronically over one obstacle after another. There’s a black baby grand in the living room, too. A special birthday gift to Pastor Tigger from his wife. It is the same baby grand that had been in the church he was raised in, just up the road a’piece.

His mother’s sister was responsible for his religious upbringing.  Aunt Jeanie sang in The Gospel Sounds, a southern gospel group. Just one of many responsibilities that Jeanie approached with the seriousness of a tax attorney.  She could not afford the luxury of being foolhardy. Jeanie, it seems, knew the importance of life at a young age. 

“She was the backbone of the family,” Pastor Trigger says. He points to a pretty woman in a photo hanging on the wall, near the baby grand. “That’s her.” The picture has that reddish tinge common to photos from the 1970s. Jeanne’s hair is teased in a Sandra Dee fashion.

Pastor Tigger is tall and has the girth of a linebacker, but when he talks of his Aunt Jeanie, he seems as young and as vulnerable as his own sons.

“I truly became a Christian in 1990. I was 14 and at church, just like normal, but when the pastor gave the altar call, I felt a drawing power. I went down and my aunt came down and prayed with me. It was one of those old-fashioned altar calls where 50 people pounce on you.”

A child of divorce, it was his aunt who provided him with the stability he didn’t find at home.     

“We raised each other, me and Mom,” he says, shrugging and laughing in an obvious attempt at extending grace to the mother who was more peer than caretaker. Jeanie nurtured them both – her sister and her sister’s boy. She attended his school events, and encouraged him when he was troubled. She took interest in the boy who felt so often overlooked. And she’s the one that would pull the car up in front of the house on Sunday mornings and insist that her nephew be ready to go to church. 

As that boy grew into a man, his devotion to his Aunt Jeanie remained uncommonly steadfast. When she was diagnosed with scleroderma, an excruciatingly painful disease that can cause a person’s organs to harden like stones, Pastor Tigger resolutely refused to believe any harm could come to her. “I believed God could and would heal her. I believed that even if she died, God would raise her up again.”

Jeanie was too sick to attend her nephew’s wedding, which, because of his aunt’s illness, was not the joyous occasion it should have been. “There are no wedding photos of my wife and I together. As soon as the ceremony was over I told my wife I had to go to Jeanie’s house, to make sure she was okay,” Pastor Tigger explains. “Aunt Jeanie was the third parent of my parents.”

Jeanie, 47, died nine days after Pastor Tigger married.  He’s not over it yet, and truth be told, he won’t be until the day Jesus returns, which he thinks could be any day now.

Or not.

“I believe Jesus could come any time. He’s coming soon. That may be when I’m 85 or when my kids are 85. We live time and space, God does not. Time is not his forte. He’s not bound by it.”

Pastor considers himself a pretty good student of End Time prophecy. He doesn’t believe that the world will end in nuclear holocaust. Instead, he believes in the 1,000 year reign by the righteous. We can’t blow everything to smithereens or there would be no place left for the righteous to reign.

“God is going to take care of all that,” he says.

He’s studied Revelation since he first read it at a teenager, during the time of what he jokingly refers to as “My goth stage.”

“I first read it because I thought it would exciting and spooky.”

It only took him a couple of days to read 22 chapters but he came away with two impressions: A disturbing fear of the rapture – that moment when the redeemed are reportedly caught up in Christ. And a sneaky suspicion that Revelation was more confounding than it was revealing.

It wasn’t until later, when he began to study Daniel and Ezekiel, Matthew and other books that the prophecies in Revelation started to make sense. “You can’t read Revelation by itself. It’s a key to a bigger puzzle,” he says.

He’s 39 now and still believes in the Rapture, though he no longer fears it. He prays for peace in Israel and believes that as long as America blesses Israel and the Jewish people, America will be blessed. 

It’s not the End Times that worries him but the present age. Pastor Tigger fears that the American Church has reached an Age of Apostasy – a falling way.

“We’ve been blinded,” he says. “It’s not just a form of godliness but an outright denial of the power of God.”

While he’s a firm believer in the prophetic teachings of Scriptures, Pastor Trigger says that for most people, speculating about the world ending is mindless chatter. “If we truly believed Jesus was coming soon, we wouldn’t live like we do now.”

 

A little Hambone for ya