“Pulling Teeth” by Hidden Hospitals, Saturday, March 27, 2021

When I think of progressive rock, I think of music that hasn't been refined enough to make it to radio. The lyrics are a little too strange. The instrumentals go off on tangents. Don't get me wrong, I like long guitar solos, but prog. rock gets a bit pedantic. Then I heard Hidden Hospitals' 2016 album Liars. The band calls themselves a progressive rock band, and honestly, I haven't heard anything like it before. Like progressive rock albums, it took me a few listens to get into Liars. But track after track reveals intricate song structures met by lyrics that could be easily passed over, but when they sink in, pack a punch. According to an episode with lead singer Dave Raymond on Matt Carter's Break It Down podcast, Raymond grew up listening to Hip-Hop, but it was rock shows by bands like Emery and Anberlin that got him interested in performing music that would become Hidden Hospitals.

FINDING REAL'S LIKE PULLING TEETH. Today's song tells the whimsical story of a child playing hide and seek. He finds a cannon and crawls in and falls asleep only to be awakened by a bang. Next thing he knows he's flying in the air. In the air he sees that not everything is as it appears. Mixing the metaphor with the simile: "finding truth is like pulling teeth," tells us that it's theoretically easy to find out the truth, but it's painful. And that's where today's sermon begins. I first learned the word deconstruction in literature class at Adventist university. I learned what deconstruction was, but I was taught to be careful with it. You can break down a text to analyze what it doesn't say. You can turn it on itself. You can point out how the author is flawed in writing it this way. And that's fine if you're analyzing Joyce or Shakespeare, but don't you dare do it to the Bible. However, that being said, of all the required religion classes I took--and a few extras to get a minor in religion--we briefly talked on canonization, how all books of the Bible that we have today were accepted. This is an unspoken article of faith. We can trust that the men at the Council of whatever it was in faith accepted the real Bible and everything else was uninspired.

I FIND WOLVES IN SHEEPS CLOTHING. Descartes is the father of deconstruction. Descartes first deconstructed and reconstructed the world based on logic, rather than through accepting what others said about it. He accepted only one truth, "I think, therefore I am." While not everyone can get a masters in engineering before stepping on to a plane to realize that flight is possible, I wonder why Christians who hold the scriptures so dear know so little about the processes of how it came to being what it is today. Why do only pastors read Greek or Hebrew? Why isn't knowing the original languages important? Why don't we research the origins of the canon? From my experience working for the church, I learned that your personal belief means very little as long as you sacrifice to keep the system in power. Once I learned that truth, it set me free. But it also made things quite complicated. 

 

Read “Pulling Teeth” by Hidden Hospitals on Genius