On my way home from Provincial Assembly I stopped in Las Vegas to visit my brother who was a part of the cast of Jersey Boys. That’s right folks, my little brother can sing like Frankie Valli, works in the film and theater world, and does so while remaining faithful to the Gospel of Jesus. He’s been in Las Vegas with the show since November and will be returning to Los Angeles sometime int he next couple of weeks.
I’ve been reflecting on a question posed to me late on Saturday evening, the gist of which was whether I had been prepared for the overwhelming sinfulness of Vegas —the word used in the question was “sexiness.” I couldn’t help laughing, kindly I hope, at the question. I knew what the person meant but had trouble articulating my answer. For I wanted to answer with a question that ran something like, “What sexiness?”
Here are some field notes to help fill-out my what I mean:
I arrived on what folks here call Hawaii’s “9th Island” late in the afternoon on a Saturday. As I deboarded the plane I was struck simultaneously by the deep dry heat which blew in gusts through the space between the ramp and the aircraft and by the LED displays of an array of gambling machines. I could not help laughing (I did, actually, out-loud until I checked myself) at how much, in the rush to high-tech-ify the systems, the creators of the machines managed to magnify the goofiness of them. I had thought at first that they were a bunch of candy-crush saga games or something like that: as if the GooglePlay App Store did a HGTV home renovation on a Chuck-E-Cheese.
Screens, huge, towering, colossal, filled almost every inch of the interior of the airport showering me with moving images and sounds all conflicting and overriding, and competing to outshout one another for my attention, like bickering children in the back of a minivan. I stood waiting at baggage claim, a consumer Danae, showered by the radiance of Olympian commercials: Bue Man Group; Cirque Du Soleil Hawaiian-themed; this Casino; that Casino; Ladies’ Night-out discounts on champagne; the shops at Bellagio; PeacockTV’s newest show about Gladiators (someone needs to order a moratorium on Streaming services getting rights to Ancient Greece and Rome); Jersey Boys (“hey that’s my kid brother!”); Meghan Thee Stallion is coming to town in August; Burger King “have it your way” (apt, very apt); another Casino but this one’s different (but not really); Best Steakhouse on the Strip. All at once, everywhere, all the time.As we drove from the airport my brother narrated the transition from “old Las Vegas” to “the Strip.” Low buildings, neon lights, countless wedding chapels (offering ‘quick easy weddings in under 5 min’) most of them Elvis themed, and sketchy all-in-one Vap-shop-and-Cash-advance places gave rise to impossible architectonics, fountains, lights, large screen displays the size of skyscrapers, and luxury flaunted from structure to decor. Those two parts of Las Vegas share a common life, both mutually sustaining the other under the yoke of fulfilling the promise to give the myriad pilgrims who descend into the valley “whatever they want.”
Outside the strip, where the ‘normal’ people live, those who work to keep Vegas humming, it feels like any sprawling city of the American Southwest: adobe coupled with faux adobe; strip malls; grocery stores; Taco Bells; parks; etc. —a contemporary Land of Goshen fueling the imperial engines of a contemporary Thebes. He took me to the local pub near his apartment. It was a place for locals: local beers, local kids working, Hawaiian-American pub fusion cuisine, prices average working people can pay, etc. After all the show of The Strip, it seemed more real —more mundane in the best sense.
Back to The Strip. I waited in the lobby of the casino in whose theater my brother’s cast was performing Jersey Boys while he got ready with his cast (costume, make-up, sound, fight-call, etc.). I sipped a Red Bull and wandered through the maze of craps tables, roulette wheels, and aisles upon aisles of gaming machines (each themed like the games at a Dave & Buster’s: Pirate’s Treasure, Wild West Coin challenge, Lucky Galaxyyyy!!!! etc.). Everything smelled of cigarette smoke, soggy carpet, and that scent I can only describe as “Food Court”.
Back to the theater for the show, which was a delight to see. I got to go back stage with my brother afterward and got a tour. Here at last was something truly to marvel at: the musical pit, the engineering, the stage design, the magnificent artifice of all of the technical ex machina. Here in the inner belly, away from the lights and the clamor and the illumination, was glory: a hundred hands co-laboring in darkness and secret, pulling levers, shifting set pieces, helping cast members make impossibly-timed costume changes.
The cast and crew of Jersey Boys were wonderful. Kind and warm and real, like the people in the Pub from earlier.
Afterwards we walked through a portion of the Strip and caught another theater production.
The walk was interesting: sunburned tourists (families with kids even) in aloha shirts, mobs of carousing frat-boys sporting bicep-clutching t-shirts and cool shoes, men dressed to the nines in fancy suits, young women dressed in little at all, and a representative from every other section of global culture.
The show, unlike the Jersey Boys but very much like the slot machines in the airport, was ridiculous: too serious to be called ‘fun’, too sexualized to be called ‘childish’, too conscious to be called ‘goofy,’ too low to be called “high art” yet too self-aware to be “for the people,” too talented to pity and too clumsy to be applauded. It was, in a nutshell, a picture of the Las Vegas Strip itself. It was a parody of a parody of a parody; mocking that which it emulated. It offered both a proximally real experience (they really are doing stunning trapeze tricks) and also the elating experience of “seeing through it all” (“ah it’s all a joke I get it”); of participating-in rampant “self-exhaustion” while also knowing that you are “above this” in a self-congratulatory fashion. You’re on the inside of an inside joke but you are also the brunt of the joke, and therefore on the outside of it too. It gives one a sensation of being soiled; like having accidentally sat-down in wet grass and then having to spend the next few hours in soaked jeans.
And so my answer to the question. If by “sexy” we mean “eros” —that deep and imaginative desiring love which begins romances, develops lasting friendships, produces a willingness to suffer for the sake of the beloved, and lies at the heart of Jesus’ prayer in John 17— then no, I saw nothing sexy. I saw much of its parody —I saw much of what could be called a bad joke, except that jokes are supposed to be funny.
And I don’t mean that I’m somehow saintly, that I can float above all that morass and know it better than it knows itself. I mean rather that my time there was a lesson in exactly what sin is: a parody of the unimaginative and worst sort. The signs which glowed from screens, that alerted from marquees, or the mere ounces of lace which passed for clothing, are not “sexiness,” no sir they are not —they are a parody of a parody of a parody of sex (and in this case the tripling does not negate, but compounds).
Sure, Mark Brians can laugh at the clumsy banality of a gaming machine or the advertisement for nightclub, but what about the sin of Pride? What about the sin of Envy, so dangerous in the church-planting world? What about parental severity, or pastoral vanity, or private scrupulosity? These too are mockeries as goofy as Chuck-E-Cheese and as soul-sucking as a night-club. These too caricature and ape human life.
So there’s a practical application here: your sin, and my sin, and the sins of our brother in Christ are a mockery of the Real. Sin caricatures, it juvenilizes. Think of the grammar of the popular phrase “It’s Vegas, baby!” Sin infantilizes without restoring innocence. It makes one child-ish (in the worst sense) without making one child-like (in the glorious sense).
My brother and I talked a lot about mission in a city like Vegas. It was illuminating to hear his thoughts working inside the film and theater industry. He had a lot of wisdom, much of it broadly applicable to our islands as well. Most moving was his emphasis on the small and the relational. Cities like Las Vegas strip people of their personhood in the interest of industry. Doing the work of renaming, restoring, and re-identifying people as persons is a central task to mission in that City. Being a church in Vegas is like being a midwife, delivering lives from the Parody to the Real.
I asked my brother the next day as we drove to church, what Las Vegas would look like if there was deep, lasting, and institutional revival. He told me he had no idea. Though there is much gold that might withstand the refiner’s fire, there is a lot of dross. Much would have to end. There is no framework for imagining such a future. All we can do, as we pray for the gospel to spread on the 9th island, is allow the Spirit to intercede for us, since we do not know what to pray, with groanings too deep for words (Rom. 8:26-27).