The Pants of Dead Rock Stars

I want to tell you about the time a man pulled his pants down in front of my wife and me on Hollywood Boulevard. I guess I want to do that because human beings are, by design, meaning-making engines. If we step on a crack, we wonder about our mother’s spinal integrity. If we drop a piece of toast, we evaluate the butter-side-down trajectory as a cosmic commentary on our life choices. If a parking lot door-dinger hits a sudden patch of black ice and damages their car years later in the exact same spot, we see the hand of God scribbling a quick invoice on the universe's ledger.

"Aha!" we whisper, rubbing our hands together like a villain in a melodrama. "Karma."

Except there is one glaring issue with that: The Gospel is not karma. In fact, the Gospel is the absolute, systematic demolition of karma. If you take a step back and look at the sheer absurdities of an average week, you realize life is not a moral vending machine. You don't insert a dollar’s worth of good behavior and select a smooth, conflict-free afternoon. If that's what you think Christianity is, you are one bumper sticker away from Buddhism. God's answer to the world's brokenness is ultimately not a perfectly balanced universe, but Jesus Christ.

Job is perhaps the ultimate anti-karma book. Job's friends desperately want the universe to make moral sense. Something terrible happened, and Job repeatedly denied doing anything that would have earned it. God never gives Job the tidy explanation he wants. God doesn't eventually say: "Here's the spreadsheet explaining why each goat died." Instead, God confronts Job with the sheer immensity and strangeness of creation. God does not owe us a satisfying explanation for every event in order for God to remain trustworthy. That's almost the opposite of popular Christian providence. We can say: "I don't know why that happened. I know God. That's enough."

The Universe Is Not Keeping Score (And Thank God for That)

When Jesus was asked about the eighteen people who died when the tower of Siloam collapsed on top of them (Luke 13:4-5), His audience wanted a tidy, karmic explanation. Which of them sinned? What did they do to earn a falling tower?

Jesus looked at them and essentially said: None of them. They weren't worse sinners than anyone else in Jerusalem. Towers just fall sometimes.

The Hebrew Scriptures are surprisingly comfortable with the sheer randomness of living in a fallen world. Ecclesiastes 9:11 lays it out with brutal honesty: “Time and chance happen to them all,” which is the Bible's way of saying "sometimes it's just ice, Gary."

Because that's exactly what we do. Something happens, and we immediately start writing God's explanation for Him. Somebody gets sick: “What did they do?” Somebody prospers: “God must be blessing them.” Somebody suffers: “God must be teaching them something.” Somebody gets promoted: “Favor.” Somebody gets fired: “Consequences.”

If every flat tire were a divine punishment and every green light were a reward, we’d be living under the Old Covenant’s behavioral scoreboard. Grace frees us from having to interpret every minor inconvenience as an angry memo from Heaven.

If you hang around church long enough, someone will eventually corner you near the industrial-sized coffee urn to hit you with Galatians 6:7: “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” There are consequences in this world. If you sow cruelty, you’re cultivating cruelty. If you sow generosity, you cultivate generosity. If you sow bitterness, you’ll find it easier to be bitter. If you sow dishonesty, you end up building a high-maintenance life where you constantly have to remember which lie you told to whom. That’s a real harvest, but that’s not karma. Karma says the universe is keeping your account. Grace says God is changing you. Galatians 6:7 does not contradict grace—it helps us understand the consequences of living out of step with the life Christ has placed within us. Our repeated choices can shape our habits, relationships, and everyday experience, but they do not redefine our identity. You are not becoming a Christian through your choices. You already are a new creation in Christ. In the midst of our choices, God is making us more Christlike. We can suffer on that journey and be dragged along like an obstinate dog on a leash by living out of sync with our new hearts, or we can enjoy our walk with Him. 

This World is Ephemeral

My father meticulously protected his car for years. He guarded that car's bumper the way other men guard nuclear launch codes. Door dings were, to him, a form of personal grief. He didn't park a car. He deployed it. He parked in the furthest possible spot at every establishment he ever visited, adding, over a lifetime, what I estimate to be several unpaid miles of bonus walking, all in service of a bumper.

Then he died. And death — I regret to inform you — does not honor parking strategy. Death is a terrible valet. My mother inherited the car, bumper and all, and one day, while I was driving her to Hardee's, a bewildered elderly man backed a trailer directly into the rear of it.

I would like to report that I responded to this with the serene detachment of a man who does not even wash his own car (true story — I don't wash mine unless there's salt eating the undercarriage; my personal automotive theology is "look sufficiently unworthy of theft"). Instead I sat there mentally drafting a police report. My immediate human reaction on behalf of my mother and my sainted father was righteous indignation. Call the authorities! File the report! Avenge the clear coat!

And yet, my mother looks at the plastic, looks at the afternoon, and makes a radical theological decision: “Let's just go inside and have a nice day.” The distinction was simple: The bumper was damaged. The day didn't have to be.

That is a living manifestation of Romans 8:28-29. We often misread verse 28 as "God secretly causes annoying things so a pleasant worldly outcome pops out later." However, verse 29 defines the "good": conformity to the image of Christ, not conformity to the condition of the vehicle you drove off the lot in. God's ability to redeem an event does not mean the event itself was good. My mother wasn't ignoring the damage. She was simply refusing to let a dented bumper set the emotional temperature of her day. Somewhere between Ecclesiastes and the Gospel of Luke there are some biscuits. Our lives are not defined by things that can rust, dent, or rot. Receive the day you’re given, and thank God.

Glory Is Manufactured; Grace Is Real

Which brings us to Hollywood Boulevard:

My wife had always wanted to see NSYNC's star on the Walk of Fame. I hadn't been able to take her to the actual unveiling — I was working, because somebody has to pay for the theoretically-someday car we will also eventually not wash — and so this belated trip meant something to her that it would never mean to me. My musical relationship with NSYNC before meeting her was basically the same as my relationship with municipal zoning: I acknowledge that it exists, and hope nobody asks me detailed questions. I couldn't give her that day back. But I could give her a Tuesday, and sometimes love looks like that. 

We got out of an Uber that might have cost more than the materials used to make the sidewalk star, and while we were trying to find which hunk of sidewalk metal was NSYNC’s, we encountered what I can only describe as the final boss, the guardian of the star: a man dancing in a loose circle of empty liquor bottles, who — with no warning, no request for money, and notably no tip jar, which really would have clarified his business model — pulled his pants down to mid-thigh and rotated slowly, presenting himself to two tourists who had come to look at a sidewalk plaque commemorating a boy band. I don’t know the local lore, but apparently we encountered the Liquor Nymph. He presented a small, empty bottle like a solemn ceremonial offering. It's almost like God hired a Coen Brothers extra to stand on the sidewalk and say: “You thought this was going to be a sentimental pilgrimage? LOL.”

I have worked in health care. I have developed, over the years, an internal setting somewhere between "mild interest" and "please pass the hand sanitizer," and this setting kicked in immediately. There are people who see nakedness and think, “This is an opportunity for ministry; it’s time to cast out Legion or put this man onto a donkey to an inn off the Jericho road.” I saw nakedness and thought, “This is an opportunity for distance.” 

Here's where I have to be careful, because I could very easily turn this chapter into a Very Special Message about How I Helped A Man In Need, and that would be a lie, because I didn't help him. It would have been very natural, very Christian-sounding, to feel like I owed that man an intervention — some Good Samaritan moment where I produce a granola bar and a gospel tract and everybody cries. Apart from a clear need I could meet, anything I did so I can feel like I passed a pop quiz on discipleship would have been about me, not him. It’s not like thieves took his pants; he had them, and chose not to use them. Sometimes the most honest thing you can do for a person is not turn him into your character development. “I ministered to a stranger today” can sometimes mean “I found a way to make someone else's misery about my spiritual résumé.” 

My actual, real-time thought was to consider him to be a threat on the level of a squirrel of similar size and mass, more of a professional assessment than judgment or fear. I do not know if this man was mentally ill, or extremely drunk, or performing a mating ritual, or attempting to get arrested for the guaranteed bed and hot meal that a night in county lockup provides to people who have run out of other options, or a modern Diogenes the Cynic philosopher. I write about freedom a lot here, so a half-naked human in no acute distress didn’t warrant alerting the authorities about Drunken Semi-Nude Gandalf. 

We got our pictures (of the sidewalk star, not the flasher). We ate at the Hard Rock. And then — because Hollywood Boulevard apparently only serves theology in double portions — we took pictures of dead musicians' pants, on display behind glass like holy relics of a religion that worships fame. One of those pairs of pants belonged to Jim Morrison, a man whose stage act one night in Florida (allegedly) was not wildly different from what we'd just watched on the sidewalk outside — minus the circle of liquor bottles, plus a record contract. Which raises an uncomfortable question I did not expect Hollywood Boulevard to raise: what, precisely, is the difference between the man whose personal effects we photographed from behind glass and the man we quietly walked around? One got a museum case. One got strangers pretending not to notice him. Fame, it turns out, is mostly just someone deciding, later, that the incident mattered. Meaning isn't self-evident at the moment. Somebody has to assign it. Give a sufficiently strange man a record contract and fifty years, and eventually somebody will put his mostly-unused pants in a museum. 

Hollywood is a literal shrine to manufactured human glory—stars set in concrete, velvet ropes, immortalized names. And yet, the raw, unfiltered reality of broken humanity is ever-present. It feels like a scene straight out of 1 Corinthians 1:27-29: "God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong..." Humanity spends billions building monuments to say, "Look at how much this person mattered!" The Kingdom of God flips the entire valuation system on its head. You don't need a star on a sidewalk to have infinite worth in the eyes of the Creator. The Gospel doesn’t center on a red carpet; it centers on an execution outside the city walls. Death and time flatten every earthly scoreboard. The famous singer's pants become a dusty display item. The pristine car becomes scrap. The star on the sidewalk gets walked on by tourists and danced over by eccentric strangers.

This is, I promise you, exactly the kind of thing Ecclesiastes is trying to warn you about. Fame is vapor. Cotton-blend denim outlives your legend. Shakespeare has plays. Jim Morrison also has songs, in addition to pants. We all leave something behind. Somebody is currently paying eleven dollars to look at Jim Morrison's pants, and Jim Morrison is not enjoying a single cent of the ticket price, because he is dead, which is the one review no performer ever gets to argue with. People now stand around photographing pants because the people who wore them mattered to somebody. Eventually there will be nobody alive who remembers them, and eventually the pants will be gone too. Eventually, Hollywood Boulevard will be something else. Eventually, the planet will be transformed. A thing doesn’t have to last forever to matter, but don't put your hope in stuff that can't stay.

The Grace-Filled Middle Ground

When confronted with life's nonsensical moments—whether it's a collapsing tower, a dented heirloom, or a street performer oversharing his anatomy—the New Covenant offers us a remarkably grounded way to walk through the world: Stop looking for cosmic blame. When something breaks or goes sideways, resist the urge to ask, "Who sinned?" (John 9:2-3). Romans 8 says that creation itself is groaning until our ultimate glorification. Hold physical things with a loose grip. Everything you own will eventually belong to someone else, get scratched, or end up in a landfill. Don't trade an afternoon of joy for a piece of painted plastic. It’s a bumper. They get hit. That’s what bumpers are for. Laugh at the absurdities. God is not pacing the halls of heaven panicked because the world is weird. He entered the mess Himself, ate with the outcasts, cooked breakfast for rough-around-the-edges fishermen known to cut off an ear occasionally, and conquered the ultimate absurdity—death itself. Grace gets the last word.

So when the bumper gets dented or some dude tries to trick you into his personal Cave of Wonders, don't waste the afternoon standing in the parking lot trying to balance a moral ledger that Jesus already erased. Remember Ecclesiastes. Acknowledge the dent, choose peace over outrage, take your spouse to see the ridiculous stars, look at the dead musicians' pants, and then go get something to eat with a thankful heart.

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