"Tyler, the Messiah," Chapter One

[Hey folks. It's literally been years since I've posted any literary stuff, but I figured that I'd post my NaNovel from 2012 to help me edit it. Basic plot summary: Tyler Swanson, disillusioned with his religion and the people who represent it, decides to start his own religion, and has to deal with the consequences when his religious teachings earn him disciples from across the world.

I'll also mention that this novel is meant to be a parody of the New Testament from Christianity. The intent is not to offend, but to show an appreciation for a globally influential text.]

* * * * * * *

Tyler Swanson looked out over the sea of people gathered in front of his house. Thousands upon thousands of people from all over the world milling about on his front lawn, speaking in hundreds of different languages, all clamoring over each other to catch a glimpse of their Messiah.

Something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

“TYLER!” His mother screamed from the bottom of the stairs. “Who are these people and what do they want?”

Tyler wished there was an easy answer to that question. Instead, he would have to tell his mother the whole story.

* * * * * * *

Tyler Swanson sat in a silent car on his way to worship at St. Paul’s Baptist Church. It was a thirty minute drive from his home in the center Watertown, Iowa, to the church, which was located on the city limits. Tyler hated the drive to church, partially because the scenery on the trip was nothing but dilapidated barns and empty corn fields, but mostly because he hated church. It wasn’t exactly the church itself that Tyler hated—the stained glass in the building was beautiful, the people were friendly, and the donuts were usually a couple of days away from being inedible. It was the entire idea of waking up early, putting on your best clothes, and driving out to remote farmland to sing songs about Jesus and listen to an old man in robes talk about the Bible for twenty minutes.

Tyler’s mom, Brenda, had required that he and his sister, Angie, make the weekly commute to worship with her. Brenda still had a youthful charm about her, even as she slowly closed in on her 50th birthday. While she had no figure to speak of, she still wore her favorite dress to church every week: a modest form-fitting light red dress with sequined waves rolling across the bottom. Over the years, some of the sequins had fallen off, but the dress still fit, and Brenda was destined to wear it until it rotted away.

Tyler hated going to church, but he understood the significance of it to his mother. Seven years prior, when Tyler was only nine, his father, Mike, was killed in a freak auto accident while he was driving to work. A man driving a bright blue pick-up barreled through a red light, totaling Mike’s car, making direct impact on the driver’s side door. The initial investigation believed that the other driver was still drunk from the night before; in actuality, the other driver was running late for work and was trying to get to his office on time. Mike was pronounced dead at the scene.

Before his dad was killed, Tyler’s family was fairly infrequent visitors to St. Paul’s. They always made sure to hit the Big Two, Christmas and Easter, and during the school year, they made it a point to take the kids to Sunday School. Whether they stayed for the services was a week-to-week decision, and over the summer, they generally didn’t go, promising instead to go to church while they were on vacation, a promise which they rarely kept.

After Mike’s death, Brenda went into a deep depression, and Tyler and Angie were sent to Brenda’s parents while she worked through it. After a couple of months, Brenda returned to pick up her children, and she became a brand new person. She smiled a lot more, she looked refreshed, and she had a pep in her step that Tyler had never noticed before.

The Swanson home also underwent a complete transformation. New leather furniture replaced the old Lay-Z-Boy and the couch with the broken arm, the carpets smelled like they had been professionally cleaned, and the shelf with the family photos now had a single white candle lit in memory of Mike.

But what Tyler found a little unnerving was the sudden presence of Jesus all around the house. In the past, there may have been a cross or two in the kitchen and in some of the bedrooms. Now there were crosses and pictures of Jesus in every room: kitchen, hallways, dining room, living room, bedrooms, even a small portrait of Jesus in the bathroom.

Tyler hated that picture. He didn’t like the idea that the man that died for his sins was now allowed to watch him poop whenever he wanted.

On their first day back together, Brenda sat the children down and told them that they would have to work hard to move on from their father’s sudden death.

“I know things are going to seem weird at first,” Brenda said. “But I promise you that soon things will return to some form of normal. All of us grieve in different ways. I just hope that you know that if you have any questions or if you want to talk through anything that you can turn to me.”

Tyler raised his hand.

“Yes, Tyler?”

“What’s the deal with all of this Jesus stuff?”

Brenda sighed. “I was just about to get to that. While you were away, I came to realize that I couldn’t get through all of this by myself, so I started reaching out to some of the people from church who gave us cards and casseroles. They invited me to a grief counseling group, which worked wonders. Then they kept inviting me to these different things, and I kept going because I knew it would do me no good to go to work and then come home and mope. Eventually I started going to church regularly, and then I started attending Bible studies, and before I knew it, my life seemed like it was on track enough to come and get you.”

“So all of this stuff…?”

“Is an expression of my renewed faith. Now, like I said, this may seem a little weird at first. But I’m hoping you’ll understand and put up with it for a while. You don’t have to jump on the train with me if you don’t want, but I’m asking, at the very least, that you come to church with me every week. If you don’t listen to the sermon and don’t sing any of the hymns, that’s fine, whatever, but at least come along so that we can have at least one thing we do as a family.”

At the time, Tyler thought it was a good idea. Now he was starting to regret it.

Tyler glanced to the backseat and saw Angie fast asleep. Angie was younger than Tyler by three years. She was sharp and greatly in tune with the world around her. Her only problem was that she wouldn’t talk. She had been able to talk since she was two years old, and would usually jabber on for hours and hours, but after Mike’s death, she refused to speak.

It was frustrating to everyone, but especially to Angie’s grandparents, who had only known Angie as a talkative little ball of energy. The first few attempts at conversation fell flat, even when the topic was something neutral.

“What would you like for dinner?” they would ask. Angie would not reply.

“We have a choice of chicken or steak. Which would you like?” No answer.

“I’ll hold up the two options, and you nod at which one you want, okay?” No answer.

“Chicken?” No response.

“Steak?” No response.

“Come on, Angie. Throw us a bone or something.” No answer.

“Fine. Steak it is.”

The doctors called it “selective mutism,” and that she would be able to speak when she felt comfortable. But even after seven years, she refused to utter a word to anyone.

“What’s wrong, hun?”

Brenda’s words broke through the fog of thoughts that had consumed Tyler. “Nothing,” he said.

“You seem a little down. You sure nothing’s up?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Just thinking a lot, I guess.”

“Anything specific?”

“No. Just about church and dad and stuff.”

Brenda said nothing. She knew that pushing the topic any further would only cause him to shut down, and that’s the last thing she needed in that moment.

Truth was, Tyler was thinking a lot about church. He understood how important it was for his mom to go—that was her connection to some sort of normalcy. Mike was taken away from Brenda far too soon, and this was the only way Brenda knew to keep it together in front of the children.

Tyler also knew that Angie was probably getting nothing out of the services. She would never verbally respond to anyone’s questions, and she rarely even looked at anyone or anything that was speaking to her.

Tyler started thinking about what he was getting out of these services. The short answer was nothing. He rarely, if ever, paid any attention to the sermons; he never sang any of the hymns, and he mostly just drew during Sunday School.

“Why do I have to go to church, Mom?”

Brenda said nothing as she pulled into the church parking lot. She sat in the idling car for a moment. “Do you not want to go to church?” she asked without looking at Tyler.

“Well, I mean, its okay. I don’t mind coming to church. But I just don’t get anything out of it. I was wondering if there was a reason I need to keep coming.”

“Why don’t you get anything out of it?”

“I don’t know. I mostly draw when I’m at church, so I don’t really listen to anything.”

Brenda thought for a moment. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “If you promise me that you’ll pay attention to the services for a month, I’ll let you make the decision on your own whether or not you can keep coming to church.”

“How will you know I’m paying attention?”

“How about you turn in sermon notes? Jot down a couple of ideas you hear, and all of the Scripture the pastor quotes, and if after a month you think you’re still not getting anything out of this, then you can decide if you want to keep coming or not.”

Tyler thought for a moment. “I think that’s something I can do.”

“Great,” said Brenda ask she kissed Tyler on the forehead. “Now hurry up, we’re almost late.”

Tyler was certain he was going to be stuck coming to church for the rest of his life. While his mother had only stated that she wanted him to pay attention and take notes during the sermon, he thought he would try to win some brownie points by being actively engaged in the entire service. But by the time the first hymn ended, Tyler was ready to go home. The liturgy felt stale and stilted, and was never how Tyler believed real people spoke.

The pastor stood behind the altar as he led the congregation through the liturgy. “Led by the Spirit of God to accept Jesus Christ as our Savior and Lord, and having entered into the fellowship of the Spirit through His Church…”

“… We, the members of the Church, prayerfully make this covenant with one another and with our Heavenly Father,” the congregation replied.

How stupid, thought Tyler. Who even says the word “covenant” anymore? All of this is so wordy and awkward. Why can’t church be less formal? Why can’t all of this talking stuff be more like real life?

This particular service also saw the baptism of three new members of St. Paul’s. Tyler hated baptisms as well. He didn’t mind baptisms for new babies, which was usually the case. Babies were generally cute, and they usually stayed pretty quiet, and Tyler kind of liked the bewildered look on a recently baptized baby’s face as they’re carried by the pastor down the center aisle of the church. The baptisms that Tyler absolutely abhorred were the baptisms of adults. He didn’t like how smug these people were. Sure, they had to be baptized before they could be considered members of the church, but the way they suddenly became much more pious than the rest of the congregation, as if their sins were completely gone and always would be…

“It’s just friggin’ water.”

Brenda looked over to Tyler. “What did you say?”

Tyler froze. “Nothing,” he said. “Just mumbling to myself.”

Brenda shot a glare over to Tyler, then returned to the baptism ceremony.

Tyler tried to focus on the baptism, but his mind quickly wandered off to other thoughts. He glanced around the church. Even though Tyler had been a member of this congregation for his entire 16 years of life, he had never taken the time to look around and fully appreciate how the church was set up.

St. Paul’s Baptist Church started as a small country church, and had grown to its current size a few years before Tyler was born. The altar stood at the front of the church, and behind it hung a large wooden cross. Some of the church elders said that the wood used in that cross was from the old church building, which had caught fire back in the 1960s, but none of the elders could ever agree on the year the church burnt down, so Tyler ignored that tidbit of information.

Flanking the altar were two lecterns. The one on the left was slightly higher than the one on the right; this was because the one on the right was used by the congregation for Scripture readings and announcements, while the one on the left was used by the pastor to read the Gospel lesson and preach the sermon. Today, because the church wasn’t in a specific liturgical season, the dressings on the altar and lecterns were a dark green.

The church building was still relatively small, so they could only fit ten pews inside the building. The pews were angled—five on one side, five on the other—facing the altar, which worked well when the majority of the service was done from the altar. However, the congregants on the left side usually complained when the sermon ran too long, as they had to turn and face the pastor in an uncomfortable position. Similarly, any time a Scripture reading was too lengthy, or if there was a particularly slow reader that day, the congregants on the right side would complain.

Tyler often wondered why they didn’t just straighten out the pews and had both side facing directly forward. The rest of the congregation wondered this as well. But nobody ever said anything about it, so nothing was ever done about it.

The stained glass windows in the church were lauded for being the best stained glass windows in the county, and as Tyler took them in, he could see why people would think that. On the left wall, the window portrayed Jesus holding a lamb. Jesus was knelt down and surrounded by children on some sort of path. It looked like he was saying something to the children, maybe telling a story, while some shadowy figures hung out in the background.

On the right, the stained glass showed Jesus levitating above a hill, with two glowing people on the sides of him. They were probably angels, Tyler thought. At the bottom of the hill were several goofy looking men all looking astonished at what they were seeing, and shielding their eyes from the light. And there was a lot of light in that scene, most of it coming from the angels, but a good portion of it coming off of Jesus himself.

Tyler was admiring the stained glass when he heard the pastor finish the Scripture reading of the day. “This is the Word of the Lord,” he said.

“Thanks be to God,” the congregation replied.

Pastor Dennis Hughes shuffled some papers on his lectern, took a sip of water, then said, “Please bow your heads and pray with me.

“Gracious God, as we listen to your Word and discern its meaning for our lives, help us to keep an open mind and an open heart and be completely receptive to your message. Amen.”

Pastor Denny looked up and scanned the room. “The world is in trouble,” he began.

Tyler rolled his eyes. He didn’t often pay attention to the sermons, but when he did, he hated when Pastor Denny had an apocalyptic theme. The world is trouble, the world is going to end, we’re all going to hell, all because of the sin of the world, and all of these people who don’t believe what we believe. It was enough to make Tyler puke. But he made a promise to his mother that he would pay attention to the sermons for the next month, so he kept his mouth shut and tried his hardest to stare at Pastor Denny’s forehead.

“The world is in trouble,” Pastor Denny repeated, “because we’ve lost sight of our goal. Jesus gave us really simple instructions: love your neighbor as yourself, and go out and make disciples. Now—here’s some of that audience participation stuff that everyone hates—raise your hand if you made any new disciples today.”

Tyler looked around. No one raised their hand.

“Okay. That’s understandable. Making disciples can be hard. It doesn’t happen instantaneously. It’s a process. And sometimes the process is so subtle that you will never really know for sure if you made any disciples.

“Now, raise your hand if you loved your neighbor as you love yourself.”

Every hand in the congregation went up.

“Keep those hands up if you continually loved your neighbors, 24 hours a day, all week this week.”

A few hands went down.

“Keep your hands up if you loved all of your neighbors. Not just your friends and family, but the guy that cut you off on your way to work, or the lady that short-changed you at the store, or the coworker that took the last donut from the break room.”

Some chuckles from the congregation, but for the most part, there were no hands raised in the church.

“Now, I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I’m not trying to make you feel like a failure. But I hope you see that obeying the Word of God isn’t going to be easy. I’ll be honest: I’ve failed to love my neighbor myself this week. I got short with one of my children who decided this week was going to be the week she was going to stand up for herself and tell her mom and I that she was old enough to stay out late with her boyfriend. She reassured us that she was a responsible young woman and that she would use her head as they went out on their date. She said that we could go to bed and that we should trust that she would be home by eleven that night.

“Now, us parents, we know better. I’m sure some of you parents out there, when you were 16 or 17 tried that same sort of line on your parents. ‘Oh, we’re fine! No need to worry about us!’

“So I tried to explain to my daughter that, while I’m sure she was a responsible young woman, she was still my daughter, and she would need to return home promptly at eleven, and that her mother and I would be up waiting for her. We wouldn’t ask her any questions, we wouldn’t try to embarrass her. She would walk through the door, we would say, ‘Glad you’re home. Hope you had fun.’ And then we all would go to bed.”

Tyler put his pen back into his pocket. This was going to be a boring sermon. When Pastor Denny talked about his family, he usually rambled on and on and on, and would loosely tie in whatever he was talking about to the Scripture reading of the day.

Maybe that’s why I hate coming to church, Tyler thought. Maybe it’s not that I hate church, maybe it’s just that I hate Pastor Denny’s preaching. Do people really leave churches because of the way the pastor preaches?

“Well, to make a long story short, there was a lot of yelling, a lot of needless accusations, and the date ended up being cancelled. So that night, no one got to go out and have any fun.

“Now, what does this have to do with our Scripture today?”

Yes, please tell us.

“The Scripture for today talks about being God’s chosen people. In First Peter, chapter 2, the reading tells us that we are ‘a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession.’ We are all meant to take these basic ideas that Jesus gave us—to love our neighbor and to make disciples—and to go and do them. We are chosen by God to get back to basics and make a difference in this world.

“Obviously, we’re going to stumble. This world is not the same world as it was during Jesus’ time. But we need to make sure that when we stumble, we don’t fall. My wife and I had choice words for our daughter the other night. Now, I can dwell on this and say, ‘I’m a terrible father, my children should be taken away from me, I should give up now.’ Or, I can say, ‘I’m human, I made a mistake, let’s apologize and set things right, and then we can get onto the more important issues at hand.’

“Now, some people would say that life would be so much easier if we just focused on the basics and didn’t have to worry about things like tithing or going to church, or staying away from the sins of the world. That’s a lot of work. But we need to remember that all of that stems from the basics. And we always need to remember that we are chosen people.

“’All of us are chosen people?’ you’re asking. Yes! All of you! Everyone in here has been chosen by God in different ways! I was chosen to preach the Inspired Word of God. That was my calling and I answered it. But we’re all chosen people. You, Marianne, are chosen by God. You, Alex, have been chosen by God.”

Up until this point, Tyler had felt that Pastor Denny was speaking only to the older members of the congregation. Tyler was only 16. What possible influence could he have on this world? That’s when Pastor Denny focused right on Tyler, pointed right at him, and said, “Even you, Tyler!”

“Me?” Tyler immediately turned red and hung his head for answering out loud.

“Yes, you, Tyler! You’ve been chosen by God to make a difference! First Timothy says to not let anyone look down on you because you are young, but to set an example in your speech and actions to all believers!

“If you are meant to lead a revolution, Tyler, God will provide you the way.”

From that moment on, Tyler couldn’t concentrate on the rest of the sermon. He had always felt this pull away from the church, thinking there was something better out there. But this encouragement—could it be called encouragement?—from Pastor Denny—or was it God Himself?—made Tyler realize that maybe the change he was looking for would have to come from him. That there would be no faith system that would work for him except for the one he created.

Tyler sat in a daze for the rest of the service, and made a note to visit Pastor Denny in his office after the service. Maybe a little one-on-one time with him would provide Tyler the encouragement he would need to make sure he was making the right choice.