"Bears" by Lyle Lovett

I first heard Lyle Lovett's "Bears" (originally by Steven Fromholz), while driving through the Dallas-Fort Worth area, listening to Sports Radio 1310 The Ticket. The station had a feature where they would play new records, and the host would evaluate them. I was not expecting much. I generally did not like country music and certainly was not listening to sports radio in search of it. Then they played "Bears."

I loved it immediately. There was something wonderfully stupid about the song. Bears in Arkansas. Bears eating babies. Bears beneath people's feet. Bears being taken out to lunch. Yet underneath all the nonsense was something strangely profound. I liked the song enough that I asked my wife to get me the double album for Christmas. Nearly thirty years later, I still have several favorites from that album. "Bears" remains one of them.

The genius of the song is that Lovett never explains the bear. He simply keeps talking about bears until the word begins to mean almost anything. Some people are afraid of bears. Some people love them. Some want them driven out of the wilderness. Others will pay money just to see one. Some people think a particular bear is wonderful. Others seem to have one under their feet. Eventually the song arrives at the wonderfully absurd suggestion that we should simply take a bear out to lunch.

Then comes the line that gives the whole song its depth: "And some folks even see the bear in me."

Suddenly the bear becomes more than a bear. It becomes the strange, difficult, inconvenient thing we see in other people and perhaps recognize in ourselves. We classify people quickly. We decide who is respectable, dangerous, lovable, unpleasant, useful, or beyond hope. We can become so confident in our categories that we forget we are dealing with actual human beings.

There is something deeply Christian in Lovett's refusal to take those categories too seriously. Scripture constantly reminds us that the people we are tempted to reduce to a type are creatures made in the image of God. The person who looks strange to us still bears God's image. The person we fear is still our neighbor. The person whose faults are obvious to us carries faults of his own that may be less obvious to us. And, as Lovett quietly admits, there is a bear in me too.

That last point matters. It is easy to make a song like this into a lesson about accepting other people. Lovett makes it more honest by including himself. Whatever absurdity, awkwardness, selfishness, or strangeness we see in others, we are not standing outside the human condition and judging it from a safe distance. We are part of it.

The Christian answer to this is neither pretending that bears are harmless nor pretending that differences do not matter. Scripture has plenty to say about wisdom, sin, foolishness, and danger. It also tells us to be humble about our own condition. "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" Jesus asks. We are very good at identifying the bear in somebody else.

Perhaps that is why the song's final invitation works. Take the bear to lunch. Let the strange person into the group. Sit with him. Get to know him. You might discover that the creature you were prepared to fear or ridicule is actually someone worth loving. And maybe you will discover something else along the way. There is a bear in you, too.

That is a remarkably serious thought to hide inside such a ridiculous song. And perhaps that is exactly why it works. Sometimes a sermon would only make us defensive. A song about bears can slip past our defenses, make us laugh, and then leave us wondering whether we have been looking at other people a little too much from the outside.

No, they just don't come no better than a bear.