Louis CK once again has me laughing, this time with his rendition of Abe Lincoln on last week’s “Saturday Night Live.”  If you missed the clip, here it is again.  (Be forewarned: in typical Louis CK fashion, there is a good amount of explicit language.)

With respect to the many awkward conversations Abe has with slave owners- many of whom, I would add, use the Bible to rationalize their lifestyle- Abe says, “I just kinda think that owning a person is not cool, you stupid d_k.”

Hilarious.

I’ll be curious to see if Daniel Day Lewis does a better job inhabiting Lincoln in Spielberg’s new flick. Incidentally, I caught a wonderful interview of Daniel Day Lewis with NPR’s Melissa Block the other day.  (You can read the highlights from that interview here.)

Daniel Day Lewis had this to say about the process of finding and crafting a voice for Lincoln: “At a certain moment I choose to believe [that it’s a good approximation] because I need to believe. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no element of doubt lurking there.”

Maybe something similar could be said of the process of giving voice to Jesus in our own disparate lives.

Like Lincoln, Jesus has been so “mythologized…and therefore dehumanized,” to borrow Daniel Day Lewis’ description of his work to humanize Lincoln.  Maybe we, too, must each do our own work of sifting through the clutter to hear what Jesus says to us about who He is- about how He wishes us to embody Him.

Maybe at a certain moment we, too, must choose to believe that our best approximation of Jesus is what Jesus would have wanted for us.

Maybe we, too, do this because we must.

And, maybe it is precisely at this moment that our “acting” stops and our real “becoming” like Jesus begins.