Hebrews 1:1

A great number of important ideas are here in the first two verses of the book of Hebrews.  God reveals himself by speaking.  He does so in various different ways, down through time and history.  There is a being called the Son through whom He speaks, and through whom He also created the world.  This Son has been appointed an heir.  These are the last days.  

There is no effort on the part of the writer to prove the existence of God, nor the idea that He speaks and has spoken.  He is apparently writing to those who accept these as truth.   God exists and speaks to us.

Speech is important.  We are speaking beings that live in time.  Our words are so important that more often than not they are all that remains of us when we die.  Millenia after their death, we the living still read the words of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Moses, and Jesus.  The ability to speak and understand speech is hard-wired into our brains, and one of the largest areas of the motor cortex in our brains controls the organs of speech.  Speech, or its proxy the written word, is undeniably our chief means of exchanging ideas of any kind.  

If we posit, for the sake of argument, that there is a God that both created us and remains interested in us, would it not be our expectation that He would use speech and words to communicate with us?  Furthermore, since we are the kind of being that exists in a sequential timeframe, and uses words to communicate between generations and pass knowledge down to those who come after, is it surprising that God would likewise reveal himself gradually over time?  We may be slow learners when it comes to history, but we do eventually learn.  These opening verses in Hebrews assert that God does use speech to reveal himself to us, and does so down through history.  In the past, he used those men and women called "prophets", but finally he has used this being called "the Son".  

Return

It has been a long time since I have written here.  Writing takes discipline, and I have not been exercising discipline very much lately, I'm afraid.   I am also somewhat uncertain what place a blog should have in my life.  Is it a type of journal?  If so, it is too public for sharing one's deepest thoughts, the ones whose discernment and recording may be most beneficial to me.  Is it a type of conversation?  Perhaps, but with whom?  

There is an effort involved in writing a blog that must have some sort of return, I think.  Not simply a return to me, the writer, but some benefit accruing to the readers.  One has to believe it is worth the effort.  

I have been encouraged to write by some who have been my readers in the past.  I am full of self-doubt; my life has had many failures recently, and I have felt very much less capable than I once felt.   Nevertheless I will attempt to take up the practice of writing again.  

Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

It is Good Friday, and today's Daily Office offers Psalm 22, the psalm that begins with the words Jesus spoke from the cross as He was dying, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

The incarnation of God as man is a deep mystery, but Good Friday begins a mystery that seems black and bottomless: the death of God, the sundering of the Trinity. In a sense, this is the center point of all history. The day becomes night, the earth shakes and splits, dead arise out of their graves and walk about. It is as if creation itself convulses, as well it might; its creator, the very hands that formed it, has unaccountably and inconceivably been destroyed by his own creation. Can such a thing be? How could the earth not cease to exist? All eyes, even the unseen eyes of Satan, who perhaps knows best what is happening, are pulled relentlessly to that cross. Can it be? Have I won? The centurions fall down in fear, "Surely this was the son of God!" Unseen forces tear the temple curtain in two. Did the earth splilt beneath as well, foreshadowing the downthrow of the now obsolete center of worship? What is happening? How can God forsake God?

I think that we cannot hope to explain these things. A toddler might as easily attempt to explain lightening. We are but of yesterday and know nothing. Our forefathers saw these terrors at midday and have passed them down without explanation. There they are, raw and aweful, assaulting the mind with impossible realities. We do not understand, but could we expect to understand? We do not even understand our own material world; how could we understand events that involve its creator?

Because Jesus spoke the opening words of Psalm 22 from the cross, we infer that he was invoking the entire psalm, and hence applying it to himself. In the past, when I have read this psalm, I was troubled that it seemed somehow too "human" to apply to Jesus. It seems to be a psalm of lament and supplication to God for rescue from oppressors, for salvation in fact. It reads very much like a human being in deep trouble, asking God to deliver him just as He had delivered his ancestors in the past.

Yet of course, it was especially as a human being, as the Human Being, the second Adam (Adam meaning, in Hebrew, Man as in man-kind) that He was being crucified. Another deep mystery. Jesus so deeply identified with those for whom he was dying that for all intents and purposes (especially divine purposes) he became those he was dying for. He became sin, and it was as such that he was dying. He was not dying because he was God--God had no need to die--but because he was Man. "Behold the Man," says Pilate. He was dying as the second Adam, the innocent Adam dying in place of the sinful Adam. Hence, all his thoughts in Psalm 22 are thoughts from a man's perspective, a human's perspective. He is speaking for us, as we might speak had we been dying there, only guiltless. That is why the Psalm does not speak from God's perspective, though Jesus is also God. These are his dying words, and he is dying as a man, for man.

Hence, he speaks of us as brethren, and says he will praise God in the midst of the "assembly" of us, his people. He, as a man, is really beset upon, is really surrounded by enemies, both material and spiritual, is really dying and is really praying for deliverence. In one sense, of course, He is not delivered. His enemies prevail, and He dies under torture. Yet He is indeed delivered, and we through Him. We are delivered from death through his death, and of course He knew this all along. The Father has not despised the affliction, nor Jesus' prayers upon the cross. He delivered Him from death, and hence from the power of death, through death. So Psalm 22 ends with praise coming from all the nations and all the peoples, who have heard and remember. Yet unborn people will hear and remember, and will declare His righteousness because "He has performed it."

Not Negative

My friends at Reading Through the Bible are contemplating the Ten Commandments, first presented to Moses on Mt. Sinai, after the people had been delivered from slavery in Egypt. Note that the commandments begin by mentioning this context: "I am the Lord thy God which brought you out of bondage...you shall have no other gods before me." God then goes on to list ten rules, ten commandments mostly having the form, "You shall not..." Does this seem odd? I have heard the complaint that the commandments are "negative", and that it would have been better for God to have used "positive language". Yet here He is, right after reminding his people that they are now free men and women, delivering this set of "negative" rules. Doesn't he get it?

Is such a formulation of law really negative? Or perhaps the question can be better formulated, "Which type of law restricts our freedom more, prohibitions (thou shalt not) or prescriptions (thou shalt)?" I propose that prohibitions are the least restrictive form of law, and that is why God casts his commandments in that form right after setting his people free. The Ten Commandments are not only consistent with their new freedom, but are excellent signs and symbols of their new freedom.

Consider the Garden of Eden. What could Adam and Eve do? Everything....except one single activity, one simple rule. They could climb trees, cut down trees, make love under the trees, make love in the trees, burn the wood, use the wood, eat the fruit from every single tree, run around, sing... whatever. In short, every conceivable activity under the sun was lawful except one: don't eat fruit from this one tree. "Thou shalt not eat the fruit from this one tree" was the absolutely least restrictive rule one could imagine, because it was negative. By saying, "Don't do this", God is allowing everything else. Imagine He had formulated His commandment in the positive. How would that be stated? "Act in accordance with My will." There's a positive formulation, but what does it mean? At every act, A and E would have to consider, "hmmm...is this according to God's will?" Talk about anxiety! Perhaps God could have said, "Do everything except eat from the tree in the middle of the garden." In the first place, this still contains the negative, but now it contains a daunting positive command: do everything else. So now they have to make love in the trees, and have to run around and sing, have to burn the wood and every other conceivable activity.

Most of our own laws work the same way. The laws in a free land generally do not prescribe behavior but simply forbid a small subset of specific behaviors, leaving its citizens free to do anything that is not specifically prohibited.

The simplest and least restrictive form of law, which is simply the declaration of God's will as distinct from His creature's, is prohibition. The Ten Commandments leave entire worlds of possible activity open to us. We can relate to God in all sorts of ways, exploring our own individuality in our worship, but we can't worship anything but our creator. We can say anything we want; we can sing, write poetry and plays, and explore all the rich possibilities of language written, spoken and sung; but we cannot dishonor God's name or use it trivially, nor can we malign our neighbor. We can enjoy all the aspects of sexual love, madly, wildly, as often as we want, wherever we want; only with our spouse. We can take all kinds of things for our own use, and create all manner of secondary things with them; only we cannot take for our use what someone else has taken for his, nor can we use these things as gods.

The Ten Commandments are simply the boundaries of our design as creatures. We were made a certain way, with certain wonderful strengths, and the commandments are in a sense our "specs". As Israel contemplated their new freedom from slavery, God was showing them that they were now able to make all sorts of choices they could not make as slaves. They could be merchants, or farmers, or herdsman, or craftsmen. They could live in what village they wanted. They could build their homes large or small, east or west, marry whom they willed, move when they wanted. They were free. Only, there were these ten kinds of things they could not do without harming themselves and their community. These commandments, in their simplicity and in their "negative" form, presumed and were emblematic of the people's freedom.

The Apocalypse Code

I read Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth in the early 70', in college, when the European Union consisted of 10 nations, the Unites States backed Israel, and Russia backed her enemies, making the Arab-Israeli conflict a very credible tinderbox for worldwide nuclear holocaust. Having only been a Christian a few years at that time, it was my first encounter with "End Times Prophecy", and I was very interested. As many of the points in Lindsey's timeline required the identification and counting of ancient kings, I took some courses in Ancient Near Eastern History. It was immediately clear to me that there is nothing simple or clear about ancient history, and that the matter-of-course manner in which Lindsey asserted his own interpretation of ancient and modern history was intentionally misleading to his readers, at the very least as regards the level of certainty with which the underlying historical facts can be known. It just wasn't that simple, and his self-assurance was unwarranted and smug. I tentatively accepted his general premillenial framework, because it seemed to be part of the general evangelical system of belief and I knew no better. I didn't pursue it any further, as it didn't seem to be something one could actually substantiate.

Some years later, in my mid 20's, I came across More Than Conquerors by William Hendriksen. This book introduced me to the idea that the Book of Revelation was written for and could be understood by the church throughout the ages, not simply the church that happened to exist just before the end. Of course! II Tim 3:16 applies to all scripture, including Daniel and Ezekiel and Revelation, and all Christians down through history. Revelation itself begins with the blessing, "Blessed is he who hears the words of this book and keeps them." How would a first century Christian "keep" a book about international political intrigue, attack helicopters, biological warfare and intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 20th century! (or 21st...it's getting pretty late, Hal.) It treated the Book of Revelation literally, ie, as literature, meant to be interpreted in the way it was written, by human beings who understand written language in all its forms. God had gone to great lengths to develop and teach a manner of expression suitable to the magnitude and sublimity of His works, and was using this language in the book intended to orient all his people, throughout the church age, to their own futures. This made great sense to me, and made all the king-counting and crazy ad-hoc mathematic contortions unnecessary, as the prediction of which part of the world was Gog and which Magog was entirely beside the point! I loved it. I still highly recommend it to anyone who is skeptical of all this Last Days Madness but feels that it goes with the territory of being a serious, Bible-believing Christian. It does not, and the good news, rarely heard in evangelical America, is that belief in such contorted end-times history is not the position of the Church through the ages, but a rather recent idea (end of the 19th century.)

Most recently, a gentleman in one of my Sunday school classes gave me a copy of Hank Hanegraaff's The Apocalypse Code. Do not confuse it with Hal Lindsey's "Apocalypse Code." Hanegraaff's subtitle is "Find out what the Bible really says about the end times, and why it matters today." I highly recommend it. Though it uses apolcalyptic literature (Revelation and Daniel and Ezekiel) as the context, it is really about correct exegesis and hermeneutics. It teaches one how to interpret the Bible, using the Bible as its own guide. The title expresses the core idea that the "decoder" for the book of Revelation is the Old Testament itself, as interpreted by Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament. The concept is simple: God's purpose is to communicate truth to us, primarily truth about His nature and ours, and He has developed a rich linguistic, symbolic and metaphorical language to do so. He teaches us this language by using it in the context of known events in the Old Testament, then having Jesus himself use it in the context of events in the New Testament. Then, when he gives his great revelation to John on the island of Patmos, he uses the very same language, now presumably understood by His people who know his prior word, to lay out for them a vision of the Church age and its consummation in the New Jerusalem.

This book is great. Very readable, very honest, not the least manipulative, and not primarily concerned that the reader adopt a particular view of future history. He is more concerned that the reader learn how to understand Biblical imagery, and that the reader not adopt a wooden literalism in interpreting prophecy. He is also concerned to prevent the nearly-heretical aspects of some popular end-times interpretations, such as that a new temple must be built to reinstate the blood sacrifices that pointed to Jesus and that were fulfilled (and made obsolete) by his own sacrifice once for all.

Get it. Read it. Then talk about it.

(Click here for a site with podcasts of Hanegraaff discussing his book and the issues it addresses.)

The Right Hand of God

**Your right hand, O LORD, glorious in power, your right hand, O LORD, shatters the enemy. (Exo 15:6)
**You stretched out your right hand; the earth swallowed them. (Exo 15:12)
**And to which of the angels has he ever said, "Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet"? (Heb 1:13)
**...looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Heb 12:2)
**Then I saw in the right hand of him who was seated on the throne a scroll written within and on the back, sealed with seven seals. (Rev 5:1)

The "right hand of the Lord" appears throughout the Bible, in over a hundred verses. What are we to make of this? Is God right-handed? Does He have a body? Does this reflect some primitive conception of God as Man-writ-large, like Zeus or Thor?

Though it might be argued that, in one sense, since the Incarnation of Jesus, God does have a body, yet that is not the notion behind these verses. Rather, this use of "God's hand" is the condescension of God in speaking to us, and in accepting our speaking of Him, in terms that have meaning to us who are embodied and finite. To us, "the hand is that part of the body which enables man to be a doer, a tool-making and tool-using being; thus it is associated with power or control." (ISBE, "Hand") It is with our hands that we make things and control things. Short of losing our minds, the loss of our hands is most disabling. Even within our brains, the amount of space given to sensation and control of our hands is larger than any part except that given to our mouths and speech. We are, essentially, speaking and making beings, made in the image of a speaking and making God.

For whatever reason, the vast majority of humans are right-handed; our right hands are more easily controlled. (It would be interesting to speculate about why God created us in this assymetrical manner. Why, when we appear to have bilateral symmetry, are we actually, inside, assymetrical?) So when we speak of God's power to do things, when we speak of him as a maker or controller, we speak in terms of his right hand. It is not because he is right-handed, but because most of us are. This demonstrates a fact about the Bible that it is critical for a reader to understand: The Bible is written for us humans, and uses all the aspects of human language and literature. To take the Bible "literally" means to read it as it was meant to be read, not woodenly or concretely, but as "literature" ("writing"). We humans use metaphor, simile, hyperbole, and many other non-concrete forms of language, and our most expressive and well-loved literature is most filled with such non-concrete language. The descriptors "poetic" or "lyrical" are generally taken to indicate praise, while "prosaic" is generally a criticism. The Bible speaks of God's mouth, his eye, his arm, his feet, his heart, his sword, his breath. God speaks to us in terms that we understand, as beings that have our powers located in those organs. He uses our own manner of speaking, so that we will understand him clearly.

So, the "right hand of God" usually speaks of his power and control. Standing or sitting at a ruler's right hand associated one with his power, and hence was a place of honor. When blessing children, the right hand was normally placed upon the firstborn, symbolizing the favored status of being firstborn. (See the scene where Jacob blesses Joseph's children, Ephraim and Manasseh) Jesus is the "firstborn among many brethren". He is our elder brother; the Father's right hand is upon him.

Praying the Psalter

In his lectures on Wonder, Heartbreak and Hope recommended previously, Gideon Strauss observes that the chief reason he was able to avoid complete emotional and spiritual disintegration during his participation in South Africa's Commission for Truth and Reconciliation was that he had begun to pray the Psalter in the years immediately preceeding. He therefore already possessed a language for expressing to himself and to God the deep pain, personal brokenness, and agonizing thirst for justice that the endless accounts of violence and loss effected in him. Dr. Strauss is a learned man, and at the time already had his PhD in philosophy and had been many years a Christian. Nevertheless, it was these poems and songs, these works of literary art that preserved his soul and sanity, rather than the didactic, factual portions of scripture.

There is a sense in which we live in our songs and poetry more deeply than in our intellectual knowledge. This is most obvious in our youth, during which time we seek refuge in our music, even identify ourselves by our music. But I think it is true throughout life. Our hearts resonate with poetry and song more deeply than with other forms of expression.

Praying the Psalter gives language to our hearts, a vocabulary for every occasion in life from the most sublime joy to the deepest personal agony. The Psalms are especially human, and sometimes raw; they express even those feelings that we might otherwise feel are forbidden. They sing of feeling abandoned by God, of feeling jealous of the good fortune of people who seem not to deserve it, of hatred for enemies, of confusion, of sickness and fear of death, of the desire to be avenged. They are songs of human beings sitting honestly before a patient and understanding God, who is Himself a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief and betrayal. They lay it all out, even the twisted bits, and ask God to see and to respond, or even just to sigh with us. Praying these songs, seeking to identify with and understand the Psalmist, prepares us to meet these emotions and to see them as common to man if and when they come upon us.

Wonder, Heartbreak and Hope

My friend Gideon Strauss has posted three powerful lectures containing his reflections upon insights he gained in the months and years surrounding his service as a translator for South Africa's Commission for Truth and Reconciliation. (Click on the title of this post to go there and listen, or you can download them for iPod use by right-clicking the links there.)

Be warned: this is hard, sad stuff. Dr. Strauss found himself praying Psalm 137 for two years after the experience (that's the Psalm that ends, "O daughter of Babylon, happy is he who repays you...who seizes your infants and dashes them upon the rocks." If you have had trouble with this Psalm, (as I hope you have), these reflections may help you understand why it is there in the Psalter, how real and violent and dark is the darkness in this world, and how our wonderful and weeping saviour may draw wonder and hope even out of such darkness.

Born in Zion: Psalm 87

Over the past year, I have been spending a lot of time reading in Isaiah, in preparation for a Sunday school class I have been teaching. In that book are many oracles "against the nations", in which the Lord punishes them for their idolatry and for oppressing his people. There is a lot of doom and gloom in Isaiah, far more than those know who merely read the Christmas prophesies and the Suffering Servant segments, which are the climactic Good News that comes only after a lot of very bad news laid out in the preceding forty or fifty chapters. And it is not only the gentile Nations that are in trouble, but Israel and Judah especially, for they of all the nations should have known better, but behaved no differently.

How delightful then to find, again and again, in Isaiah and throughout the old and new testaments, that the delight of God rests, finally, not only in Israel but also in all the other nations of the world, even those who were her particular enemies. Zion is more than simply a hill in Jerusalem, but becomes figuratively that place, that city to which all of God's children eventually come.

In Psalm 87 we see a list of countries who were at one time enemies of Israel, and some of them her chief enemies: Egypt, Babylon, and Philistia. These are among "those who know Me", and it seems that God is pleased to say that they know Him. Furthermore, though being born in these countries granted one a certain panache in the ancient world, such as being from New York or Moscow or Beijing today, yet all those who know God are said to be "born in Zion." She is the central City, the only City in the end, after the fall of the only other city, Babylon. Once you become a citizen of Zion, that identity gathers into itself all one's other identities. When we are born again, this is the city in which we are born, so that it will be said, "this one and that one were born in her...."

That City will gather into herself all that is good, all that is beautiful and worthy in all the cultures and peoples of the world, and make it her own, because, of course, it was hers all along. As God makes his rain to fall upon the wicked and the righteous both, so His beauty is shed abroad among the nations, even to those who persecute His people and suppress his truth. All will bear fruit that will be gathered in again at the end, into his holy city for His pleasure and the pleasure of His people.

By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their
glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day--and there will be no
night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.
(Rev 21:24-26)

Reading Through the Bible

Some old friends from "Kairos" have begun to read through the Bible together, and have started a blog in which they reflect on their reading. What a great format through which to wrestle with the truth! Click on the heading of this post to go there, and be sure to read the comments...I have asked one of their writers to see if she can post the reading schedule, so that anyone so inclined could join the group and read along. I have also placed a link in the margin at left, so you can easily jump there from this site.

Christian Classics Ethereal Library

On the sidebar I have added a resource I use often, Calvin College's "Christian Classics Ethereal Library". It has hundreds, if not thousands, of public domain classics covering nearly all of the Church Age so far. You can read them online, or download them in various common formats like Adobe and Palm and Word and Reader. It was begun and is overseen by Harry Plantinga and now a board at Calvin. Check it out, it's great!

Random Thought...

The capability of being delighted is a fine thing.

Some Thoughts on David's Blog

Some thoughts on morality and the new Earth.

An Elegy for Buttercup

This morning dawned clear and cold with a scattering of snow on the ground. It will be the last morning for our beloved dog, Buttercup. At 2:30 today, the vet will come to our home and put her to sleep. I hope that she wakes up enough before then to go outside with me a last time to sniff the air.

I am not taking this very well. I have gone off to weep several times in the days since we made the decision. There is much meaning wrapped up in a dog's life; many memories. It is hard to think of it ending. It forebodes other endings.

Our animals generally live much shorter lives than we do, at least the ones we choose as pets. Why should a 65 lb dog live only 15 years and a 120 lb adult live 80? Perhaps that we might more frequently and more safely contemplate life and death, and the cycles in our lives.

My life so far has encompassed the lives of two beloved dogs. I have had others, but only two whose lives were completely involved in my own from beginning to end. Pixie was the dog of my childhood, who shared my life from age 6 until age 16, when I entered upon my adulthood and my walk with Christ. When she died, in my arms, I somehow understood that my childhood was over, and she had seen me through it. She had been my companion on many explorations of my growing world; I shared my childhood sorrows with her, and she seemed to absorb them and bear them up quietly, as dogs do. I knew, when she died, that in the next ten years my adult life would be defined. She would not be there, she had done her part. And I knew that I was entering a world in which there would be losses.

Buttercup has been the dog of my maturity, growing up with my children who now, as she dies, are entering their own adulthoods in their various ways. The six of us were her pack; she was happiest when we were all home, and would lie where we were gathered. Each night she slept beneath one of our beds, or on the corner of a sleeping bag when friends were over. We have hiked, canoed, splashed in streams, dug snow forts together. She has slept amidst my wife and children when I worked those many nights. Our windowsills are scarred from her claws; our carpets are worn with her path up the steps under the banister. She was the gentlest of dogs. She loved to have her face rubbed.

Now she is nearly gone. Those once-acute ears can no longer hear the birds, nor any but the loudest speech. Her world is quiet, and her eyes are dim. For some time she has been unable to mount the stairs, so she sleeps alone. Over the years her pack has drifted away, to college and to other new homes. Her world has become very small. Sometimes at night she will yip the lonely yip, and one of us will sleep on the couch till she falls asleep. Sometimes she is incontinent, and embarassed. She is afraid of edges.

Yet she is still there, still in time with us, even now. She does not look bad; she does not look sick. She is still warm and soft and breathing. She still likes her face rubbed, though her eyes are somewhat glazed from the pain medications. But she cannot pee and has not eaten for days. She goes outside and is puzzled why no urine will emerge.

It is an odd thing, this contemplation of her coming death. I have seen death many times, of course, but nearly always of humans. It is always mysterious. One minute there is a person there, then there is just a body. With humans, it can be approached with language. There are last words; there are understood goodbyes. In this death, she does not understand. And I cannot make her know what she has meant to me and to her pack.

In four hours, she will go out of time. She will be there, warm and moving and loving us, and then she will be still, and will never move again. Somehow this thought is devastating to me. Time the destroyer, again.

C.S. Lewis wondered about the souls of animals. "Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth?" (Ecc 3:21) He wondered whether beloved animals might become "real" by the chosen love of their masters, even as we become real by the love of our Master. I cannot read The Velveteen Rabbit without weeping. I do not like to think of a world in which anything really good, really beautiful is utterly lost. It does not seem like something my God would allow. I would pray, "Heavenly Father, you have made this beautiful, gentle animal to be our companion for these many years, a lesser being with enough consciousness to be faithful and gentle and loving, to form a bond with us greater beings that brings us both comfort and pleasure, to choose (usually) what she knew would please us, and to give both of us joy in our respective natures. As surely as other humans, this being has entered into the eternal lives and memory of us and our children. Can not this lesser being be granted an existence with us in eternity? Can she not share with us the new earth we shall inherit, content as a lesser being to attend at the heels of her beloved masters, even as we shall be content to walk with you as lesser beings basking in your love? Will our new earth be filled only with humans or greater beings, and no lesser? Is our condescension to and love for lesser dependent beings not a reflection of your love for us in some way? I think it may be so. If so, please grant that these beloved animals, among them this particular creation of yours, Buttercup, might have the pleasure and honor of renewal when you renew all things. "

We just walked outside for a bit. She sniffs the air, but does not seem interested. She tries to pee. I wonder what she knows. Does a merciful God allow the animals some acceptance of death? Some animal behavior suggests it. Does she discern a coming end in our sorrow, in our attendance upon her in these last hours? Is she sad with our sorrow, or with her own?

I contemplate my own end in this death. I doubt that my own life will encompass the life of another dog. I will be a grandfather in a few months. There will be dogs yet in the lives of my children, and in their children's, but probably not in my own. Perhaps there will be a dog of my old age; I do not know. It would be a dog of leavings and of sorrow. It will not be that long before I, too, will wonder why I cannot pee, and will lose the song of birds and the high notes of the children's laughter.

I know the ending of Ecclesiastes, have known it long. This is the way of things under the sun. There will be joy and sorrow both. Buttercup's life was a blessing and a joy, and her death is a sorrow. One entails the other till we return to our maker and enter into the new Earth prepared for us. There, I think, we will rediscover much that was lost here in this beginning of our long lives.

Hebrews 1 on Kairos site

A few thoughts on Hebrews are posted on the Kairos blog.

In His hands are the Caverns...

In the Daily Office, one frequenty recites a Venite which proclaims, "In His hand are the caverns of the earth; the heights of the mountains are His also." This is probably based upon Ps 95:4.

We are accustomed to looking up to the heights in our contemplation of God, and many feel somehow closer to God when on a mountaintop. But I am also moved by contemplation of the truth that not only the obvious mountains but the inapparent caverns are in His hand, are his workmanship.

As a child I visited various caverns with my parents, the largest being Luray Caverns in Virginia. The stories of the discovery of these caverns have a certain similarity. For millenia, their existence is hidden beneath the earth, and one day someone finds a sinkhole, or cool air emanating from under a rock, and digs a little to discover breathtaking beauty that has lain unknown and unappreciated beneath our feet for hundreds of years, thousands of years. All that time, slow millimeter by millimeter and unappreciated by mortal eyes, God has carved chambers filled with beauty and mirror pools and deep quiet. A work of removal and accretion, the work of Water moving through and out of Rock.

We are an impatient race. What work is God doing beneath our feet, unknown to us, over the decades of our own lives and over the centuries of the life of the City of Zion? What caverns of beauty will be revealed to us in that Day when we shall see clearly and know as we are known? What shapes are being carved out of our stony hearts by the slow but relentless movement through them of the water of life?

The Ten Commandments

I have had a wonderful opportunity to think upon the Decalogue over the past several weeks, while discussing the Commandments in Kairos and our high school Bible study. How deep is God's wisdom, how searching his words! Here in these ancient instructions lie hidden deep truths about God, man, and our place in the creation. These commandments set themselves apart from the cultic and civil law of Israel by addressing the very foundations of our existence and our relatedness to God and other persons and things. They begin at the beginning, with the questions of who we are, where did we come from, and what is reality? Then, what is wrong with us, and how should we then live? They rough out a sketch of human life in a created world in which everything matters, and persons most of all. Without an understanding illuminated by this light, the world would seem dark indeed.

Then God spoke all these words, saying, "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the LORD your God gives you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor."
(Exo 20:1-17 NASB)

Fertile questions:

1. What assumptions about the world in which we live underly the commandment?
2. What is it about us that makes the commandment necessary?
3. What would perfect compliance with the commandment look like?

"Speaking of Faith"

I recently discovered this very interesting podcast site. (In fact, I only just discovered the convenience of podcasts!) The hostess, Krista Tippet, may or may not be a Christian; I cannot tell from my listening so far, and have not explored it. However, she is a very respectful and sympathetic interviewer, without any discernable agenda or running subtext so common in programs about "faith" per se. She seems to be exploring the interface of religion and culture. She asks good questions, does not attack her interviewees, and is not eager to insert her own views. I have listened to programs on the gods of business, Einstein's god and his ethics, the Mohammad cartoon controversy, and Israeli and Palestinian narratives of the middle East conflict. All quite interesting. Check it out. It's free - including the podcasts - at the site above.

More Than We Ask

In Genesis Chapter 18, Abraham contends with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Some commentators think that he was particularly concerned about his nephew Lot, and his family, whom he knew to be living in the plain cities. Abraham dares to importune God, and the angel of God agrees to spare the city if ten righteous men are found in it.

In Chapter 19, we see the Angels arriving in Sodom to rescue Lot and his family from the coming destruction. Verse 29 notes that, "God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot lived." God was not obligated to do this. As there were not ten righteous men in the city, he would have been completely justified in overthrowing both cities without rescuing the family of Abraham. Yet, though Abraham did not articulate it, God understood his unspoken concern for his family. As a loving father he granted not the prayer that Abraham articulated, but instead satisfied the desires of his heart.

I find this very comforting, and a great encouragement to prayer. Though we should always aim to communicate clearly with God, just as we aim to communicate clearly with each other, yet we should not worry that God will misunderstand us. He knows the desires of our hearts. He knows these desires better than we do. He loves those desires, or those portions of our desires, that are good and that correspond to his desires. These he grants; these he owns as being prayed in his name. He answers our prayers beyond the particularities that we may impose upon them. He gives us even better than we ask for.

Today is the feast of Epiphany

One feature of Mission St. Claire's Daily Office site (that presents each day's prayer service from the Book of Common Prayer) is a brief explanation of the traditional Church Calendar. (A wise friend once noted that, if we ignore the Church calendar, we will fall back to the Hallmark calendar. Only too true...).
Today is Epiphany. Here, from St. Claire's site, is an explanation.

On this day we celebrate the holy Epiphany of our Lord and God and Savior
Jesus Christ.
In all the holy churches of God we celebrate today the holy
Epiphany of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ and from evening onwards we
keep a vigil because when the Lord completed His thirtieth year on earth He
wanted to make Himself known to people that He is God in body. When the Lord was
being baptized by John, he was revealed in voice by God the Father from above
and by the coming of the Holy Spirit to be true God and consubstantial with the
Father. From that time onwards it was made known to all through miracles and His
excellent teaching that He certainly is the God who was openly preached by the
prophets.
He came to baptism for such a reason: When the Lord became man for
us, he fulfilled the whole law throughout His whole life. John on the other hand
came from the desert and was baptizing in river Jordan according to what God had
told him and to the order and law of God, as Luke the evangelist says (Luke
3,2). That is why the Lord wishing to fulfil even this word as divine law, after
he completed thirty years of age, He went to John the Baptist to be baptized as
the rest of men did, although he had no need of baptism being sinless. John
respecting the Lord and thinking of his own worthlessness said: "I have need to
be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?" But the Lord encourages and moves
John to baptize Him, showing that what he thinks to be improper is most proper,
i.e. the Lord to be baptized by the servant. That is why He told him: "Suffer it
to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness". According to
the divine Chrysostomos righteousness is here called by the Lord the perfection
of all the commandments (in his homily on baptism), i.e. it is as if He says:
because I have perfected all the commandments of divine law, this is the only
one that is left, that is why I have to perfect it, too.
This is when John
gave up his objections. So, when the Lord was baptized by him, he immediately
rose from the water and behold! The heavens opened and John saw the Spirit of
God descending like a dove and going to Jesus. But even a voice from heavens
above was heard saying: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased".
From this it was made obvious to the Jews that John was not greater than Jesus,
according to the false conviction held by many, but that he was incomparably
lower than Him and that he was His servant. That is why the Spirit descending
addressed the Father's voice to Jesus and obviously showed as if pointing out
with the finger that "This is my beloved Son" was not said about John the
Baptist, although he was glorified and accepted by many, but it was said about
Jesus who was being baptized. When the Lord had completed this legal commandment
of baptism as well, He broke the curse which had been put on Adam because he had
broken the Divine law and, delivering us from condemnation, he brought every
ceremonial law to and end from that time onwards lifting them up to a more
spiritual and perfect level. Following this He discontinued the Jewish baptism
and gave to us, the faithful, the commandment to be baptized with the baptism of
the three immersions and immersions, which has the grace of the Holy Spirit that
was absent from John's baptism. Because, when the Lord had been baptized in that
same river, he completed the shadowy and imperfect baptism and opened the gates
of the spiritual and divine baptism of the Church.