Fugue

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Imagine
                    creation—

          See as though standing there
          (though there is no there yet
                    only nowhere, Nothing,
                    a space not even black because black hasn’t been
                    created yet,
                              only absence,
                                                            Void,
                                                                                          Nothing—)

          the apocalyptic eruption
          (apocalypse, apokalupsis, revelation, the opening of the curtains of the world)
          at the sound of a Voice
                              that carries through emptiness
                    (a scientific impossibility, that, but
                              impossibility never stopped this Voice yet)
                                        to tear back the face of Nothing
                                        and reveal Something,
                    raw light from everywhere bursting forth—“Let there be Light!”—
                    dazzling your eyes—
                    creating color,
                              light waiting only for more to be made
                              that it might illuminate
                                        (for what light can shine with nothing to shine on?) . . .

Can you imagine?
Perhaps a humbler image, analogy, a comprehensible scale
                    —human scale, not God’s—
                              his cabinets are too high for us to reach
                              to bring down his tools of creation

          Have you ever known writers,
                    had the privilege of sitting among them?
          Listen to the bursting-forth of worlds in their speech,
                              new creations birthing in the cross-cutting ideas—

                                        “What if we had a story in which
                                                            the hero turned into the villain
                                                  and the villain
                                                                      the hero?”

                    “I’m playing with a world where
                                        Israel stayed faithful and became a great empire—
                              what would that look like?”

                                        “The idea is that the essence of each object, its name,
                                                  is music, and if you know the music
                              you have power to control the object.”

                    “What do you know about dragons?
                                        I have this dragon who keeps wanting to change color on me.”

                                                            “Do you think—
                              can I get away with putting coffee into a fantasy story?”

          again, language shapes the world
                    as they speak and bring
                                        time
                                        space
                                        being
                    into focus.
                              It’s the same thing, really,
                              or at least the same sort of thing, this speaking,
                              as the grand re-echoing Word of God—
                    as he spoke
                              (“Let there be Light!”)
                                                  so they speak
          and there is light shining across plains, mountains, seas, faces,
                    lighting the words and deeds
                    of heroes and villains
                              of all the people in between—
                              you and me as it were recaptured
                                        in other times and places that never were
                    though they often should have been

 

Photo ©2018 Gerd Altmann.  Free for use.

Mercy as justice

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Whoever keeps the whole law but fails at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.  For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.”  If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker.  Speak and act as those who will be judged by the law of liberty, for judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy.  Mercy triumphs over judgment.

—James 2:10-13

In human courts, mercy and justice seem clearly to be mutually opposed:  justice for the victims of crime means imposing punishments on criminals, and pleas for mercy are requests that those punishments be lessened (or not imposed at all).  At the same time, the operation of human justice consists of the rendering and enactment of judgments on crime and criminals.

Given these realities, it’s no surprise that we assume God’s justice and mercy to be equally at odds.  Salvation through Jesus is often understood as God’s mercy overcoming his justice, and this understanding is presented as a straightforward reading of James 2:13b:  “Mercy triumphs over judgment.”  We may not even notice that it says judgment rather than justice—after all, aren’t they the same thing?

Well, no.  No, they aren’t.Read more→

Christian idolatry

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We like making life all about us (at least until things start going wrong).  That’s as true of believers as of anyone else, which means there is a constant pull to shrink our faith—to scale it to the size of our problems, our goals, and our perception of our own sin.  The only countermeasure to this pull is to keep refocusing ourselves on the bigness of God and the great sweep of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  As Mark Brouwer put it, “The Gospel is about reconciling people together, setting captives free, overcoming injustice, bringing healing to hurts . . . it’s not just getting our sins forgiven so that we can go to heaven when we die.”

Anything less than the true gospel can become an idol, because anything which is not the gospel can be made to be all about us, one way or another.  Even our salvation can become an idol; rather than being “the salvation which God gave me even though I don’t deserve it,” it can become “the salvation which belongs to me because I earned it.”  Instead of a reason for humility, it becomes a cause for pride.  Sadly, the world can see this clearly in the many professed Christians who carry themselves with a sense of moral and spiritual superiority.

The only countermeasure is for the church to continually refocus and recenter itself on the full gospel of Jesus Christ.  It’s only by making our churches all about the gospel that we can keep them free of the idolatries that will otherwise, inevitably, seep in.  Any other focus makes idolatry inevitable, because if we have the opportunity to make our faith all about us, we’ll take it.  Every time.

 

Gustave Doré, The Brazen Serpent, engraved by Alphonse François, 1883.

hope*links

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This week’s fruit from some of my fellow hope*writers:

Jennifer Riales reflects on the challenge of waiting on God

Jennifer Denney (good week for Jennifers, I guess) looks back on “two years of nomad-life” and the importance of living intentionally for what’s actually important

Amy Noel Green struggles with skepticism and the ways other Christians can be stumbling blocks for our faith (Instagram link provided in case the Facebook link doesn’t work)

There is none righteous; no, not one

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I linked a few days ago to Yolanda Lichty’s post on the mass grave of 215 First Nations children found on the grounds of the former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia; the day I posted, the bodies of 751 First Nations people, mostly children, were found on the site of another closed residential school, this one in Saskatchewan.  The story continues to be exposed—and not just in Canada; the US did much the same thing, and now the Department of the Interior is committed to finding out if it has its own graves crying out for justice.

 

Photo taken ca. 1920 by F. H. Kitto.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Consider the Source

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(Psalm 1)

This morning we’re starting a sermon series from the Psalms.  I say from the Psalms rather than on the Psalms because there are 150 of them and we don’t want to spend three years on this; but that very fact that there are 150 makes it a challenge to figure out where to look.  When starting anything, I tend to defer to the King of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who instructed the White Rabbit, “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end:  then stop.”  But does that really matter here?  Stories have beginnings, and essays—like the ones our middle-school English teachers have to pound their students through—but the book of Psalms?

Thing is, though it doesn’t have the same sort of throughline as a story or an essay, the book of Psalms does have an introduction and a conclusion.  In fact, it has a two-part introduction—that’s why some ancient manuscripts of the Psalter combined the first two psalms into one.  Psalm 1 operates at the level of the individual, and then Psalm 2 speaks of the community of faith among the godless nations.  Both areas of focus are important throughout the book; but you can’t really do both in one sermon, so we’re just doing the first part this morning.Read more→

In my end is my beginning

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We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise.  In my end is my beginning.

—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “East Coker,” V.

If people know anything about 2 Corinthians, it’s probably the “thorn in the flesh” passage, 12:7-10.  On the one hand, there are all sorts of ideas as to what the thorn in the flesh was, and those sorts of speculative disagreements always generate interest.  On the other, this is where we get the oft-quoted idea that God’s power is perfected in weakness.  Unfortunately, however, I think the standard interpretation of this passage misses what’s actually going on.Read more→

Belated, but still appreciated

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This week beat me; there’s no two ways about it.  I won’t say I didn’t get anything done, but I had specific plans to write, and those didn’t get done; a blog post I started last Friday is still sitting as a draft, just to name one thing.

I also didn’t get my weekly hope*writers post up before this.  I thought about doing two weeks’ worth in one post, but decided against it—it seemed to me that doing so would de-emphasize the writers to whom I’m linking, and I don’t want to do that.

I love the way Katie Scott put this:  “God is predictable in His character and unexpected in His actions.”  It always delights me when someone captures something I’ve been trying to say better than I’ve managed to say it.

Yolanda Lichty grapples with a terrible story which is little-known outside of Canada (I’m familiar with it from my time at Regent) in her post “215 Is too Many: Confessions and Questions of a White Canadian Mennonite”—the story of the residential schools to which indigenous peoples were forced to send their children and the abuses that happened in those schools.  I commend Katie Scott’s post to you because it’s encouraging; I commend Yolanda Lichty’s to you as a point of entry into a hard story that needs to be heard.