On Revelation and Humility

 I wrote a post inspired by teaching Foundations of Theology at Notre Dame, and it got posted on my church blog. Key points: The mere act of God revealing himself shows humility on God's part. It also is a manifestation of grace. You can read it here. 

On the Meaning of Life

“Nothing like cooking on a freshly cleaned stove to make you contemplate the futility of all human endeavors.” Some of you may recognize this as a Facebook status I posted a while ago. It was a joke. But it was also deadly serious.

I could blame it on the lockdown. Not seeing anyone in person has this way of making relationships less satisfying. Or maybe I just have too much time to myself to think.

On a pretty regular basis lately, I’ve been feeling like everything is pointless. I cook. I eat. I run out of food and need to cook again. I clean. Dirt piles up. I exercise. It makes no discernible difference in my health, unless I do it again and again and again. In the short term, the exercise might even make me sore. And in the long term, I’m still going to die.

Yes, but what about those things that only need to be done once? My knitting and writing, for example. Each of these produces a thing that wasn’t there before. But does the world really need another baby blanket? And my dissertation … will be read by exactly four people in the form I’m working on right now. If I’m lucky, I’ll publish it after significant revisions. Maybe someone will read it in that form, too. Maybe someone will be convinced to look at the Bible closer to the way I do. I think that will be a good thing? But my confidence in my ability to come to the truth right now is very low.

And then there are relationships. Normally, I tell myself that if I can make life better for one other person, then my life counts. But is that happening? “Making life better” is a vague goal, and it’s harder to convince myself I’m reaching it when I can’t see people in person. My presence in a room feels significant in a way that silently lurking on a zoom call isn’t. Talking on a zoom call feels more like a contribution, but sometimes I don’t have anything to say. And in the long term, other people are going to die, too.

Fun is … fun. But it doesn’t really matter if I have fun. Work is always there afterward. And does anyone other than me care if I enjoy myself? Maybe because they’re kind, but not because it actually helps them in any way.

But writing this has been somewhat artificial. I was feeling life’s pointlessness at the beginning, but as I wrote, I kept thinking about other things. Things that go beyond the futility I was describing. Like how making something that wasn’t there before is me exercising the image of God. Like how other people are made in the image of God, and that’s why improving their lives is a good thing. Like how even though we’re all gonna die, that’s not the end of the story.

I guess what I’m writing is a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes. There is nothing new under the sun, including this blog post. Ecclesiastes talks about life under the sun, in a world without God. It concludes that everything is meaningless. But then, the implication is, we must turn our eyes to something greater than the sun. We live under heaven, under God, and that is what makes this life significant. We do good things, even if we’re just going to have to do them again, because he made us to do them. Our relationships matter because people are walking pictures of God, and they’re going to exist forever. What we create is valuable not because the world desperately needs another baby blanket or even another dissertation, but because by making, we are acting out the image of our Maker, and that brings Him pleasure(!). Even fun matters as we enjoy the good world He made or good things made by his “sub-creators” (a term I shamelessly borrow from Tolkien).

In some ways, it’s good for us to “contemplate the futility of all human endeavors.” We tend to make the good things in life more than they are, as though we can make our own meaning. But that’s impossible, for meaning has to connect to something outside of us to count as meaning. We need to be humbled, to recognize that what we work for and worry about isn’t as big as it seems.

And yet, right now, we also need to be elevated. We need to look up and see beyond the sun to the heaven that makes our lives matter. We need this both for our own sanity and because it helps us focus on what truly matters. Yes, fun is valuable if received as a gift and rejoiced in, but using it to numb ourselves to pain is a misuse of it. The same goes for work, and relationships and everything else. We must relate them to the Creator for only in Him do they find their meaning.

By the Dead Sea

This poem was inspired by a trip I recently took to Masada. The beauty of the landscape amazed me and made the architecture of the fortress far more impressive.

I stand upon Earth’s deepest height,

My spirit yearning to take wing,

To leap up toward the greater light.

The craggy cliffs in silence sing

To me of beauty brave and bare,

Of solid sculpted forms that stand,

That, crowned by solar beauty, bear

The fingerprints of Heaven’s hand,

And distantly I think I see

An echo of the closer song,

A blue-gray ridge, its melody

More faint from distance, yet as strong.

Its cliffs cascade down toward the sea

That scatters salt upon the shore

In crystals that plant poetry

In me. I stand. I adore.

Chaos and Pentecost

The first time we meet the Holy Spirit in the Bible is in Genesis 1, where the earth is formless and empty and God’s Spirit hovers over the water. In the ancient Near East, water was a common symbol for chaos as it has no regular shape and can be both a source of life and a terrifying force of destruction (think of a storm at sea). Many ancient creation stories spoke of a deity associated with water being defeated by the god who would become head of the pantheon. But in Genesis, the water is not a god; it’s just the state of disorder that exists before God forms the world. The first chapter of Genesis is the story of God’s spirit bringing order out of disorder.

The formless, surging waters return a few chapters later in the story of Noah’s flood. Once again, the water is not a deity but a tool in the hand of God. It’s also a consequence of human sin; God sends the flood in response to the moral chaos of a world of violence and bloodshed. But the Holy Spirit, though not mentioned in the text, still hovers over the waters, which we know because God plans to bring new life into this world of formlessness. That new life is Noah, his family and the animals aboard the ark.

Skip ahead another few chapters. Once again humanity is sinning against God, this time by building a tower designed to reach heaven. God responds by once again returning the world to chaos. But this time the chaos isn’t water (since God promised not to do that again). This time the chaos is the babble of thousands of languages, which the people now speak. Unable to understand one another, the people scatter over the face of the earth. This time there is no Noah who escapes the judgment. But in the next chapter, God calls a man named Abram, who will become the ancestor of a nation through which all families of the earth will be blessed.

Thousands of years later, people from all over the world gather in Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of Pentecost. These are descendants of Abram (now called Abraham), but they speak the languages of a myriad of nations. Suddenly the sound of a wind begins to blow. The Spirit is once again hovering over the chaos. A group of men stand up and begin speaking about Jesus, the one who fulfilled the entirety of the promise to Abram. And everyone hears them speaking in their own language. The chaos of Babel is finally brought to order. A new community is created. And the mark of that new community is water – the water of baptism.

Autumn Poems

Autumn Wonders

Why are dead leaves so lovely?

Why is the sky so blue?

Why does the starlight reach into our night

And whisper that hope is true?

Our world is infused with blessing

That my logic cannot explain

And it whispers “rejoice” in a still, small, voice

Beyond the clamor of pain.

So I’ll dance as the leaves are dying,

I’ll look up at the bright blue sky

I’ll let starlight into my heart’s dark night

And trust that hope does not lie.

For love makes the dead leaves lovely

And soon buds will burst forth new

Love colors the sky and makes the stars cry,

“In the night, hope still is true.”

Flames unfurling in the cold

Paint the landscape red and gold.

Drained of green, yet vibrant still,

Waiting for the winter’s chill.

The wind picks up; they tumble down

And in falling gild the ground.

Thus they whisper without breath,

“Beauty blossoms out of death”

Years spent in New England and the Upper Midwest have taught me to love autumn. The leaves are so beautiful, and yet they only change color because they’re in the process of dying. Here are two poems I wrote this year meditating on this paradox. Looking at the poems, I see the beaten-down paths depression has left on my soul, but in my better moments I know that this death, too, is giving way to beauty.

The Tabernacle: God in Our Midst

The first few times I tried reading the Bible through from start to finish, the place where I ran into trouble was the section on the Tabernacle. I could get through the genealogies in Genesis, which only lasted a chapter or so at most, but the tabernacle account contains six chapters (Exod. 25-31) of building instructions and lists of materials, dimensions, parts of pieces of furniture, and so on. These chapters are followed by the story of the Golden Calf, which lasts about three chapters, and then five more chapters (Exod. 35-40) of descriptions of the building instructions being carried out. This raises the question of why the text places so much emphasis on how the Tabernacle was constructed.


Read more at https://michianacovenant.org/the-tabernacle-god-in-our-midst/ 

News and the Kingdom

The world is in turmoil. Last week it looked like the U.S. was on the brink of nuclear war with North Korea. This week the news is buzzing with reports of white supremacists marching and violence that flows from that. If you come across this post a few weeks from now, there will probably be some new disaster in the news that has people worried. There is a lot of genuine evil in the world, and it can get overwhelming.

Two days in a row, my devotions have pointed me to verses that seem particularly relevant to all the nonsense that's happening in the world.* Yesterday was Isaiah 9:6-7 "To us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on His shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on the throne of David and over His kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this.”

Now that you, my readers, all have Handel’s Messiah going through your heads, let me point out the themes that he overlooked. We’re talking about a king who establishes a just, righteous government that is never overthrown and establishes peace. The Hebrew concept of peace is much broader than just a cessation of fighting. It refers to wellbeing, flourishing, a state where all is, generally speaking, well.

Today I read Daniel 7:13-14: “The Son of Man will come with the clouds of heaven. In the presence of the Ancient of Days, He will be given dominion and glory and a kingdom, so that all peoples, nations, and men of every language will worship Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and His kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.”

This verse isn’t about events that will happen in the future. It’s about Jesus coming into the presence of the Ancient of Days (God the Father) after His ascension to receive authority. Already we see people from all peoples, nations and languages worshipping Him.

Jesus already reigns over our broken world. On a cosmic level, all is well. That doesn’t mean we just sit around and wait for him to act. It means that as we do the work of advancing justice and righteousness, we can be confident that in the end good will triumph.

*The verses were collected by Ken Boa in his book A Journal of Sacred Readings, which I highly recommend.