Category Archives: Musings

Sometimes you just have one of those days where you wish you had a RESTART button.

Somewhere recently I heard the term “The Facebook Lie”, which refers to the lies we tell on Facebook about our lives: the glowing portraits of a healthily functioning family at play, the hilarious things that we say to each other on a daily basis, the delicious meals, the serene setting in which we live. It’s not that those things individually are not true, but the overall picture we paint is a false one. Our lives are not living Norman Rockwell or Thomas Kinkade paintings. Where are the arguments, the tears, the yelling, the mess? It’s one sided. I’ve thought more than once that maybe I should record some of those messy, ugly times with stylized Instagram photos and gritty Facebook statuses. I haven’t done that yet, except in what follows I guess.

I went to bed quite late last night. I knew it was a bad idea and all that prevented me from going to sleep was mindless browsing of the internet and hitting “refresh.” My body was tired, but I just didn’t want to go to sleep yet. I guess I did eventually watch a movie, but still, not a good reason to stay up these days.

Dixie was in Calgary for the week and I chatted with her a bit toward the end of the evening. I said, “I shouldn’t have stayed up so late. Now I’ll be grumpy with the kids tomorrow and generally useless.”

And so it was.

I turned my light off at about 12:15 or 12:30, about two hours later than we normally do. There was no school today, so I let the kids stay up a little later on the assumption that they would sleep in. They did a little, but not much. I was woken up at 7:39 by Olivia’s tapping on the railing of her bunk bed. That’s about 40 minutes later than I normally get up, it wasn’t enough to make up for the late night and I couldn’t get back to sleep.

Until about mid-afternoon, it was one of those days in which I repeatedly wished I had a “RESTART” button I could press to have a second (or third or fourth) go at the day. I was tired and didn’t feel like doing what the kids wanted to do (“The Game of Life”? Really?) and I was edgy. I’d snap at the kids, show them very little mercy (in other words: wouldn’t let them be kids), raised my voice in irritation and anger. Of course, they were the problem. My day would be much better if they would just stop…being them.

Later on the day I reflected on this. The problem wasn’t the kids. I mean, they had their moments of fighting, loudness, rudeness, disobedience and poor listening, but that’s not unusual. They’re kids, after all. The problem was me. I was cranky, I was on edge, I was impatient, which meant that I reacted where I didn’t need to react and, worse, I would set both them and myself up for further failure. One of them does something that isn’t wrong in itself, but it really bugs me because I’m tired, so I tell that one to stop it. They do it again and so I get angry with them for disobeying me. And things escalate. My crankiness leads me to set up unreasonable and unnecessary expectations for my children, which leads to further crankiness when those expectations are inevitably not met.

I attempted a couple of restarts today. I walked the few hundred yards to the mailbox and back, in hopes that the blue skies and fresh winter air would brighten my mood. It only worked for a couple of minutes. I tried napping after lunch but was woken twice by the kids right at that moment of transition between wakefulness and sleep. Then I just laid there restlessly for a while, unable to get back to that transition point. Later, at Madeline’s request, we went out for a walk. Luke and Olivia didn’t want to go outside initially, but pretty soon they were having some fun sliding down some piles of snow-covered dirt in the yard. They wanted to stay outside, but none of us (except Olivia) were dressed properly and I, being grumpy and the attempt at revival failing miserably, wanted to go back inside.

I hate those kinds of days. I loathe myself as a father on those days. And that loathing feeds my crankiness. I feel much regret on those days, cycling through failure and regret, failure and regret, failure and regret. And then I experience low levels of anxiety about alienating my kids, so I give them big hugs and tell them I love them and that I sometimes have grumpy days and that today is one of them. Moments later I’m likely to be Unreasonably Grumpy Dad again. Failure, regret, reconciliation attempt, failure, regret…

But you know what’s crazy (and this is perhaps what I should really take away from the day)? The kids are unfazed. They know their dad. They know I have grumpy days, and they are always forgiving. At lunch I apologized for my grumpiness. I asked them if they would forgive me. Luke said, “I’ll always forgive you, dad!”

What a gift! What a gift! It encourages me and it shames me.

It’s difficult to forgive myself on these days, to do that thing that seems to come so naturally to my own children. Is it possible give ourselves as parents the room to be who we are on these days without also justifying the way we are? Our kids seem to give us that room, but we are left only with regret.

Jesus seemed to think we had quite a lot to learn from children. I think he was onto something.

The afternoon was salvaged with pop, a big bowl of popcorn, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and the kids with me on the couch, Luke snuggled up under my arm.

Kitchen conversations

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The other day I was walking to work, between open fields pure white with snow. It was a clear blue day, the sun shining bright, but there was a cool breeze blowing across the fields, setting the power lines to humming. It put me in a bit of a melancholic mood, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I felt a bit of the isolation out here in this beautiful place we live, maybe a bit of loneliness.

I thought of my friends from Providence Seminary and the conversations we would have almost every day during class breaks. We’d wander the halls, almost inevitably ending up in the seminary kitchen area. Someone would boil water for tea, and we’d lean back against the counters or sit on them while we waited. We would discuss and debate and question and explain. There would be a number of conversations going on at once, spilling out into the hallway. It was mostly theology we talked about, stuff that came up in class, stuff we read, controversies we heard about, and all of it peppered with wit. Later we’d run into each other in the library or near the bookstore and we’d pick up where we left off.

Those were good years. And I miss them right now (water rises to my eyes).

I started this blog nine years ago last December. I didn’t own theeagleandchild.com at the time, but it was called The Eagle & Child right from the beginning.

The Eagle & Child is a pub in Oxford, England, where J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and other members of the Inklings would gather Tuesday mornings for a pint and some good discussion. They discussed their own literary works-in-progress, and I imagine theology and philosophy was also covered.

… The concept of the Inkling’s gatherings was sort of what I had in mind for this blog. It was to be a place where people “gather” to discuss life, faith, literature, philosophy, and so on. (from my About… page)

And for a time, at least, that’s what happened here. Lots of theological (and sometimes political) discussion and debate, and a bit of a community developed. I started blogging less and less frequently around the time I started to move towards vocational ministry and it almost died completely through the last three years of seminary. That was surprising to me, since I had expected seminary to provide lots of “blog fodder”. I’m sure there were a number of reasons for the decrease in blogging, but it occurs to me now that what I had envisioned for this blog–the, as it were, Eagle & Child experience–was happening in the hallways of Providence Seminary. I didn’t need this blog, because I was having face-t0-face discussion and debate.

That seminary kitchen was my Eagle & Child! Were I to start a blog like this now, I might just call it “Kitchen Conversations.” Kitchens are where the best conversations happen most of the time, and that particular kitchen in the seminary is where “the Eagle & Child” became real for me.

Maybe I’m idealizing. Maybe nostalgia has taken control of my memory and my emotions and circumstances and created something didn’t exist in quite the way I remember it. But I don’t have access to that kitchen any more. I won’t be discussing Torrance or Bonhoeffer or Wright or even Bell while leaning against that kitchen counter as the kettle begins to gurgle and spit. Not anytime soon, anyway.

So maybe this will mark a return to this space. And maybe it’ll mean more of a contribution to the joint blog I occasionally contribute to with the very guys I was having those discussions with. And new face-to-face conversations will be had where we live now, and they, too, will be good.

But I’ll still miss those seminary kitchen conversations.

We are all theologians…

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…whether we like it or not.

For many, “theology” is a field of the academic world, out of the mental reach of the average person, and not really all that valuable in day-to-day life. It’s certainly true that much of what is known as theology is often written in nearly impenetrable prose. In this respect it really is “the science of God”, because people who “do” theology for a living (I’ll call them “vocational theologians”) have created specialized terminology in order to make dialogue between vocational theologians a little simpler: they could string a bunch of verbs and adjectives together when talking about God or some concept relating to God, or they could come up with a single word that encapsulates all of them. The one-word option makes communication much less cumbersome and less confusing within the field, just like the latin names of plants and animals may be a more efficient form of communication for botanists and entomologists (or for me to say “entomologist” instead of “guy or girl who studies bugs”). But to the rest of us, this also makes theology seem like the exclusive field of vocational theologians.

But here’s the thing: theology is simply “thinking about God” or “words about God”. Theology is what we do when we try to come to grips with who God is or understand what God is doing in the world, when we ask “Who is God?” or “What is God like?”. And we all do this. All of us. Even you. When you say, “Jesus loves you,” you are doing theology; when you say “God is love,” you are doing theology; when you confess that “Jesus is Lord,” you are doing theology. Even if you say “There is no God” or “God doesn’t care about the world anymore,” you are in some sense doing theology.

What the vocational theologians–the ones we may think of as impenetrable-prose, know-it-all hot shots–are doing is unpacking theological ideas, trying to get behind them. They are curious and want to know what it means, for example, that “God is love” or how the Three-in-One God might work. And the deeper they go, the more complicated it can sound. But just because you or I don’t go to these levels doesn’t make us any less theologians or make theology any less our business.

Karl Barth–possibly the most famous and important theologian (at least within vocational theological circles) of the 20th century–wrote a 13-volume (6 million words!) theological tome called Church Dogmatics, on top of many other books. It’s not an easy read–it takes work to read. I think. That’s what I hear. I purchased a copy of the set on a whim (or possibly through mob shopping mentality) when they were made available at a once-in-a-lifetime price. I’ve opened the books on occasion and I will again, but they’re not easy. That much was clear after reading a page or two. But here’s the thing: there’s a story told (it’s not just a legend) in which someone asked Barth after one of his lectures how he would summarize his life’s work as a theologian. His answer was this: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

What Barth and other vocational theologians do is unpack and examine the implications of our theological beliefs, asking the question “What does it mean when we or the Bible say ‘God is love’” But Barth and you and I are ultimately all thinking and talking about the same thing: Jesus love me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Most of us just don’t have the desire or privilege to spend our days thinking about little else, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable for others to do so, or for us to draw on their thoughts and learning for our own benefit as individuals and as the Christian church.

Why do theology?

I can think of a couple of reasons why we might want to be more actively theological (as opposed to being accidentally theological). First, theology can be an act of worship and discipleship. There is value in contemplating the God we serve and to try and understand this God who seeks us out and who promises that he is with us. Theology is part of the pursuit of God, of getting to know God better, and in meditating what who God is means for our day-to-day lives.

This leads into the second reason theology is important for everyone: it shapes who we are, what we do, how we act, the choices we make. If God loves his creation so much that he enters into that creation to make things right, it has implications for how we deal with the wrongs in our lives and in the rest of the world, and with our broken relationships. If God says his creation is “very good,” it has implications for how we care for that creation. In other words, theology is connected to our action; how we understand God influences how we act.

So… theology is not by nature complicated. It can sound complicated, just like conversations about the mechanics of cars or farm machinery can sound complicated to those who are not mechanically inclined. But, unlike the world of the mechanics of internal combustion engines which not everyone can engage in, we are all theologians whether we know it or not.

To mangle a phrase from Larry Norman, “Why should all the vocational theologians enjoy all the theology?” They shouldn’t. You and I should too. Maybe not to the point of unintelligibility, but at the very least to think on who God is and what that means for us and for the world.

Reading as mining for gold and precious jewels.

New Year Randomicity

1. Hey! We’re almost a quarter of the way through January already! Interpret the exclamation marks as excitement or alarm as you see fit!

2. Sitting here reading with John Barry’s score for Dances with Wolves playing in the background. It’s a beautiful score. I’m not sure if it’s the same without knowing the film, but it’s gorgeous. It occurred to me that after all these years Dances with Wolves is still one of my favourite films. Other films come and go in Marc’s Film Canon, but that one has stayed at or near the top. It gets everything right, as far as I’m concerned: setting, score, plot, themes. And even Kevin Costner has a decent turn as an earnest, idealistic soldier. The Last Samurai and Avatar are poor imitations. I’m sure Dances with Wolves is itself an imitation, but it’s GOOD.

3. Last weekend I solemnized my first marriage. No big deal.

4. I don’t really have any New Year’s resolutions, other than an unofficial desire to spend at least 20 minutes a day walking. Since it’s January 8 and I haven’t spent 20 minutes walking in any of those eight days, I guess that’s not going to happen. So, I won’t walk 20 minutes every day…YET. I will walk 20 minutes some days. Hopefully more days as the weather improves and as I remember that we have a treadmill. Facing our TV. With Netflix.

5. I did write down some things that I want to spend more time thinking about this year. Some highlights from the journal:

“What do I need? Don’t buy anything I don’t need.” I’m not yet sure whether the remastered blu-ray special edition of the original 1989 mini-series Lonesome Dove (starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones and Danny Glover and Ricky Schroder and others) is a want or a need..

“What makes or should make Christians different? Is it belief? Is it action? Is it both? Neither?” I know the standard/stock answers. It nevertheless bears further thought. Things aren’t always what they seem or how I understand them to be.

“The nature of the incarnation.” That’s a biggie. It means I need to read more T.F. Torrance, for one. And scripture. Oddly enough, I came across this in the book I was reading tonight: “We cannot live as if the incarnation had not occurred.” That’s quite a profound statement. Exclamation point and star in the margin. I don’t think Christians consider the incarnation enough. God become human. We tend to think mostly about sin and forgiveness and we do this mostly without thinking about the incarnation. The author follows that up with this line: “God has taken upon himself our earthly existence and claimed it for his Kingdom.” Another good one!

6. Between now and February 4 I have to read 4 books and 33 articles for a theology class I’m taking, as well as write a short book review. I was intending to write an anxious “Eep!” after my to-do list, but now that I’ve written it down it doesn’t seem like nearly such a big deal. Mind you, that’s less than a month away and in the meantime I have meetings and other work and family.

By the way, this is for a theology class I’m taking… IN SAN DIEGO! Too bad I’ll be hunkered down in a (the cynic in me says) dark basement room in the hotel.

Supernova

I have loads of reading to do with a theology class I’m taking (in San Diego!) at the beginning of February, which is precisely why I’ve started reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything again. Because that’s what I do when there are things to get done: distract myself with other things.

I came across this in a passage about supernovae and it ground my brain to a halt:

The question that naturally occurs is “What would it be like if a star exploded nearby?” Our nearest stellar neighbour…is Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light years away. I had imagined that if there were an explosion there we would have 4.3 years to watch the light of this magnificent event spreading across the sky, as if tipped from a giant can. What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones? Would people still go to work? Would farmers still plant crops? Would anyone deliver them to the stores?

Weeks later, back in the town in New Hampshire where I live, I put these questions to John Thorstenson, an astronomer at Dartmouth College. “Oh no,” he said, laughing. “The news of such an event travels out at the speed of light, but so does the destructiveness, so you’d learn about it and die from it in the same instant” (36).

What?

So it takes 4.3 years to reach us, moving through 4.3 light years of space in that time–that is, moving from A to B and covering the distance between–but we would never see it approaching. I imagined it, much like Bryson, rather like watching a ball approach one’s face from a distance. Not so.

Instead, it would kind of be like the running scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, except without the extended approach–Sir Lancelot would simply appear suddenly at the gate and kill the guards without warning.

I understand that (as far as we know) light is the fastest thing in the universe and we wouldn’t see the event until it reached us, meaning that as soon as we saw the event it would have arrived. Conceptually I get it. But it nevertheless boggles my mind–I can’t “see” it in my imagination.

Violence begets violence (and other thoughts)

I was sitting in my office early yesterday afternoon before a dress rehearsal for our church’s Christmas concert. While I waited for the call for our skit, I opened the Globe and Mail website. There were a couple of headlines about various aspects of the school shooting in Connecticut. Those headlines did not stand out out to me. What stood out was something seemingly unrelated: “Warplanes bomb Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus.”

On the face of it, they seem like unrelated stories, but in the broad scheme of things, I don’t think they are. They’re related because they reflect a persistent problem in our world: we solve our problems and disagreements with violence. I shouldn’t make blanket statements I suppose, but I’m reluctant to express a more focussed statement than that. We solve our problems with violence.

We do this over oil and other natural resources, over despots and tyrants. We do it over sports events. We do it over spilled milk, if we’re the angry sort. We do it in our movies, where the good guys defeat the bad guys using the bad guys’ weapons and methods. We solve our problems with violence, whether they’re problems of oil or plot.

I wonder if this is a learned approach? We see how it’s done by our governments, by our international neighbours, by our heroes, by our friends, by our parents. We learn violence as our means for solving our problems, for getting rid of our troubles, for protecting our rights and our property, for protecting us against…violence. And so the cycle goes on and violence begets violence. The ones that grow up to be the “good guys” and “bad guys” learn the same methods of problem solving; the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are distinguished by their cause, not their methods.

We talked a bit about the school shooting in Connecticut in Sunday school on Sunday morning. The issue of gun control came up–how it’s different in Canada. I made the comment that while gun control isn’t the total solution, I nevertheless see no reason for any private citizen owning an assault rifle or a handgun. One of my students replied confidently that there is a reason: “For self-defense.” But that’s precisely it: I need a handgun or assault rifle to defend myself against someone else with a handgun or assault rifle. Violence begets violence.

I want to be careful here that I don’t offer a simple explanation for such a tragic event as a school shooting. I’m not trying to explain the event, I’m just reflecting on an interesting and possibly overlooked relationship that popped out at me as I read yesterday’s headlines. Weak or lack of gun control may be a factor, mental illness may be a factor, the example of problem-solving through violence may be a factor, bullying may be a factor, the media may be a factor, our “good guy” heroes may be a factor, and so on. Any one of these things and a host of others may be part of the problem–singling out any one of them, as I read somewhere online today or yesterday, is little more than a coping method, a way for us to regain some control, some semblance of order, over a chaotic and inexplicable event. But the reality is much more complicated, much more difficult to unravel, because this event and others like it is really the culmination of millennia of human beings turning in on themselves, an infection that has worked its way into (or humans have worked into) every aspect of human culture. And how can we possibly unravel that? Certainly not with simplistic explanations.

It is complicated. So complicated, so overwhelming, in fact, that I feel nothing but helplessness and frustration, to the point of simply giving up. Giving up hope, maybe, or maybe just giving up paying attention to the world, retreating into my own little sphere, just doing what I do, but maybe without passion or care, with a dull look in my eye. Except I no longer have that luxury in my line of work. Thankfully, I tend to be an optimist. There’s always some hope and joy smoldering deep inside me somewhere. You might say that’s because I’m an optimist. Or you might say that I’m an optimist because I have that hope and joy smoldering within.

How can I be optimistic about a school shooting? Well, I can’t. I say I tend towards optimism, but there are some things that are simply dark and inexplicable.

And yet…

We’ve been working our way through I John in Sunday school. “Love” is one of the main themes of that letter, and yesterday I went back to something we had discussed earlier. In chapter 3, John says this, “For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another… This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.” We had covered this material already a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn’t help but think of the stories coming out of Connecticut of teachers protecting their students, giving up their own lives to save others. I don’t know whether these teachers were conscious Jesus-followers or not, but what they did was true love, what they did was walking in the way of Jesus.

What does this have to do with that dark, evil event? Only this: that even in the darkest circumstances, we can still find light, we can still find hope, we can still find goodness and love–they won’t be defeated.

At times like these, we rightly ask, “How can this be?” The problem of evil is highlighted in weeks like these, and rightly so. But this same question is rarely, if ever, asked about goodness and light in the world–we never ask, when we hear stories of self-sacrifice, of the giving up of one’s own life for the sake of another, “How can this be?”. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome or understood it.

This in no way is meant to dampen the horror and pain of events such as this school shooting. It is only an observation that light continues to shine in our often dark world, and it will continue to shine. And the darkness will not overcome it.

Keeping the ‘X’ in ‘Christmas’.

It’s that time of year again, folks, where Christ begins to disappear from Christmas…

These days we are likely to see “Xmas” written as often as “Christmas,” and this is of major concern for many Christians. Christ disappearing from Christmas is certainly something to give us pause, but this has been going on for a long time, and the way “Christmas” is written is not, ultimately, the problem.

In Koine Greek (the common language of the early church and the original language of the New Testament), “Christ” is written (here in equivalent English letters) “Xristos”(pronounced “Kris-toss”). The early church would use “X” as shorthand for “Christ”. Look at one of those Jesus fish sometime. Inside some of these fish are these Greek letters: IX[TH]YS.* These signs have been found at ancient Christian sites. Each of these Greek letters is the first letter in the words that say: “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour”. You see the “X” there is short for “Christ”.

In English, there is no natural correlation between “X” and “Christ”. It is such an unlikely connection, in fact, that I’m inclined to think that it’s origin in English is most likely Christian as well, from someone or a group familiar with Koine Greek. So there’s nothing for Christians fear there–the loss is not in the name but (potentially) in the way the occasion is celebrated.

What we call Christmas is ultimately irrelevant. It is now for most people a cultural, consumption-based holiday event, including for most Christians. Whether or not the the word “Christ” is in the name is not going to change that fact. The name “Easter” has nothing whatsoever to do with Christ or the Resurrection event, so far as I can tell (wheras “Paschal” does), and it takes nothing away from the religious end of that season for those who choose to focus on it that way.

So keep the ‘X’ in Christmas and keep the ‘Christ’, too, for that matter. Keep Christ in there not by means of spelling the word a certain way, but by entering into the season reflectively and with open hearts, preparing for his arrival, remembering his birth and anticipating his second advent. That’s a choice we all have to make, regardless of how we spell “Christmas”.

______________________
*in Greek there is one letter that represents the English “th” sound.

“That’ll do”: God’s Grace in the Old Testament

“I have no charges against you concerning your sacrifices
or concerning your burnt offerings, which are ever before me.

I have no need of a bull from your stall
or of goats from your pens,

for every animal in the forest is mine,
and the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know every bird in the mountains,
and the insects in the fields are mine.

If I were hungry, I would not tell you,
for the world is mine, and all that is in it.

Do I eat the flesh of bulls
or drink the blood of goats?”

- Psalm 50:8-13 (NIV)

I read the above Psalm this morning and it got me thinking again about animal sacrifice in the Old Testament. I have never understood what it was about the blood sacrifice that could possibly atone for individual or corporate human sin. What strange ancient magic in the universe could this be? From my 20th/21st century vantage point, that sort of thing has always seemed archaic, a relic from the ancient world that made sense in a particular context but not a whole lot in our own. And yet there it is: sacrifice, the shedding of blood in atonement for sin, is embedded the Christian meta-narrative. An essential aspect of Christian theology and doctrine that I don’t fully understand. I’m okay with that, actually. I don’t need an answer to all my questions to be compelled by the birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

And yet the mystery remains. Atoning sacrifice still doesn’t make complete sense to me. And to complicate matters, there are plenty of scriptures like the above Psalm which indicate that sacrifices are not needed by God or, in some cases, wanted by him. There are a couple of instances in the Psalms and perhaps most famously, Hosea 6:6: “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, / and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.” So we have a situation where sacrifice is necessary for atonement, but a God who does not desire those sacrifice.*

BUT… I’ve been reading John Stackhouse’s book Can God be Trusted?: Faith and the Challenge of Evil. Later in the book he gives an overview of the Christian story of creation, fall, and redemption. He briefly covers the topic of sacrifice and I was struck by this passage:

Two principal images have been used by Christians to explain what Jesus accomplished on the cross: Christ as Sacrifice, and Christ as Victor. The former harks back to the extensive symbolism of Israelite temple worship, in which animals were killed and offered to God as substitutes for the human sinners who gave them up. “Life for life” was the basic principle, because sin at its root is the enemy of life. The Hebrew prophets themselves made clear that these rituals together formed an elaborate picture of God’s holiness (God views sin as mortally serious, and therefore the most graphic symbolism of life and death was necessary to portray its cost and its redemption) and God’s mercy (God was willing to accept animal substitutes, although it makes no logical or moral sense to do so: how can the blood of bulls and goats possibly make up for human sin?). The ultimate payment for, the ultimate cost of human sin, had to be borne by human beings. (133-4 in the 2nd edition)

What particularly struck me about this paragraph was animal sacrifice as a picture of God’s mercy. I have often been reminded that grace is not a concept limited to the New Testament and the coming of Jesus. The Old Testament is also filled with God’s grace to humankind. Looking at the story of Israel in particular, we see God repeatedly calling the wayward Israelites back. The Israelites were constantly breaking their covenant with God and therefore constantly placing themselves under God’s judgment. God is the giver and sustainer of all life and to sever our relationship with the Life-Giver means the end of life. God was perfectly within his rights to let Israel perish on any number of occasions. But God is slow to anger and rich in love, mercy, and forgiveness, and each time Israel severed their ties with him and walked away from the Life-Giver, God pursued and called them back to life and wholeness.

So grace and mercy are there in the Old Testament; Jesus didn’t bring in anything new in that regard. But I had never thought of the sacrificial system as a grace-filled thing. It was about restitution, atonement, making things right, and even (in my tradition) salvation by works. But the reality is that animal sacrifice itself does not forgive sin–only God forgives sin. And in his grace and mercy he provided Israel with a way to enact their repentance–to show that they acknowledged God–which, though not in itself sufficient to forgive sin, moved him to forgive.

Perhaps I’m taking Stackhouse’s words farther than they should be taken. Fair enough; what he said simply set my mind to thinking about grace. It makes a great deal of sense to me that, even though human sin is serious enough that death is a legitimate result, God, because he loves humankind so much and wanted things to be right between himself and Israel and the world, set up what was in fact a sub-par arrangement to atone for sin and said, “That’ll do,” and restored his wayward people.

Yes, things did change significantly with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We no longer need to offer blood sacrifices because the Final Sacrifice has been made. But God has always been full of grace and mercy, even in the Old Testament.

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* This leads to a tangent issue, of course: if we were merciful and truly acknowledged God, sacrifice for sin probably wouldn’t be needed.

Sunday thoughts on a Monday morning

Sometimes during a church service I become aware of what we are doing–the raw details of it, I mean. Usually this is during the singing time, when, depending on where I am, 50 or 100 or 120 men, women, and children stand and sing songs together, we stand reading words from a screen or from a book and sing. What a strange thing! What are we doing? Sometimes the songs are beautiful, sometimes the words seem meaningless, but always we sing. How strange!

This thought and feeling came over me again yesterday morning. I again became aware of how odd and unprecedented it and even not normal it seemed. People from 5 to 90 facing forward, singing songs.

And then it dawned on me. It’s not just the standing reading theological and worshipful words on a screen, it’s the whole package. We are singing together: people of all ages, genders, and races, singing together about and to a God they have gathered together to worship. People of different incomes, walks of life, opinions, histories, all gathered together to sing, to listen, to learn, to worship, to pray. This is remarkable, when you stop to think about it.

I realized that it’s not just the words we sing, but the act of singing together itself that is powerful and symbolic–no, even an enacting of the Kingdom of God.