I think the first three chapters of Genesis some of the most beautifully crafted passages in the whole Bible. Genesis 2:25 ends by saying that the man and the woman were naked (‛ârôm) but not ashamed. And then 3:1, the next verse says that the serpent was the most "shrewd" (‛ârûm) creature of all those God had made.
It's so curious: in the Hebrew, the word for "shrewd" that's used there derives from the same word as the word for "naked" (i.e. both come from the same root word). At the end of the passage, when he sees them in fig leaves, God will say, who told you you were "‛ârôm"? Who else but that "‛ârûm" serpent who deceived us? (In other words, there is a profound connection between the serpent's nature as "cunning" (ârûm) and the way he exposes us to shame in our "nakedness" (ârôm).)
There's another layer to this, though. In 3:8 it says that Adam heard the sound of the Lord walking in the "cool of the day." Whar's interesting to me, though is that in Hebrew, it uses the word "ruach" there to describe the "cool of the day." Literally, God was looking for Adam in the "day's ruach." That stood out to me, because the word "ruach" is one of those multi-layered words in the Bible. It can mean "spirit" (like it does in Genesis 1:2 or Job 27:3). It can mean "breath" (like it does in Psalm 104:29). Or it can mean "wind" (like it does in Genesis 8:1).
It seems like here it's meant as "wind"-- God came to Adam in the "breezy" part of the day (?). But it's a strange phrase, and it's the only place I'm aware of where "ruach" is used to mean "the cool of the day" like this (my Hebrew-Scholar friends are sincerely invited to chime in here). What it makes me wonder is this: healing for Adam and Eve's shame over their nakedness is found (or at least a covering for it, until the ultimate healing is made available) by encountering God in the "day's ruach"-- the cool of the day, if we're thinking about it in terms of the story line; the "spiritual time of the day," if we're thinking about it in terms of its implications for us.
Do we have a time of the day, each day, that we would describe like that-- the "ruach of the day"? What I mean by that is: a time of the day that is set aside as sacred, where our spirits encounter his Spirit, and it's so centering and rejuvenating and peaceful, that it's sort of like walking with a good friend in the evening's cool after a long hot day of toil?
May God encounter each of us like that, on a daily basis, and may those encounters heal in us any lingering shame or fear or hiding that's still happening for us because of that first, ancient brush with the serpent's "ârûm-ness."
From the Beginning: A Devotional Commentary on Genesis (II)
The Thursday Review: The Eyes and Ears of Saskatchewan
I only discovered him a couple of months ago, but Ken Dalgarno has become one of my favorite contemporary artists. Think Van Gogh meets Group of Seven meets Saskatchewan. His paintings have an almost startling vividness. And then the texture of them: you can almost feel the prairie wind against your ears.
There's also Yvette Moore. Sometimes her work is a little too linear for me, but at her best she has a patient, loving eye for detail and a careful hand. I read somewhere that before someone can learn to paint, they must first learn to see-- and this can take a life time. Yvette Moore is an artist who has, indeed, seen the prairies.
These two are my favorite Yvette Moores, both historic details from Moose Jaw. They're both unlike much of her work, but I find them strangely compelling. Subtle and evocative.
And while I'm noting Saskatchewan artists, I should mention one of my favorite Saskatchewan bands, The Northern Pikes. Their 1990 album Snow in June still echoes in my head once in a while, especially "Am I in Your Way." I used to sing the chorus of "Love These Hands" (hit play below) to my kids while I rocked them to sleep: From the Beginning: A Devotional Commentary on Genesis (I)
It's always struck me that Genesis 2:18 is the first time in all the Bible when God says that something "isn't good." The verse stands out all the more starkly because throughout Chapter 1, God kept saying things were good-- the sea and dry land (1:10), the sun, moon and stars (1:18), the sea creatures and birds (1:21), and the beasts of the field (1:25).
But here, for the first time, something's explicitly and specifically not good. And what a thing it is: the 'adam is alone! God forms a human creature, places him in the garden on the mission of imaging God to the world, and in 2:18 we find out that the male 'adam all on his own is not good, not complete, not able to accomplish God's purposes for him.
A couple of incidentals: 1) this explains why the story has God making the female 'adam out of the male 'adam's rib. It's not to suggest that the woman is in any sense inferior or subsequent to the man. It's so we could see the helpless (and according to 2:18 he is, quite literally help-less) male all alone, and recognize with God how not-good that state of affairs is. 2) We have to read this in light of Gen 1:27, where it says that God made the 'adam in his own image, male and female, he created them. On his own the male 'adam can't Image God; it takes male and female together to do that. Rather than being archaically patriarchal, this text actually underscores the man and woman's interdependence in radical ways.
But all that is incidental to my main thought here. Because the solution to this "not-good" situation is for God to give the male a helping hand. And what a helping hand he had in mind! The Hebrew phrase in 2:18 is "etzer chenaged," and a lot of theological ink had been spilled over this one. Literally it means something like "a help that is compatible/fitting/completing and/or equal to him."
Often scholars point out that etzer (help) is the word the Bible uses when it wants to talk about how God is Israel's "help." In other words, the woman is not the man's "help" the way Robin is a "helper" to Batman; more in the way a search and rescue team is a "help" to the lost and stranded hiker. And this morning I find myself deeply grateful for the "etzer chenaged"-- the "fitting help" that God has given me in the many godly women he has placed in my life, who together have kept me from trying to "image God" alone in my "help-less" maleness. But in particular, of course, I'm thanking him for that one woman he caused my heart to cleave to, my wife. Through her help, I've come to appreciate how true the flip side of Genesis 2:18 is, that it is good for the man to be not alone.
Three Minute Theology 3.8: Clean Slate
In the 2012 movie, Batman Returns, one of Cat Woman’s driving motivations was her desire for a clean slate.
As you might imagine, she has a pretty sordid history as an international cat-burglar, and, like all of us in the age of social media, every detail of her past is on record somewhere on the world-wide-web, making it impossible for her to escape the past.
But word on the streets of Gotham is that someone has developed a powerful computer program called “The Clean Slate” which will erase your entire internet record from every database on the planet, all with the simple click of a single button. And for reasons that are perhaps obvious, Cat Woman would do anything to get her hands on it.
In this respect, Cat Woman is more than just a comic-book super-villain, she is also a metaphor for us all. At least, the way data about us accumulates on the internet until it starts to define and control us, is one of the growing social issues of our day.
Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain uses the term “reputational bankruptcy” to talk about all this. The web never forgets, he reminds us, and as more and more of our lives are lived online, it becomes increasingly difficult to escape the impact of our digital footprints.
“What we need,” Zittrian argues, “is some way to declare ‘reputation bankruptcy and start over. Like: If the internet allowed you a one-time pulling of a lever that would delete your digital identity and you could just start fresh.”
The concept of “reputational bankruptcy” is a helpful image for something the Bible calls “Justification by Faith.”
The idea is that we are justified—saved from the sins of the past and saved for a relationship with God—not by works—keeping the Old Testament Law or adhering to some human-defined moral code or what have you—but through Faith in Jesus Christ.
Strictly speaking, the term “justification” is a legal term that describes a judge rendering a not-guilty verdict in a court of law. To be justified, in this sense, is to be declared not-guilty.
But what, exactly, does this mean? How does God declare us “not guilty” on the basis of our faith in Christ, and what does this justification actually look like for us in real life?
This is where the Clean Slate comes in handy. Because in the same way that all the digital data that’s accumulated about us on the internet has all sorts of implications for our present—impacting our ability to get a job, to secure a bank-loan, to get a date, and so on—so much so that our digital identity can come to define us in all sorts of unhealthy ways—so too with sin.
Biblically, sin is not just about the moral failings of the past that need forgiveness, it is about how these moral failings define us and have all sorts of implications for our present: our ability to serve God, our ability to commune with him, our ability to take our place as one of his people. We don’t just need them forgiven, we need a brand new spiritual identity.
Justification by Faith is for our spiritual identities, what the Clean Slate is to our digital identities.
On the cross, Christ stands in our place as our fully-human representative—the Second Adam is what the Bible calls him—and through his own death on the cross, he puts to death the entire sin-record of our lives—he cancelled the accusation that stood against us, is how the Bible puts it, nailing it to the cross.
Through his death on the cross, he wipes the slate clean, and then, through his resurrection on the other side, he offers us a brand new identity to live, untied with his resurrected life.
In a very real way, putting our faith in Christ is like declaring “reputational bankruptcy” and so allowing God to “justify us”—to wipe the record clean so that Christ’s identity can now define us.
And, like it says in one place: “Having been justified like this through faith, we now have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
An Ancient Path for a Modern World (IV): Solitude
The stylite tradition is one of the little known but most fascinating stories from the ancient Orthodox Church. According to Wikipedia, a “stylite” (from the Greek, stylites, meaning “pillar-dweller”) was a type of Christian ascetic who lived out their Christian witness on top of a pillar, preaching, fasting and praying, sometimes for decades on end.
As odd as it may sound to us in 21 Century Canada, these “pillar-saints” were relatively common in the Byzantine Empire in the 5th and 6th Century. They believed that the extreme discipline and self-mortification it took to while away your days isolated from society alone, on the top of a pole, had a purifying effect on the soul.
According to tradition, the first stylite to get the idea was a fellow known as Simeon Stylites the Elder, who first took his perch atop a tall pillar back in AD 423, and stayed there until his death in AD 470 (yes, that’s a grand total of 37 years sitting in one spot on top of a pillar). It wasn’t long before his example had spawned a number of imitators: a guy named Daniel the Stylite, Simeon the Younger, St Alypius (who, according to legend, lasted 53 years atop his pillar, until they finally coaxed him down).
From what I understand, the sites of famous stylites became pilgrimage destinations in the ancient world, and folks would come from far and wide to witness these ascetic hermits sitting there on their poles. Daniel the Stylite was so famous that even Emperor Leo came once for a visit.
Now: I am not suggesting anyone build a column in their back yard anytime soon; and to be sure there are all sorts of theological issues with the idea of earning one’s salvation through forms of extreme asceticism like pole-sitting. Let me be clear. But I was thinking about the stylites of the ancient Orthodox Church the other day because, whatever theological problems we might have with their methods, still, there is something commendable in their goal—what they were looking for, there atop those poles—that we would do well to reflect on as we continue our journey through the forgotten practices of Christian spirituality.
I’m talking here about solitude. The necessary removal of distractions, I mean, of competing interests, and yes, even of companionship for a time, or a season, or a moment in the day, so as to fix the heart unflinchingly on the awe-inspiring wonder of the presence of God.
Jesus, of course, practiced solitude as part of the regular rhythm of his life with God. In Matthew 14:13, as just one of many examples, we read that Jesus “sent his disciples away and went up on a mountain by himself to pray; and when evening came he was there alone.”
Solitude is to our social lives what fasting is to our appetites; a saying “no” to something, for a while, so that we can say “yes” to God more earnestly, sincerely, openly or expectantly. Solitude is the art of getting one’s self totally alone so that we can discover that we are never, actually, ever alone, and that often, God is often most talkative, most at work, most present to us, in the quiet and the stillness of our loneliness. Solitude is a discipline, too, that allows us to be more fully present to and thankful for others in our lives, in the same way that fasting actually sharpens our gratitude for food, once the fast ends.
Solitude is all these things and it is, also, very hard to come by these days. Surrounded as we are by incessantly ringing gadgets, blipping email alerts, whizzing cars, jostling crowds, screens and phones and the busyness of life, it is often profoundly difficult to find an hour alone with God on a metaphorical pillar, let alone 53 years on a real one.
There is, of course, a bitter irony in this. Many analyses of social media technologies have noted that, for all our text messages and face-time chats, our face-book posts and innumerable ways of communicating, people report higher levels of loneliness, disconnectedness, angst and social anxiety than we have ever experienced before. As MIT scholar Sherry Turkle put it, “Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication.” We are, as she so vividly puts it, “alone together.”
But this may be precisely the reason that the practice of genuine solitude is needed now more than ever, because choosing to be alone—to shut off the gadgets and unplug the wires and close down the screens for an intentional season, so that we can attune ourselves all over again to the God who is always present to us—may be the path towards regaining control over those gadgets and wires and screens and wires in the first place.
Whether or not that’s the case, I do know that those times I’ve made the effort to carve out intentional spaces in my day, my week, my year for real solitude, away from all other social distractions so that I can focus simply and intently on God, are times where God has done and said and worked remarkable things in my spirit, opening me to deeper and better and more sincere communion with him and with others.
It doesn’t take 53 years on top of a pole in the Byzantine Empire to get this, either. It just takes an awareness of the need, and a commitment to satisfy it in God, alone.
The Thursday Review: The Prairie Noah
First posted July 11, 2009
About ten minutes outside Moose Jaw there's this obscure little museum called the Sukanen Ship Museum. It tells one of the most interesting pioneer stories I've heard in Saskatchewan.
Tom Sukanen was a Finnish sailor/ship-builder who immigrated to Minnesota in 1898. In 1911, he came to Saskatchewan to homestead a land claim, leaving his family behind in Minnesota and making the 600 mile trek by foot with all his belongings on his back. He filed a homestead near the town of Birsay.
Over six feet tall and weighing some 280 pounds, Tom was a man of almost legendary strength (he once clean-and-jerked the axle and wheels of a car at a town fair), infinite resourcefulness (he once knitted a suit out of bailer twine) and amazing inventiveness (he once designed and built his own threshing machine).
After the farm was well established, Tom walked back to Minnesota to retrieve his family and bring them out to Saskatchewan. When he arrived, however, he discovered that his wife had died in a flu epidemic and the state had adopted out his children to foster families. Twice the authorities apprehended him trying to bring his son into Canada, and when they finally threatened him with jail-time, Tom was forced to return to Saskatchewan alone.
And here's where the story gets almost surreal.
Dejected and isolated on his farm, Tom became obsessed with the idea of building a boat and returning to Finland. His plan was to follow local waterways to the Saskatchewan River, follow it to Hudson Bay (he'd already made this trip once by rowboat) and from there sail home to Finland. As large shipments of steel and sheet metal were delivered out to his farm, and as he completely abandoned his farming to work on his land-locked ship-building project, Tom became something of a curiosity among the gossips and scoffers of Birsay. Days they could hear his hammer pounding tirelessly, nights they could see the glow of his forge, as he built the steel hull and shaped the boiler for his ship.
From the Museum's description of the boat:
Tom's plan was to build the ship in three sections. The keel and hull would be water tight and could be floated on some very shallow water. The cabins could be loaded onto a large raft, along with other odds and ends. This raft would be powered with a motor and rudder, and by towing the keel and hull, he could catch the high water of the Saskatchewan River.... He planned to reach the deep water mouth of the Nelson River and then on to the Hudson Bay. There he would quickly have the various parts assembled and the steam engine and boiler installed.
Tom worked through the Great Depression on this unlikely project, forging and shaping the metal boiler, smokestack, pulleys and gears, all by hand. His status among the locals was upgraded from curiosity to eccentric and eventually to "That Crazy Finn," as he poured all his energy and resources into his strange obsession. When asked, "Why are you building a ship on the prairie?" he would reply with a stone-set face, "There's a great flood coming and I want to be ready to sail out of it home to Finland."
By 1940, Tom had finished his ship, but after a local farmer refused to tow the finished sections to the water, and after vandals looted and stripped the boat one night, and after townspeople began petitioning the RCMP to remove him from the area because his "junk" was a hazard, he had to abandon his dream a broken man. In the end, Tom was institutionalized in a North Battleford hospital, where he eventually died (April 3, 1943). His last words to a friend were: "Don't ever let that ship go. Don't let them tear it down."
But the ship lay derelict and nearly forgotten for almost thirty years. Much of it was wrecked by vandals and pillaged by scavengers, but the bulk of the remains were hidden on a farm in Whitebear, SK. In 1972, a Pioneer Village Museum outside Moose Jaw purchased and restored the ship, raising it as a monument to the indefatigable spirit that pioneers like Tom Sukanen brought with them to the often merciless Saskatchewan prairie.
This story has held a special place in my imagination ever since I first heard it. Something about Tom's dream to build an ocean going vessel in the heart of the prairies has always seemed distinctly Saskatchewanesque to me. It's that spirit of outlandish vision and bold resourcefulness and even a certain kind of creative restlessness that I've grown to love and am sure to miss about this place.
The Girl Queen, the Captive Conqueror: A Devotional Commentary on the Book of Esther (10:1-3)
And so we come to the end of the Book of Esther. In these last three verses we see the final, complete reversal of the fortunes of God's People. Mordecai, who used to sit by the gate of the king's palace, is now second in command over the whole Empire, promoting the well-being of his people and speaking shalom to "all his seed" (10:3). On the one hand, it reminds me of the story of Joseph in Genesis, another displaced son of Abraham who went from imprisoned slave to second-only-to-Pharaoh over all Egypt, who looked back on his story and said to those who had harmed him: "You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good, to accomplish salvation for many lives."
Interestingly, the wording of Esther 10:2 echoes the epigraph form that the Book of Kings always used to sum up the reign of each of Israel's monarchs: all the deeds of Mordecai, "are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the Kings...?" Essentially, Mordecai--King Saul's heir, remember--has ascended as close to the place of a king over Israel, as a displaced Jew in a foreign empire could possibly get. After all the terror and distress, the trauma and pain, the near-misses and ominous uncertainty of Esther's story, we see, at last, God's purpose in it all: the mini-resurrection (of sorts) of Saul's line, and through that "resurrection," shalom for all God's people.
And maybe you see where I'm going with this?
Because in Christ we have the true Resurrection of which Mordecai's mini-resurrection is just a dim shadow, and in Him, we see how our own stories, as difficult or painful as they might be, fit into God's plan to speak shalom to the world. Be encouraged today: however hidden him they might sometimes be, God does have a Resurrection purpose that he can, and will, bring out of whatever it is you may be facing today. And a day will come when we, with Mordecai and Esther, will be able to look back on it all and say: all that happened for this, that we, too, might be part of God's Word of Shalom to the world.
The Thursday Review: Musing Art and Faith
First Posted, April 24, 2009
The other day I was driving along, half-listening to the radio when this girl with a fragile voice started singing a melancholy tune about her confusing love affair with some guy named Art. And I thought: "Sweet melody, but the girl-chases-boy thing's been done before."
But by the time the second chorus came around, I was listening a bit closer, and it slowly dawned on me: She's not singing to Art-short-for-Arthur; she's singing to art itself. This is music for the muse:
Art, O Art I want youAnd as I listened, the words fell around me like familiar rain. I'd sung this song before. Not the tune, of course, or even the lyrics, but the question. I want to do art, but I how can I tell if I ought to? This is a question my heart used to sing a lot.
Art, you make it pretty hard not to
And my heart is trying hard here to follow you
But I can't always tell if I ought to
For me, the uncertainty came from some vague notion I picked in the ditches of my faith-journey, that you couldn't be a Christian and an artist; it was an either-or. Somehow, growing up evangelical left me with the pretty strong impression that art was only acceptable in the church if it asked you blandly to ask Jesus into your heart when it was through with you. No ambiguous questions about ugliness or beauty, please, just solve the problem with a simple sinner's prayer. (Franky Schaeffer refers colorfully to this kind of evangelical "art" as "theological sloganeering".) In one of my more maudlin moments some ten years ago, I put it like this in an old journal: "Because something (God did you put it there? Is it sin to listen?) inside me sings of the beauty and truth of creation, and because something even deeper longs to capture, reflect and join the beauty and truth of creation, I am a poet .... I stare at the word on the page, and am flooded with questions impossible to answer: can I be a poet & serve God?"
By God's grace I happened to read a number of books that helped me answer that question with an honest and hopeful "yes." Among these were Madeline L'Engle's (insightful) Walking on Water, which suggests that all true art is Christian art, since Jesus himself is "the Truth"; and Franky Schaeffer's (sometimes bitter) Addicted to Mediocrity, which calls evangelicals to rediscover the church's rich tradition of art-making.By God's further grace, I also meet a wise mentor who encouraged me to see my artistic passions as a calling and gift from God. He helped me believe that there really was an important role for the artist in the Christian community. He also allowed me do art in a way that served the Christian community (like the artwork I designed for the chapel space pictured above).
But I'm convinced there are other men and women besides me asking the same confusing question that the girl on the radio was singing to her lover Art: is there any place anywhere for this artistic passion of mine? And as she sang that afternoon, I started to imagine all over again: what would it be like if the community of Jesus' people sought out these wondering artists to tell them, "That place is here among us." What would it be like if Jesus' people embraced the artists in their midst without asking them merely to do some theological sloganeering for them?
What would it be like if Christians affirmed the truest work of the artists among them with the heart of Jesus, who affirms all things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely and admirable?
The Girl Queen, the Captive Conqueror: A Devotional Commentary on the Book of Esther (9:21-32)
About 5 weeks ago (March 24), the Jewish community around the world celebrated the Feast of Purim, the very feast that the Book of Esther culminates with, and whose origins it commemorates to this day. Some 2500 years later, they still set aside a holy day to do what Esther 9:22 says they did that first Purim so long ago: observe a day of feasting and joy, giving presents to each other and gifts to the poor. They will also, from what I understand, read the Book of Esther in its entirety, shaking rattles whenever Haman’s name is mentioned (and in some traditions, they’ll dress in colorful costumes, as a remembrance of the ‘disguised’ activity of God in this story). In this way the community actually relives today in the saga of God’s deliverance back then, remembering in a way that invites active participation in the on-going story.
And I’m thinking about Holy Communion. Because just like the Book of Esther is the story of God’s unforeseen deliverance when all hope was lost, a story which transforms despair and fasting into festival joy and culminates with a Sacred Feast that commemorates God’s salvation in a way that binds the community together through that act of commemoration, so too the Christian Faith. Ours is a story of God’s unexpected deliverance, which transforms crucifixion grief into resurrection joy, and is celebrated through a Sacred Feast of bread and cup that binds us together as his people. “Take and eat, this is my body; this is my blood of the covenant, poured out for the forgiveness of sins,” is how He said it. Inasmuch as it is about a feast that celebrates God’s deliverance, the Book of Esther is re-enacted for Christians, every time we come to the communion table and remember the Ultimate Deliverance of God’s people in Jesus Christ.
But the Book of Esther has something to teach us here about communion, I think. Because the kind of “remembering” that happens through the Purim Festival is more than just a vague, “Oh, yeah, remember when ...” It is actually a dramatic entering into and re-living the story, the kind remembering that brings the past to life in this present moment, and allows us to take our place in the events. Purim celebrants are not passive recipients; they are active participants. And what if we came to the Communion Table in this kind of spirit, awake and alive and receptive to the possibility that what happened then is still, in a unique and mysterious way, playing out here, now, in this simple feast of bread and cup? If we did, I think, we’d be much more likely to recognize the Communion Feast for what it really is whether we realize it or not: a real encounter with the living Jesus.