Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘denkschrift’ Category

La llama que arde, pero no consume: Éxodo 3.1-15

Posted in denkschrift, logos, tagged , , , , on April 4, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Un sermón predicado en el servicio religioso semanal del Seminario Bíblico de Colombia en conformidad con el tema semestral ‘Viviendo la fidelidad de Dios’.

3 abril 2025

Moisés apacentaba el rebaño de Jetro su suegro, sacerdote de Madián; condujo el rebaño hacia el lado occidental del desierto y llegó a Horeb, el monte de Dios. Y el ángel del SEÑOR se le apareció en una llama de fuego, en medio de una zarza. Al fijarse Moisés, vio que la zarza ardía en fuego, pero la zarza no se consumía. Entonces Moisés dijo: “Me acercaré ahora para ver esta maravilla (gran visión), por qué la zarza no se quema.”

Cuando el SEÑOR vio que Moisés se acercaba para mirar, Dios lo llamó de en medio de la zarza, y dijo: “¡Moisés, Moisés!” Y él respondió: “Aquí estoy.” Entonces Dios le dijo: “No te acerques aquí. Quítate las sandalias de los pies, porque el lugar donde estás parado es tierra santa.” Y añadió: “Yo soy el Dios de tu padre, el Dios de Abraham, el Dios de Isaac y el Dios de Jacob.” Entonces Moisés se cubrió el rostro, porque tenía temor de mirar a Dios.

Y el SEÑOR dijo: “Ciertamente he visto la aflicción de Mi pueblo que está en Egipto, y he escuchado su clamor a causa de sus capataces, pues estoy consciente de sus sufrimientos. “Así que he descendido para librarlos de mano de los Egipcios, y para sacarlos de aquella tierra a una tierra buena y espaciosa, a una tierra que mana leche y miel, al lugar de los Cananeos, de los Hititas, de los Amorreos, de los Ferezeos, de los Heveos y de los Jebuseos. “Y ahora, el clamor de los Israelitas ha llegado hasta Mí, y además he visto la opresión con que los Egipcios los oprimen. “Ahora pues, ven y te enviaré a Faraón, para que saques a Mi pueblo, a los Israelitas, de Egipto.”

Pero Moisés dijo a Dios: “¿Quién soy yo para ir a Faraón, y sacar a los Israelitas de Egipto?” “Ciertamente Yo estaré contigo,” (כי אהיה עמך) le respondió el SEÑOR, “y la señal para ti de que soy Yo el que te ha enviado será ésta: cuando hayas sacado al pueblo de Egipto ustedes adorarán (servirán) a Dios en este monte.”

Entonces Moisés dijo a Dios: “Si voy a los Israelitas, y les digo: ‘El Dios de sus padres me ha enviado a ustedes,’ tal vez me digan: ‘¿Cuál es Su nombre?’ ¿qué les responderé?” Y dijo Dios a Moisés: “YO SOY EL QUE SOY,” (אהיה אשׁר אהיה) y añadió: “Así dirás a los Israelitas: ‘YO SOY (אהיה) me ha enviado a ustedes.’” Dijo además Dios a Moisés: “Así dirás a los Israelitas: ‘El SEÑOR (יהוה), el Dios de sus padres, el Dios de Abraham, el Dios de Isaac y el Dios de Jacob, me ha enviado a ustedes.’ Este es Mi nombre para siempre, y con él se hará memoria de Mí de generación en generación.

(Éxodo 3.1-15 NBLH)

Me gustan los nombres. No … en realidad, me encantan los nombres.

En los últimos años, en mi lectura diaria de las Escrituras, he renunciado la velocidad normal de la lectura, cambiándola por otra más lenta, para mejor saborear los nombres que aparecen en las genealogías:

Me tomo unos segundos para imaginar la vida de estos abuelos nuestros, preguntándome con qué fin el Señor nos invita a recordarlos.

El museo del pueblo en Jerusalen—Yad Vashem—deriva su nombre de la hermosa promesa de Isaías 56.4-5:

A los eunucos que guardan Mis días de reposo, Escogen lo que Me agrada Y se mantienen firmes en Mi pacto,

Les daré en Mi casa y en Mis muros un lugar, Y un nombre mejor que el de hijos e hijas. Les daré nombre eterno que nunca será borrado.

(Isaías 56.4-5 NBLH)

Hace años tuve la experiencia de caminar por el ‘laberinto de los nombres’ en Yad VaShem, un pasillo de poca luz donde uno escucha desde el sistema de sonido la lectura incesante y casi susurrada de los nombres de los víctimas de los Nazi en Europa. Uno, siendo gentil, se une por unos treinta minutos al pueblo judío en su disciplina de mantener presentes—si no vivos—las hijas e hijos de Israel que perecieron en los fuegos exterminadores de los Nazis, haciendo lo que se puede: nunca dejar de recordar sus nombres.

En un contexto más feliz, anhelo el momento la semana antes del arranque de cada semestre en nuestra comunidad cuando a los profes Ivonne nos envía la lista de los estudiantes que pronto se convertirán en rebaño nuestro. Tomo un momento para contemplar las bellas sílabas colombianas de ‘mis’—si me permiten—ovejas, de mi rebaño:

Johan Danilo Álvarez Sánchez

Isabela García Patiño

Jhon Janner Carballo Denis

Daniela Urango Giraldo…

Bellos nombres, cuyos dueños dentro de días o semanas serán personas que admiro y amo.

En una ocasión, compartí con varios de ustedes el gozo que me generó un momento hace muchos años en Costa Rica. Caí en cuenta que en latitudes latinoamericanas me había llegado el lujo de recuperar el apellido de mis abuelos maternos: Potter = Alfarero. Privilegio que se me había robado por la extraña costumbre anglosajona de bendecirnos con un solo apellido en lugar de dos. Abuelo y abuelita Potter habían sido héroes de mi juventud y ahora orgullosamente ostento su apellido en mi firma electrónica y en cualquier oportunidad que se me presente. 

Grandma and Grandpa Potter … David Allen Baer Potter

Admiro … aprecio … es más, en realidad amo los nombres.

Los nombres a lo largo de los años acumulan significado … connotación … riqueza … insinuación … nobleza. Con tiempo, se vuelven casi una manifestación de los seres humanos que los nombres mismos identifican.

El nombre de nuestro Señor es diferente. En uno de los pasajes más formidables de nuestra Biblia, el Dios de los padres anuncia … declara su nombre … y le informa a Moisés que será el nombre recordatorio … el instrumento hablado … el medio por el cual Israel se recordará de la naturaleza de su deidad para las generaciones y los siglos que vienen.

Su nombre es, conforme a nuestra manera de acercarnos como hijos adoptivos de Israel, Yahvé. No es, como los nuestros, un nombre que paulatinamente adquiere su significado dependiendo de cómo nosotros vivamos bajo su rotulación de nuestras vidas. Al contrario, el nombre Yahvé es un vocablo que predice el comportamiento … la conducta … del Dios de Israel. Anuncia su naturaleza desde antes para instruirnos como es Él.

Esta declaración de mi nombre … como el texto nos lo presenta … viene a partir de una intensa colaboración entre el nombre, por un lado, y la extraña llama que arde en un arbusto cualquier … una intensa colaboración entre lo visto y lo oído … una manifestación multifacética de una realidad que sobrepasa la capacidad humana de asimilarla. Una realidad inefable.

La llamada ‘revelación del nombre divino’ en Éxodo 3 es simultáneamente una revelación y una ocultación. La manifestación de un Dios bueno y noble que añora conocer y ser conocido … pero que jamás se permite controlar. Jamás se permite conocer exhaustivamente.

El texto que pide nuestra atención ha sido víctima, a mi criterio, de tres lecturas deficientes … para no decir equivocadas.

La primera deficiencia que nos toca corregir gira en torno al rol que juega la zarza ardiente. En realidad, es cualquier zarza, como el suelo que Moisés pisa es cualquier tierra. El detalle que más nos concierne es la llama que arde en la zarza, pero que no la consume.

2Y el ángel del SEÑOR se le apareció en una llama de fuego, en medio de una zarza. Al fijarse Moisés, vio que la zarza ardía en fuego, pero la zarza no se consumía. 3 Entonces Moisés dijo: “Me acercaré ahora para ver esta maravilla (gran visión), por qué la zarza no se quema.”

Una lectura superficial concluye—en realidad asume—que la extraña visión existe solo para llamarle la atención a Moisés para que deje de dedicarse a las ovejas y tome un atajo importante para llegar a escuchar lo que el Señor le quiere decir. Una vez Moisés se acerque y el Señor le hable, la llama pierde su relevancia. Es cómo un letrero de neón que dice ‘¡Moisés, Moisés, por acá…!’ Y nada más.

Discrepo vehementemente. 

El mensaje sobre la naturaleza de Yahvé que la voz del ‘Ángel de Yahvé’ declara es inextricablemente integrada a la llama que arde y no consume. Son dos manifestaciones—una visible y la otra audible—de una misma realidad.

La llama comunica la realidad de un Dios que se puede localizar, pero no se puede controlar. Es una realidad dinámica, no estática. Es un Dios cuya presencia se puede afirmar, pero no se puede precisar, mucho menos controlar.

En nuestra casa en los Estados Unidos, Karen y yo tenemos una chimenea. Además, tenemos preparada más leña que podríamos usar si alcanzaramos a cumplir 150 años. Me encanta salir al bosque con mi motosierra y cortar leña sin preocuparme por las extravagantes dimensiones de los montones de leña que mi obsesión genera. Durante los inviernos salvajes de Nueva Inglaterra, nos encanta encender un fuego en la chimenea, sentarnos con la perrita sobre su alfombra, y pasar las horas contemplando la danza de la llama.

Sería absurdo reportar que no sabemos si hay un fuego o no hay un fuego en la chimenea. ¡Obvio que hace treinta minutos no había fuego! ¡Indiscutible que ahora sí hay!

Pero si me preguntas, segundo por segundo, si la llama está allí o si está allí, te pediré con máxima cortesía que no nos pierdas el escaso tiempo que tengo con Karen para descansar delante de la chimenea. La llama danza, la llama es imprevisible, la llama sorprende, la llama hace lo que quiera, la llama aparece donde le dé ganas y se ausenta donde no quiera. Uno no controla la llama. La llama tiene sus propios medios y no los revela.

Pero hay una diferencia entre la llama en nuestra que nos deleita en la chimenea y la que arde en este arbusto del desierto. La nuestra consume. 

Esta llama no consume. Es decir, el Dios de los padres, a pesar de las incipientes enseñanzas sobre su soberanía que la llama ejemplifica, no existe para destruir. Al contrario, existe para crear. Para generar abundante existencia que le da eco a la realidad primordial de su existencia. Para redimir. Para dar vida.

=====================

Mencioné que una lectura superficial de este formidable texto genera tres deficiencias. 

La segunda deficiencia tiene que ver con una ceguera frente al evangelio … frente a las buenas nuevas … que saturan el pasaje:

Ex. 3:13   Entonces Moisés dijo a Dios: “Si voy a los Israelitas, y les digo: ‘El Dios de sus padres me ha enviado a ustedes,’ tal vez me digan: ‘¿Cuál es Su nombre?’ ¿qué les responderé?” 14 Y dijo Dios a Moisés: “YO SOY EL QUE SOY,” y añadió: “Así dirás a los Israelitas: ‘YO SOY me ha enviado a ustedes.’”

A partir de este momento, voy a hacer algo que espero que nunca hagamos en las iglesias que servimos, una aflicción con que espero que nunca carguen a sus ovejas en un contexto eclesial. Lo hago porque compartimos un contexto universitario y académico, donde tenemos el lujo de sumergirnos en semejantes temas. Voy a hablar del Hebreo y del Griego.

¿Qué significa ‘YO SOY EL QUE SOY’?  … אהיה אשר אהיה

Bueno, a partir de la Septuaginta, se supone que tiene que ver con la existencia del Dios de los padres: Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν· = ‘Yo soy el que existe’.

Lo que el ángel de Dios revela desde la zarza, desde la perspectiva de esta lectura, es la estupenda novedad de que Dios existe…

Pero no me imagino como la existencia de Dios funciona como buenas nuevas para los esclavos hebreos gimiendo bajo el yugo de su opresor. Es más, en una cultura altamente religiosa, ¿quién hubiera dudado de la existencia de su Dios … o de los dioses?

Tristemente, lo que la Septuaginta alcanza es poner pan sobre la mesa de generaciones de filósofos que se dan a la tarea de debatir que significa ‘Yo soy quien soy’ … o ‘Yo soy el que existe.’

¡Nada o poco que ver con el sufrimiento de los esclavos hebreos que protagonizan el contexto del pasaje! ¡Y muy poco que ver con la expresión hebrea אהיה אשׁר אהיה!

Ahora, cuando estamos ante un verbo medio ambiguo como el verbo hebreo היה, el español nos obliga a tomar una decisión. O vamos con ser o vamos con estar. Muchos idiomas no insisten que el lector tome esta decisión. El español sí, y yo digo por lo tanto, ¡Dios bendiga el español!

Las exigencies de nuestro idioma compartido—el español—nos respaldan mientras practicamos la exegesis que debíamos haber efectuado en primera instancia. El hebreo también corre al rescate pues היה difícilmente hubiera aparecido en esta forma para hablar de existencia. Su implicación más natural hubiera sido presencia.

El nombre divino tiene poco o nada que ver con la existencia del Dios de los Padres, cosa que hasta la época moderna no habría provocado duda. El dilema de los esclavos hebreos es que el Dios de sus padres no aparece. Por las apariencias, por sus moretones, por su cansancio, y por los asesinatos que les ha tocado sufrir, el problema es que aquel Dios se ausentó hace tiempo y ya no hace nada.

El hecho de que el ángel de Dios revela que su nombre es ‘El que está’ o, con un poco más de precisión ‘El que está poderosamente presente para rescatar’… ¡Esas sí son buenas nuevas!

Y para la satisfacción de un exégeta, son buenas noticias que corresponden precisamente con el contexto histórico y literario, por un lado, y con el idioma hebreo, por otro.

‘¿Cómo se llama?’, imagina Moisés que sus hermanos desde su agonía nacional van a preguntarle apenas él les declare que ‘el Dios de los padres me envió?’

‘Diles esto, Moisés’, viene instruyendo la voz que sale de la llama danzante en la zarza que no se consume…

No les digas que yo existo. Diles esto ‘Yo soy el que hace presencia con los suyos. ¡Eso es mi nombre! Presencia para rescatar. Para soltar. Para liberar. Para redimir.

Esta revelación sí consiste en buenas nuevas. Para los eslavos hebreos. Pero también para este peregrino gringo perdido en Colombia, pues el ángel del Señor dice que este es mi nombre para siempre. ¡Yo necesito como nadie un Dios que haga presencia y me salve de mí mismo, que nunca me abandone hasta haberme conducido a mi victoria final! Y quizás uno que otro de ustedes, perdido o ahogándose en su miseria … su pecado … su ansiedad … su sufrimiento … su desesperación … su necesidad … necesito lo mismo.

===========================

Nos queda una lectura deficiente más para remediar.

Una vez más, nos tocará tener paciencia con un idioma que solo una minoría de nosotros hemos estudiado. Así que les pido esa paciencia, mientras intento no complicarles la vida más de lo necesario.

Ex. 3:13   Entonces Moisés dijo a Dios: “Si voy a los Israelitas, y les digo: ‘El Dios de sus padres me ha enviado a ustedes,’ tal vez me digan: ‘¿Cuál es Su nombre?’ ¿qué les responderé?” 14 Y dijo Dios a Moisés: “YO SOY EL QUE SOY,” y añadió: “Así dirás a los Israelitas: ‘YO SOY me ha enviado a ustedes.’” 15 Dijo además Dios a Moisés: “Así dirás a los Israelitas: ‘El SEÑOR, el Dios de sus padres, el Dios de Abraham, el Dios de Isaac y el Dios de Jacob, me ha enviado a ustedes.’ Este es Mi nombre para siempre, y con él se hará memoria de Mí de generación en generación.

אהיה אשר אהיה

Un imperfecto/yiqtol, primera persona común singular: estaré, haré presencia, apareceré…

Es un verbo imperfectivo: Uno se encuentra dentro de un proceso en desarrollo, observando su concretización, no sabiendo de antemano su desenlace final.

Un pronombre relativo declinable: que, de la manera que, tal y como

Otra vez, un imperfecto/yiqtol, 1cs, idéntico al primero.

Y luego en v. 15 la condensación de todo esto en el mismo verbo היה pero ahora en tercera persona masculino singular: él estará … él hará presencia.

Permítanme el lujo de un español poco natural:

Yo estaré en la manera que yo estaré…

O acudiendo a la propuesta de un estudiante mío: Yo estaré en la manera que a mi se me dé la gana…

Todo está impregnado de contingencia, de incertidumbre desde la perspectiva de quien necesita a este Dios y de suprema soberanía de parte de Él Mismo.

Yo haré presencia cuando y como yo haga presencia (y en ninguna otra) … Yo me haré poderosamente presente de manera que ustedes jamás controlarán. Pueden contar con mi presencia … pero siempre … a mi manera.

Y luego, nutrido por toda esta explicación audible desde la Zarza, ‘Diles que mi nombre es EL QUE ESTA Y ESTARA…’

Si fuera posible reducir esto a un griego natural … o un español natural … estaríamos más cómodos con el lenguaje, pero no estaríamos hablando de la misma llama danzante que hace presencia para redimir a su manera, no a la nuestra.

El resto del Antiguo Testamento a ratos demuestra su fascinación con esta revelación que simultáneamente es ocultación.

Les refiero a un solo ejemplo, sin salir de las fronteras del libro de Éxodo, otro pasaje genuinamente memorable: (33.18-20)

18 Entonces Moisés dijo: “Te ruego que me muestres Tu gloria.” 19 Y Yahvé respondió: “Yo haré pasar toda Mi bondad delante de ti, y proclamaré el nombre de Yahvé delante de ti. Tendré misericordia del que tendré misericordia, y tendré compasión de quien tendré compasión.” 20 Y añadió: “No puedes ver Mi rostro; porque nadie Me puede ver, y vivir.”


La misma sintaxis, el mismo ritmo hablado, las mismas estructuras gramaticales. Es una exégesis del nombre divino dentro de la misma Biblia.

Pero si nos permitimos un salto al Nuevo Testamento, sería interesante aterrizar en el tercer capítulo del Evangelio de Juan. Pues, allí Jesús da su acostumbrada y muy coherente relectura de su Escritura Hebrea, ajustando las metáforas para actualizar una misma realidad.

3.1 Había un hombre de los Fariseos, llamado Nicodemo, prominente (principal) entre los Judíos. 2 Este vino a Jesús de noche y Le dijo: “Rabí, sabemos que has venido de Dios como maestro, porque nadie puede hacer las señales (los milagros) que Tú haces si Dios no está con él.”

3.3   Jesús le contestó: “En verdad te digo que el que no nace de nuevo no puede ver el reino de Dios.”

3.4   Nicodemo Le dijo: “¿Cómo puede un hombre nacer siendo ya viejo? ¿Acaso puede entrar por segunda vez en el vientre de su madre y nacer?”

3.5   Jesús respondió: “En verdad te digo que el que no nace de agua y del Espíritu no puede entrar en el reino de Dios. 6 “Lo que es nacido de la carne, carne es, y lo que es nacido del Espíritu, espíritu es. 7 “No te asombres de que te haya dicho: ‘Tienen que nacer de nuevo.’ 8 “El viento sopla por donde quiere, y oyes su sonido, pero no sabes de dónde viene ni adónde va; así es todo aquél que es nacido del Espíritu.”

Soberana y redentora presencia de Dios.

Misterio divino. Llama danzante o viento que sopla invisiblemente. Dios redentor y poderosamente presente, pero inescrutablemente incontrolable. Revelación y ocultación.

Creando futuro donde solo olía a muerte.

Yahvé, Dios de los padres. Jesús, hijo encarnado. Viento divino dinámico, nunca estático. 

Como seminaristas, ¿cómo vamos a vivir fielmente en la presencia de esta llama danzante, este Yahvé? ¿Esta llama divina que es viento divino?

Primero, lo que no vamos a hacer: Decidir que nuestro trabajo académico es un mero juego intelectual, y lo que realmente importa es una espiritualidad sentimentalizada y alejada de nuestra vocación. Dios guarde que volvamos a semejante superficialidad, aunque haya sido predicado desde este púlpito.

  1. No vamos a dejar de gemir, anticipando que el Dios que se hace presente a su manera y en su momento responderá.
  2. Vamos a aceptar la realidad de que Yahvé simultáneamente se revela y se oculta. Nunca vamos a anticipar que nuestro conocimiento teológico lo vaya a ‘atrapar’ de manera exhaustiva. Vamos a celebrar la realidad de que su soberanía garantiza sorpresas en nuestras pequeñas y frágiles vidas.
  3. Vamos a deleitarnos en los misterios movimientos de la llama … del viento. Vamos a aprender que al centro de una espiritualidad bíblica … de una fidelidad biblica… yace una pregunta digna de ser repetida diariamente y sin cesar: ¿Y ahora … qué estará haciendo este Dios soberano, incontrolable, presente?

Bendito sea Adonai, el que hace presencia. Llama divina, viento divino. Bondad, misericordia y compasión.

Read Full Post »

Agents of Transformation: A New Household

Posted in denkschrift, tagged , on July 7, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Titus 2.1-10

Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church

7 July 2024

We’re in the midst of a series of messages entitled Show the Beauty of Christ … Church and Culture. Today’s message bears the title ‘Agents of Transformation: A New Household’. Our text from the Bible today is Titus 2.1-10. This is what it says:

But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine. Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. Likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled. Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us. Bondservants are to be submissive to their own masters in everything; they are to be well-pleasing, not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.

(Titus 2:1-10 ESV)

Pastor Scott always gives me the toughest texts….

Clearly, this is a text about family, although maybe not as closely defined as our revered concept of nuclear family.

We begin in family, at least biologically speaking. It’s in the coming together of a biological father and a biological mother that we begin our life as human beings. We pass in that unremembered moment from the mind of God to this place of space and time. In most cases, we end our earthy lives in the company of family, whether remembered or resented. Everywhere in between we are at least partially defined by these people who share blood or a fateful decision with us. 

Yet the apostle is strangely unsentimental about family. He doesn’t write, as I heard said at the funeral of a cousin last week, that it all comes down to blood. Family is what matters. 

Convinced as Paul is that the gospel of Jesus has the strongest implications for how followers of Jesus do family, Paul doesn’t elevate family to that absolute, iconic level that popular culture and sometimes popular Christian culture does. Paul does not worship family or come anything close to that. He does not imagine that the integrity of our faith stands or falls on the condition of our family, though he does ask that church leaders show evidence of good parenting.  Paul does not isolate ‘the nuclear family’ from its context of our wider network of relationships. There’s no gauzy focus on the camera when this apostle turns to matters of family.

But we can say one thing about Paul’s instruction regarding family, whether here in the little book of Titus or elsewhere in his writings: When he turns to how we work out our faith in Jesus, he begins with family. When we peer out from the angle of our own human heart, family is the closest thing. It is, as a friend of mine likes to say about other priorities, it’s the wolf closest to our sled. It’s our near horizon. It’s our starting point for the hard and often unromantic adventure of living as Jesus would have us live in this life that he has given to us.

I suppose that there’s not a man or woman who stands to teach about familiy in a context like ours this morning who doesn’t feel their own inability to live up to an idealized version of what family supposed to look like. Let me say right from the start that I experience being a family man as a source of constant challenge as well as joy and belonging.

Some of you are aware that trying to find my place here in Connecticut in the family I’ve married into is one of the primary challenges of my own little life. There have been tears as I’ve tried to figure out what it means to be husband, stepfather, step-grandfather, and brother in our very non-ideal, wildly eclectic, ruthlessly bizarre, occasionally hilarious family.

So I for one welcome Paul’s unsentimental take on what it means to live out Christian integrity in a context where things are complicated and answers are not easy.

Here’s another complicating factor: If we insist on approaching today’s text with the idea that our social arrangements today represent the unquestioned pinnacle of human achievement, then there’s a lot not to like in this passage.

Paul tolerates slavery. Now this may not be like the horrific slavery along racial lines that we’ve known in this country, where a White man owned a Black man for no other reason than the color of their skin. And it may not be the cruel slavery that chains up more human beings today than ever before in human history

The organization Walk Free runs something called the Global Slavery Index: Here’s what they have to say: 

An estimated 50 million people were living in modern slavery on any given day in 2021. This is nearly one in every 150 people in the world. Modern slavery is hidden in plain sight and is deeply intertwined with life in every corner of the world.

Slavery today includes sex trafficking of adults, child sex trafficking, forced labor in the form of bonded labor or debt bondage, and the recruitment and use of child soldiers.

The slavery Paul does not directly oppose is a more benign arrangement that any of this. In some cases we might argue that bondservice—a more accurate word than ‘slavery’ for what Paul is talking about—is a mechanism that allows a person to work there way out of a debt brought on them by some calamity. But the stubborn fact remains that even the slavery, or bondservice, of Paul’s day consists of the control of one human being’s life by another without consent. It would be easy for us to find in Paul some retrograde, soul-darkened, ethical monster, unworthy of our time and attention. For some, this is especially the case because this apostle purports to speak in the name of God without opposing this evil and even while giving instructions for bondservants to submit to it.

Maybe it’s even more likely that we’d take offense from Paul’s instructions for women to submit to men, or at least for wives to submit to their husbands. We might wonder where he comes off being that kind of sexist and why we would still find it acceptable to take our instruction from such a man.

I think either reaction would be mistaken. But I also find them understandable.

Paul is speaking from and to another time, and it’s up to us to find the enduring truth for our moment in how he advises his young disciple Timothy to shape the community he’s been tasked with shepherding.

That is hard work. But let’s give it our best this morning.

First of all, I don’t think Paul’s intention here is to provide a precise set of role categories and ask people to stay inside their box. Paul may or may not go at things in that way in other passages. It’s not what he’s doing here.

He’s working with his guy Titus to shape Christian communities for the long haul. He’s looking for health, survivability, and minimal conflict. Some might say minimal drama.

If you can take that opinion on faith just to get us started, then let me try to work out its implications.

I’m not big on quoting strange languages from up here, but I think in this case it’s worth doing so.

Paul deploys a Greek word twice here, in verse 1 and then again in verse 2. The word is ὑγιαίνω. If you have a brain wired for language, you might hear our word ‘hygiene’ in there. That’s not an accident. The word has to do with health or what an earlier generation of English speakers might have called soundness.

Ὑγιαίνω appears twice = ‘sound doctrine’ (1) and ‘sound in faith’ (2). Paul is signalling that his concern is not principally theoretical. It’s pragmatic. It’s about health.

In Paul’s ethical instruction, Christian practice starts from where we are, not from an idealized, imagined neutrality/perfection. In fact, if you happen to be reading the English Standard Version with notes in the margins or at the foot of the page, you’ll see that I’m not the only person who reads verses 1 and 2 this way. If you to happen to have those notes, you’ll read…

 But as for you (Titus), teach what accords with sound doctrine. 

Just after the word ‘sound’, you’ll see a number (it’s probably a little number ‘1’) that will direct you to the footnotes or marginal notes. There, you’ll see the words ‘or healthy’. Then, in verse 2, you’ll read this: 

Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, psound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.

Just in front of the word ‘sound’ you’ll see a small letter (probably a p). It will direct you to a note that points you back to that comment in verse 1. What it’s telling you is that the Greek word  ὑγιαίνω in both verses is possibly best understood in our English today as ‘healthy’ rather than ‘sound’. And that what Paul is talking about is not a rigid code of doctrine or behavior but rather a way of life in a household that is healthy … that produces wholeness instead of disease … life instead of death … peace instead of conflict. This is how I believe we’re to understand this entire body of instruction for members of households.

Let me take an illustration from the life of, well bugs:

Christians don’t have exoskeletons, we have endoskeletons.

When we’re at our best, we don’t wear a set of doctrines around like outerwear or clothing or an exoskeleton. Rather, we internalize these truths, these realities. They come to form who we are as human beings so that we can interact with each other and with those outside the faith as the human beings creating in God’s image that we are constantly becoming.

The passion that generates this passage is not doctrinal precision, but rather the desire to see a community that can survive its hostile environment and engage in gospel conversations with its neighbors.

So what is Paul’s end-game if it’s not doctrinal precision? This may seem like a trivial question when we haven’t really even examined the text yet. But I think it’s a critical one.

Paul is not a social revolutionary. But he is revolutionary in his own way. The thing is, he’s an incrementalrevolutionary. Paul is confident that the kingdom of God is breaking in and that God’s grace is relentless and will show itself to be triumphant. As a result, Paul is willing to let some sleeping dogs lie. Not all of them. But some of them. Like bond-service.

The apostle, I am sure, has no stomach for the subjection of women or slaves. He knows that slavery and subjection are not God’s design, but rather are the way things are for now in a fallen world. And he’s willing to allow the power of grace to take its good old time undermining the forces that would subject slaves to masters and wives to their husbands.

Now please hear me out, because I could be misunderstood on this point. I am not saying that there are not different roles assigned to men and women in the design of God. We can discuss that and perhaps even come to different conclusions about that and about how that should work out in our families. For those who like technical terms for this kind of thing, we are as a church body ‘soft complementarians’. We are capable of managing different opinions about how exactly our understanding of general roles, for example, should work out. By my lights, that’s normal and that’s healthy. I have a position on such things, but I defer to our agreed stance as a congregation of believers seeking to be obedient to Christ.

What I’m driving at here is that I don’t think Paul’s intention in his instruction to Titus is to fine-tune rules and social arrangements with precision. If it were, we wouldn’t have the book of Philemon, where he urges a Christian slave to gain his freedom if he possibly can. 

So if Paul is not trying to work out a precise map of social arrangements, what is his end game? Why is he dedicating ink and energy and persuasive power to a passage like this?

He’s trying to help Titus shape a Christian community that can survive and even thrive in its context, warts and all, so that it can be the bearer of the life of Christ for the looooooong haul.

He’s building into social arrangements two critical new elements: grace and self-denial.

And he’s counseling older men and younger men, older women and younger women, slaves (and elsewhere slave-owners) on one absolutely critical point: This is not about you!

You can stop fighting and stop defending yourselves. Just breathe.

As a community, Paul is saying, each one of you needs to live in a way that makes the gospel of Jesus Christ attractive to others. A life together that nourishes those gospel conversations.

===========

This is not the spirit of our argumentative age. And if you’re a committed progressive or a nostalgic conservative, you will not be happy with me this morning. And that’s OK.

=============

I believe Paul is speaking to the ‘pinch points’ of the household roles of his day. In my opinion, these ‘pinch points’ change somewhat as cultures evolve, yet I think they’re remarkably durable. In fact, I think most of us can see probably see ourselves and our own pinch points in the role Paul mentions that corresponds to ourplacement in our households. Probably not all of us, but many of us. Even if we can’t see ourselves in this text, the apostle’s instruction won’t be lost on us even if our own circumstances don’t exactly fit the ones he mentions.

So Paul works his way through the most common household roles and identifies pinch points that are going to require God’s grace and a self-denying effort on our part if we’re going to successfully negotiate the challenges they represent. Now I want to be transparent about this list. Honestly, there’s not that much that is novel or creative in them. We have ‘household codes’ very much like these from Greco-Roman culture at the time Paul was writing. Formally, they’re very similar to what we have here in Titus 2.1-10.

But in spite of this formal similarity between what the culture produced as a norm and Paul’s instruction to Titus, there is one big difference: In every case, Paul is telling household members to forget themselves and their claimable rights in behalf of a community that can survive and thrive and bear the gospel into gospel conversations in their generation. These are households that may seem rather ordinary from the outside, and yet are becoming genuine agents of transformation.

Let’s see whether you agree with me about those pinch points. We’ll start, as Paul does, with us old dudes:

1 But as for you, teach what accords with psound1 doctrine. 2 Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, psound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.

I don’t know exactly what age range of men Paul had in mind with his expression translated ‘older men’. Life expectancies were different from what we know today. But I’m confident he was thinking of men whose age means they are no longer starting out in life. Their life has been consolidated or at least should have become consolidated by this age. They’re not anticipating any radical new directions. It’s safe to presume that the good ones among them are community pillars that others can lean on when necessary.

What does he want from these older guys?

He wants them to be…

  • Sober-minded
  • Dignified
  • Self-controlled
  • Healthy in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.

Do you see what’s happening here? 

Paul is not cutting against the grain of normal life patterns here. He’s very much working with the grain.

You should be able to count on an older man to be like this. It’s natural. 

The problem is that you sometimes can’t and that’s why Titus needs to instruct them.

Because an old dude like me can start to act out on his fantasies of stuff he’d always wanted to do but never did … to be driven by his disappointments … to resent his compromises … to become erratic: this is true professionally. It’s true romantically and sexually. It’s true financially.

You know the old trope about the new wife and the red Corvette convertible with the old guy hanging out of it? It’s a trope for a reason!

Men who are not sober do stuff like that. They break out like old fools and become useless to their communities because they only think about themselves. They look ridiculous when they live like this, but they’re the last ones to know.

Or, more commonly—because I didn’t see many red Corvettes in the parking lot this morning—we old guys become cantankerous and curmudgeonly and a pain in the butt to be around. Always complaining. We become Clint Eastwood saying ‘get off my lawn’, only without the coolness of Clint.

So Paul says, Titus, look, let’s be real: you gotta’ exhort your old guys to be healthy in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. You gotta’ help them stop thinking about themselves all the time! Even though you’re young, you gotta’ walk with them as they learn to become pillars for their community rather than fusty old opinionated annoyances.

Pinch points. Paul’s instruction helps Christian older men become what we naturally should become, but we don’t always do it.

Do you see?

Let’s work our way down the list.

Now I’m gonna’ be a little more careful with these, because I don’t belong to these other categoreis. If you find any caricaturing in these next pinch points, don’t shoot the messenger. Your beef is with the apostle, not with me. 

Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers nor slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, 4 and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, 5 to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. 6

When you see an older woman who’s been shaped by this instruction, you recognize her immediately. I think so, at least. I’m not going to make any diagnostic observations about older women who are irreverent … or slanderers … or winos. Far be it from me. I see enough of that behavior in us guys. But I will note that I’ve seen at least five articles over the past five years about mommies who need their wine to get through the day. And I’ve overheard enough conversations of women in my circles to know that gossip and slander are not uncommon. There’s an easy-to-cite trope for each of these things, of course, and when they are turned against women in a general way they are cruel. And inaccurate. But the trope exists for a reason. I think Paul is touching on some sore spots here that most of us can probably recognize.

Because Paul is unsentimental about Christian families and Christians in families and Christian community, he feels no obligation to deny that this kind of regrettable behavior is present and accounted for. He doesn’t throw dust in the air or get all dramatic shout that ‘they aren’t real Christians!’. But he wants this young pastor Titus to be situationally aware, and to be intentional towards the women in his community so that they are the best human beings and, yes, the best role models possible. 

Do you note that he wants these women to work on their own stuff? (Here we merge into the third group Paul addresses, the young women.)

He wants the older women to be such accessible … attractive … lovable people that young women will learn through them to love their husbands and children. You might think that’s an odd ambition. Don’t they alreadylove their husbands and their children?

I think Paul’s point is more nuanced, as is almost always the case when we’re trying to understand this man. He’s talking about loving the man and the kids who are right there under her nose, not getting caught up in fantasies about a different guy and more accomplished or obedient or gorgeous children than these ordinary, snotty-nosed ones who crowd her days. Remember, he’s unsentimental and very realistic.

Now please don’t get hung up on the language that is translated in the English Standard Version as ‘working at home’ (οἰκουργοὺς) in verse 5. Paul is not arguing that these young women should not go out and get a job. That’s not the economy that he or they were living in and few of them would have had any such opportunity. Most of the guys will have worked at home as well. 

Paul’s point is not that. He’s saying that these young women should be industrious where life has placed them, that they should take care of the business that is right there in front of them rather than running around in search of more interesting errands and conversations.

You may or may not like Paul’s exhortation that these young women should be submissive to their husbands. That’s material for a much larger conversation. But I would ask you to at least consider that the kind of family atmosphere that will not cause ‘the word of God to be reviled (5)’ is one where there is unity of purpose. And that in Paul’s world—arguably in our own as well, but I don’t see that as a conversation to be had on a morning like this and via a monologue like this—a kind of submission to a common purpose is the best available counsel.

Paul has only one word of advice for Titus in dealing with ‘the young men’.: 

Likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled.

Those savages….

But if you’ve only got one thing to say to a young man, doesn’t it make sense that it should be this one thing? I think so. How many of the disqualifying, non-community-building mistakes of young men come down to the absence of self-control. Maybe almost all of them?

 Then finally those slaves or bondservants.

Paul never even mentions their masters here, although he certainly does in other places.


Here’s Paul’s realism again:

Bondservants are to be submissive to their own masters ein everything; they are to be well-pleasing, not argumentative, 10 not pilfering, fbut showing all good faith, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.

Paul’s failure to condemn slavery here drives … people … crazy.

For many, it makes Paul and Christian faith complicit in this evil.

And yet Paul’s approach eventually won the day, at least in this country—not without immense pain and suffering and egregious hypocrisy—as the master and the slave discovered that they were brothers. We may think Paul should have taken another course here. But this is the counsel he gave. 

He is playing the long game. He knows the power of the gospel to triumph and he knows that God’s metronome sometimes beats slowly. 

How then shall we draw this to a close?

Paul’s instructions for households that want to become agents of transformation is not complex. It’s difficult, but not complex.

  • Start where you are.
  • Ask God for grace.
  • Forget yourself.
  • Love the ones closest to you.

Are there qualifications and conditions and some households that justify getting out of there before somebody gets hurt or killed? Of course.

For most of us, that is not our situation. Those of us fortunate to live ordinary lives in unremarkable households seek God’s power to love those closest to us. It’s where Christian practice always … inescapably … begins. It’s the wolf closest to the sled. It’s the way of Jesus.


May it be our way, too.

Read Full Post »

¿En realidad podemos esperar?

Posted in denkschrift, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Un sermón pronunciado en el Servicio Religioso de la Fundación Universitaria Seminario Bíblico de Colombia

9 mayo 2024

David Allen Baer Potter

El bus que me lleva varias veces cada semana entre Robledo y San Cristóbal pasa una cantidad de mensajes pintados en rocas, en tablas y por doquier que dicen ‘¡Cristo viene pronto!’ Es una expresión bíblica o por lo menos un concepto que nace y que existe en la Biblia. Confieso que he aprendido a callar un poco el volumen del mensaje reiterado que me asalta en esos viajes en bus. Si no, es capaz de que uno apareciera a la puerta de nuestra iglesia en San Cristóbal en un estado de exaltación suficiente pa’ despertar los muertos. O tal vez en condiciones de pánico suficientes para justificar que los hermanos me hospitalicen.

Estoy seguro de que la fe del hermano que con su pintura y su brocha evangeliza los viajeros que pasamos por esos lares es genuina, sólida y más atrevida que la mía.

Pero estoy seguro de otro detalle a la vez: que la iglesia de Cristo es, como dicen, reformada y siempre reformándose. Como tal, los hijos e hijas de la iglesia tenemos la ineludible vocación de someter todo lo que creemos y todo lo que vivimos … y todo lo que pintamos al lado de la carretera … a la luz de la palabra de Dios.


Hoy pretendo hacer eso con la manera en que anticipamos el triunfo del amor divino en la historia y más allá.


Quiero plantear una pregunta: ¿En realidad podemos esperar?

Además, quiero leer dos pasajes de los profetas del Antiguo Testamento. Observaremos una marcada semejanza entre los dos:

Primero, Miqueas 4.1-4 (NBLH):

Y sucederá en los últimos días Que el monte de la casa del SEÑOR Será establecido como cabeza de los montes; Se elevará sobre las colinas, Y correrán a él los pueblos.

Vendrán muchas naciones y dirán: ‘Vengan y subamos al monte del SEÑOR, A la casa del Dios de Jacob, Para que Él nos instruya en Sus caminos, Y nosotros andemos en Sus sendas.’ Porque de Sion saldrá la ley (תורה, instrucción), Y de Jerusalén la palabra del SEÑOR.

 El juzgará entre muchos pueblos, Y enjuiciará a naciones poderosas y lejanas; Entonces forjarán sus espadas en rejas de arado Y sus lanzas en podaderas. No alzará espada nación contra nación, Ni se adiestrarán más para la guerra. Cada uno se sentará bajo su parra Y bajo su higuera, Y no habrá quien los atemorice, Porque la boca del SEÑOR de los ejércitos ha hablado.

Y ahora nuestro segundo texto, Isaías 2.2-4 (NBLH). Consten que ya les advertí que escucharían mucha semejanza entre los dos textos:

Acontecerá en los postreros días, Que el monte de la casa del SEÑOR Será establecido como cabeza de los montes. Se alzará sobre los collados, Y confluirán a él todas las naciones.

Vendrán muchos pueblos, y dirán: ‘Vengan, subamos al monte del SEÑOR, A la casa del Dios de Jacob, Para que nos enseñe acerca de Sus caminos, Y andemos en Sus sendas.’ Porque de Sion saldrá la ley (תורה, instrucción), Y de Jerusalén la palabra del SEÑOR.

 El juzgará entre las naciones, Y hará decisiones por muchos pueblos. Forjarán sus espadas en rejas de arado, Y sus lanzas en podaderas. No alzará espada nación contra nación, Ni se adiestrarán más para la guerra.

Sus oídos les habrán avisado que la semejanza entre estos dos textos proféticos alcanza una exactitud casi palabra por palabra. Los mejores estudios de esta extraña dinámica sugieren que son dos variantes de un común denominador que yace a la raíz de la expectativa profética en el Antiguo Testamento. En Isaías, esta visión sirve como la visión de visiones de ese extenso libro, el motor de prácticamente cada pasaje del libro. En Miqueas, la realidad es similar. Y si esta convicción del futuro que Dios se compromete a forjar reposa en el corazón del testimonio profético, entonces de seguro debemos leer todos los pasajes ‘escatológicos’ del Nuevo Testamento a la luz de esta esperanza. Es decir, entre otras cosas debemos anticipar la salvación y la reorientación—el discipulado—de ‘todos los pueblos’ y ‘todas las naciones’.

Pero no lo hacemos.

Al contrario, tenemos expectativas flacas … desnutridas … empobrecidas, pues la ‘escatología’ es una de las áreas de nuestra vida cristiana que le hemos sacrificado al espíritu deprimente y lúgubre de nuestro mundo … nuestro mundo afligido y sufriente … nuestro mundo turbulento y confuso … nuestro mundo enfermizo y asfixiante … nuestro mundo borracho y envenenado.

Terminamos esperando que Dios logre sacarnos a unos pocos de acá para trasladarnos a latitudes celestiales más agradables.

Pero esa expectativa—si la dignificamos con el vocablo—no tiene nada que ver con la esperanza profética, que se manifiesta con constantes referencias a ‘toda carne’, ‘todos los pueblos’, ‘todas las naciones’ y otras descripciones de una humanidad redimida en dimensiones asombrosas y triunfantes.

A esa esperanza no le damos la talla. Porque hemos negociado una solución de pequeñas expectativas y esperanzas marchitadas que reducen la gloria de Dios al rescate de unos pocos mientras las multitudes sufren la inagotable llama de la ira divina.

Si una vez uno creía de esa manera, ya no puedo. La Biblia no me lo permite. La Biblia no nos lo permite.

Si voy a reclamar de manera tan atrevida una creencia—llámese ‘escatología’—que tantos sectores de nuestra comunidad evangélica afirman, sería justo que diera argumentos exegéticos y teológicos sofisticados y bien afinados. Pero no tenemos tiempo para semejante ejercicio hoy. Esa tarea queda pendiente. 

El único ofrecimiento que les traigo hoy es una lluvia de metáforas. Mi ambición es modesta. Quiero sembrar nuestra conciencia colectiva con ideas que espero nutran nuestra capacidad de esperar en grande. Quiero moverles unos centímetros en dirección de poder dar una respuesta afirmativa ante la pregunta que planteo: ‘¿En realidad podemos esperar?’

Primera metáfora: El metrónomo de Dios marca lentamente.

La Biblia presenta a un Creador y Redentor triunfante. Es más, en las Escrituras nuestro Señor bendice el mundo que Él creó por medio de su amor triunfante. 

Pero hay un problema pa’ nosotros, feligreses de la Iglesia de los Santos Afanados: El triunfo de Dios no se ve en un día … ni en un año … ni en una década … ni aun en un siglo. 

Su metrónomo redentor marca lentamente.

Miqueas e Isaías, representantes de todo un gremio de profetas bíblicos que—cada uno a su manera y conforme a sus idiosincrasias—compartían una misma esperanza, hablaron de las naciones fluyendo como un inmenso río a la ciudad del Dios de Jacob para recibir su torah, su enseñanza, su instrucción, su orientación, para luego vivir en paz y harmonía bajo el gobierno de YHVH. Cuando se atrevieron a pintar el futuro de Dios en colores que contrastaron tan radicalmente con las tinieblas de su momento histórico, ellos hablaron de algo que nunca iban a presenciar. Hablaron algo que les parecía absurdo … imposible … contrario a la naturaleza de las naciones y del mundo en que nos toca convivir con tales pueblos.

Pero al ritmo del metrónomo de Dios, somos no solo testigos sino participantes en la realización de esa visión tan radical. Tenemos la tendencia, al leer esta visión profética, de identificarnos con Israel, pero esa es una lamentable ilusión óptica. Al contrario,  somos los hijos e hijas, nietos y bisnietas de aquellos pueblos. Sin embargo, nos hemos unido al Israel de Dios y—esto debe ser más visible en un seminario que en cualquier otro lado—nos hemos dado a la tarea de volvernos aprendices … estudiantes … pupilos … discípulos de תורת יהוה, la ley del Señor.

Y aquí estamos, habiendo confluido a Sión, a lo largo de 28 siglos de ritmo redentor … marcado a paso lento … conforme al metrónomo del amor triunfante del Dios de Jacob. 

Yo sé que es difícil aceptarlo a partir de nuestra vivencia apocalíptica evangélica, pero el Señor de la historia no anda afanado. Él toma su buen tiempo. Su metrónomo marca, mide y divide la historia de la redención a paso lento.

Les confesé que lo único que tengo hoy para apoyar mi reclamo es una lluvia de metáforas. Permítanme, pues, una segunda.

 

Segunda metáfora: ¿Qué hora es?

Sospecho que el hermano anónimo que pintó las rocas en la carretera a San Cristóbal sabe a ciencia cierta que son las 11:59 p.m. 

Y siendo la comunidad evangélica que somos, en el primer cuarto del siglo XXI, sospecho que la mayoría de nosotros también asumimos que el reloj de la historia ha marcado 11:59 … p.m. De hecho, los movimientos evangélicos y pentecostales de los últimos cien años han invertido la mayor parte de sus energías escatológicas en salvajes argumentos sobre si son las 11:59 o las 11:57 … p.m.

Y quizás la hora es así de tardía. Con todo candor, yo no sé. Tú tampoco sabes.

Pero me atrevo hacer una observación ingenuamente sencilla: cada generación de cristianos ha sospechado que la generación suya es la última, que Cristo viene muy, muy pronto, y que la hora a un mínimo marca las 11:45 … p.m. Y cada generación ha sido equivocada.

¿Pero qué tal si son las 6:00 de la mañana? ¿O si es la una de la tarde?

O un poco más radicalmente, ¿si son las 2:45 de la mañana?

En ese caso, nuestra forma de esperar sería diferente. ¿Qué tal si nuestro momento, donde uno puede aterrizar en cualquier aeropuerto del mundo, grande o pequeño, y encontrar una comunidad de seguidores de Jesús dentro de minutos o un puño de horas … qué tal si esa confirmación del amor triunfante de Dios es … pues Dios apenas haciendo calentamientos? ¿Qué tal si el Señor apenas ha iniciado el camino hacia la plenitud profética, donde—Isaías otra vez—los que conocen al Señor llenarán la tierra como las aguas cubren el mar?

¿Qué hora es? ¿Está seguro? … ¿Estás segura?

Quizás la hora no es tan tarde y nos queda mucho tiempo para admirar el amor triunfante del Señor. Quizás la extensión del evangelio de estas latitudes y a otras es primicias de cosas que solo la visión profética es capaz de admirar. Quizás este mundo afligido está madrugando, camino a su medianoche de luces y de celebración y redención.

 

Tercera metáfora: Mis Medias Rojas @ 2004

Si uno es fanático del mejor equipo de beisbol en la historia humana, animal y cósmica—me refiero por supuesto a las Medias Rojas de Boston—entonces uno está moralmente obligado a odiar el principal rival, los detestables Yanquis de Nueva York. Obvio….

En el trágico y oscuro año 2003, los Yanquis nos eliminaron en el séptimo y último partido del Campeonato de la Liga Americana, por medio de una cadena de sucesos tan tristemente improbables que nos dejaron descorazonados. Nos condenaron a pasar un invierno de lágrimas.

Viene el año 2004. Una vez más, todo se ve posible. Tanto las Medias Rojas como los maléficos Yanquis ostentan una temporada magnífica y figuran entre los mejores equipos de ambas ligas del beisbol profesional en los EE.UU.

Al final de la temporada, en los llamados playoffs, se enfrentan una vez más los Yanquis y las Medias Rojas en el campeonato de la Liga Americana. Es una serie de siete partidos. Hay que ganar cuatro. El ganador avanza a la Serie Mundial. El perdedor llora y se arrastra a su casa.

Pero en 2004, las Medias Rojas han logrado consolidar los roles de varios jugadores increíbles, incluyendo latinos como el boricua Manny Ramírez, los dominicanos David Ortiz y Pedro Ramírez y un shortstop, hijo de la costa caribeña de Colombia, Orlando Cabrero. Somos fuertes. Pero los odiados Yanquis una vez más nos obstaculizan el camino a la Serie Mundial, campeonato que no hemos ganado desde 1918, cuando se nos occurió vender a los Yanquis nuestra mejor estrella, el leyendario Babe Ruth.


Esta vez los Yanquis nos humillan en los primeros tres partidos. Solo les toca ganar uno más para acabar una vez más con nuestros sueños. Es una total calamidad. Ningún equipo en la historia de las Ligas Mayores de beisbol ha podido recuperar después de una desventaja de 3 partidos a 0.  Ninguno.

Pero … pero … en una de las semanas más insuperables en la historia del deporte, las Medias Rojas ganan los próximos cuatro partidos. Avanzan a la Serie Mundial, donde ganan cuatro partidos contra 0 y se nos corona ‘campeones del mundo’. 

En estos últimos dos meses del 2024, me he dado a la tarea de ver las grabaciones de los partidos 4, 5, 6 y 7 de ese inolvidable campeonato de hace veinte años.

Yo sabía quién iba a ganar, claro, octubre del 2004 fue uno de los meses más exhilarantes de mi vida. Pero sentándome a lo largo de dos meses para ver minuto tras minuto, lanzamiento tras lanzamiento, entrada tras entrada, experimenté el mismo ardor, el mismo drama, el mismo pulso acelerado, el mismo delirio de hace 20 años. La conclusión nunca entraba en duda. Pero el play-by-play fue fascinante y conmovedor y … para este peregrino … muy real.

Yo sé quién triunfa en la historia de ese mundo … en la experiencia de la humanidad … en la redención del cosmos. Su nombre es Yahveh … Adonai … el Señor, el Padre de nuestro Señor Jesucristo. 

Los profetas me lo dijeron. Su Espíritu venció mis dudas. Mi Jesús me lo confirmó. La conclusión no está en duda. El amor divino triunfará.


Pero nos toca vivir cada momento a todo color, con el drama intenso de lo que está en juego. Sufrimos, lloramos, reímos, celebramos como cualquier otro ser humano … lanzamiento por lanzamiento, entrada por entrada … pero sabemos quién triunfa a la conclusión de todo.

Mientras tanto, esperamos en grande.

Cuarta metáfora: El camino a Jardín

Muchos de ustedes saben que este semestre a Karen y a su servidor se nos ha golpeado fuertemente, principalmente mediante la pérdida de nuestro hijo Taylor. No ha sido fácil.

Cumplimos doce años de matrimonio el día 28 de abril y a mi esposa le sorprendí, arrendando una casa en las montañas alrededor del pueblo de Jardín, en el suroeste de nuestra hermosa Antioquia.

El lugar fue indescriptiblemente bello. Nos sentamos por incontables horas, admirando el juego de luz y nube que es un constante en esos espacios andinos, gozándonos en la presencia de las muchas aves que compartieron con nosotros sus vidas de constante movimiento.

De vez en cuando, cuadramos un tuk-tuk que llegaba para llevarnos al pueblo de Jardín. Siempre una aventura en ese camino rocoso y serpentino. Durante los 25 minutos entre casa y pueblo nos preguntábamos, ¿Dónde estará el pueblo? ¿Por ahí? No, creo es por allá. No jamás…


Sabíamos perfectamente bien pa’ donde íbamos. El destino era seguro. Pero era imposible en cualquier momento saber dónde estábamos. A veces la lluvia nos mojó; a ratos al tuktuk le costó subir una loma porque había mucho barro. Había un momento cuando nos preguntamos si hubiera sido mejor quedarnos en casa, pues quizás no llegábamos y la noche se volvía oscura.

La principal objeción al tipo de esperanza robusta que los profetas generan es que, pues, las cosas están tan mal. Es que … la persecución … es que los imperios …. Es que la corrupción … es que la miseria … es que la violencia … es que el nominalismo … es que …

Cristo tiene que volver pronto pa’ sacarnos a los pocos de este infierno.

Pero la esperanza que a mi criterio el testimonio bíblico engendra y sostiene es otra cosa. No niega la realidad de la maldad, de las guerras, de nada. Es una esperanza sumamente realista. Acepta que las Édades y las Épocas de Oscuridad pueden recurrir y asumir muchas formas y cobrar factura horrible.

Pero permítanme volver por última vez a mi lluvia de metáforas:

Si el metrónomo de Dios marca lentamente, su amor triunfará a ritmo suyo.

Si no tenemos ni idea qué hora es, es probable que los problemas de nuestra generación pasarán y cederán su lugar o los problemas de otra generación, sin que esto estorbe el avance de la misión triunfante de Dios.

Si al saber quién gana no le resta el color, el drama, el vigor de estas breves vidas que nos toca realizar, viviremos a todo color, con pasión por Cristo, intoxicados por la llenura del Espíritu de Dios y amando al prójimo como a nosotros mismos. Invertiremos nuestras vidas en el proyecto de Dios, encomendando los resultados a sus manos amorosas.

Y si no nos corresponde saber dónde estamos porque el destino es seguro, aunque la carretera se vuelva oscura, entonces no exageraremos la momentánea confusión que nos aflige en camino.

Y esperaremos. Sí, esperaremos.

Alinearemos nuestras vidas con aquel día cuando toda carne …. todos los pueblos … todas las naciones fluirán como inmenso río a la escuela … al aula … a la casa de nuestro Dios. Y en consecuencia los que conocen a YHVH llenarán la tierra como las aguas cubren el mar.

Somos un seminario y somos seminaristas. Por lo tanto, habrá otros momentos para considerar y debatir las implicaciones escatológicas, misionales y hasta soteriológicas de lo que compartí hoy. Eso es natural, y necesario.

Pero si quieres esperar de veras, no quiero caminar solo. Acompañémonos, pues, esperando el futuro de Dios de veras.

Amen.

Read Full Post »

So what’s the payoff for learning another language?

Posted in denkschrift on October 25, 2023| Leave a Comment »

A talk delivered at the induction ceremony of the National Spanish Honor Society (Machu Pichu chapter), Cromwell (CT) High School, 23 October 2023

Buenas tardes, amigos, y muchas gracias, Sra. Williams, por esa generosa presentación.

Good evening, friends, and many thanks, Mrs. Williams, for that very generous introduction.

I want to congratulate those students who this evening will be inducted into the National Spanish Honor Society. Well done!

I was really honored when my granddaughter Kyla asked me on Mrs. Williams’ behalf whether I would be interested in serving as the invited speaker at this important ceremony. Since that initial exchange of texts, my interaction with Mrs. Williams has been a delight. Gracias, Christina.

There was no reason in the world for me to envisage, back in my day, that I would be speaking with you at an event like this.

I grew up in small-town Millersburg, Pennsylvania, a village with 1/6 the population of Cromwell. All of us were ethnically the same, made from what we would have called good German stock. We were certainly not Spanish speakers.

But something happened to me in my high school years. Our little high school—less than half the size of yours—began to receive ‘foreign exchange students’, many of them from Latin America.

I had taken a little Spanish. They knew a little English. 

On that modest basis, we often became friends and I developed a massive crush on the poor souls among them who were women. In the process, I discovered the joy of cross-cultural and bilingual communication that was to set the direction for the rest of my life. I’ve spent the lion’s share of my adult life now in Latin America and another twelve years of it in a role that had me traveling and communicating globally.

From this perspective, from the angle of vision afforded to me by my own little life, I’ll try to respond to the question that Mrs. Wiliams has asked me to address this evening:

What is the payout for the consistent effort it takes to achieve even a basic level of fluency in a language that is not one’s own, as our honorees have done?

Here’s what I think.

FIRST: It provides the opportunity for us to see another human being … to honor that person or those people by respecting their language.

Language is not like a favorite shirt or blouse that you can pull out of the closet one day and leave on the hanger the next. Language is a core feature of who a person is. When we step outside our own comfort zone and dare to express ourselves in another person’s language, we honor them. We respect their humanness. We step for a moment into their story. We see them.

SECOND: It frees us up to circulate in a world outside our own bubble.

I used to travel often to China and I loved the opportunity to immerse myself in a culture nearly completely alien to my own. But I didn’t travel in China alone. I was dependent upon a translator or a bilingual Chinese colleague. 

                        
When I travel to Spanish-speaking contexts, even places I have never been, I am a free, autonomous traveler. I feel confident in moving around, I feel as though I know what’s going on, I almost always feel safe. I can ask questions and volley conversations. I can find a home or at least become a comfortable guest in a world in which I wasn’t born.

THIRD: It makes life a constant surprise.

Because no one would suspect that this face belongs to a Spanish speaker … because I am a late-arriving guest in Latin contexts rather that a native son … I love the surprise that comes when I speak Spanish in a first encounter where no one expects it.

Surprise soon fades, often to deep conversation and human-to-human self-disclosure. I’m constantly amazed how quickly in Latin American contexts people bare their hearts, even strangers. I love that. The desk in my university office in Colombia has a Kleenex box always at the ready, because my students and sometimes my colleagues regularly find that they need it as some intense conversation brings tears. As well as a university professor, I am a pastor, and this calling seems to invite that kind of conversation. By the time we get to the tears—or the laughter— the fact that I grew up not speaking Spanish is far from anyone’s mind. I have been invited inside, and the initial surprise has mellowed into friendship. 

FOURTH: It has commercial value. It just might get you the job and the career you want.

You’ll notice I’m mentioning this one last. That’s because I don’t see learning a second language as principally a career move. I think it’s a move that sets you up to be a broader, more interesting person. But that person just might then nail the job she longs for.

I believe the value I’ve found in being a language-learner is not so different from what you will discover if you continue to give yourself to this opportunity.

What I want to say is that becoming bilingual has immeasurably enriched my life over the course of five decades, far more time than our honorees have lived and breathed. If it produces a tenth of that treasure in your own life, you will never hear yourself say ‘Ojalá no hubiera hecho todo esto.’ // ‘I wish I had never done this.’

De corazón, pues, les felicito. Muchas gracias.

Read Full Post »

Just do it! (Lamentations 3:19-26)

Posted in denkschrift, tagged , on July 19, 2022| Leave a Comment »

A sermon preached at David’s Community Bible Church

Millersburg, Pennsylvania

July 19, 2022

Life is hard.

My wife often turns to me after a phone call or an email has brought really tough news that someone we know is suffering and says it: Life is hard…

I often feel this way after reading the news. I close up my laptop or lay down my phone and murmur to myself or say to Karen or groan before God: Life is hard…

We’ve had our own, more personal reasons to recognize this Home Truth over the past two years. Each of us has had a cancer diagnosis. Karen and I have both undergone cancer surgery. Each if us is doing well, but we’re far more conscious of our own mortality … our own fragility … our own dust-to-dustness … than we were before ‘the C word’ entered our home.

Some of my dear Colombian students, wonderful, emerging Christian leaders, face unspeakable odds in life. You wonder how they even get up in the morning sometimes. As they confide in me about their lives … as I hear them out … as I seek for ways to put wind in their sails, I regularly come away from conversations shaking my head and saying it: Life is hard…

As I volley the illness and the bereavement and the tragedy that comes across the wires courtesy of the DCBC prayer list, I once again shake my head against this undeniable, grim reality: life is hard…

And I watch the gradual but steady passing of my personal generation of ‘local heroes’ from Lykens Valley. My own parents’ graves, freshly dug over the past four years not a hundred yards from use his morning, are surrounded by the resting places of my Sunday school teachers, my Dad’s baseball buddies who were always so good to me, and the parents’ of my friends from childhood and teenage years. Right out there!

Life is hard…

I suppose none of this should surprise those of us who are  followers of Jesus, sons and daughters of biblical faith. We of all people should be the most clear-eyed about reality, the most in touch with how things really are, the least prone to look away from both the goodness and beauty and joy of this world that our Lord has made … and from its hard edges, twisted and deformed as they are by human rebellion.

Still, despite the confidence and stability our faith provides, life somehow beats us up. It arrives with a rude thud more often that we’d like and brings out of us … out of me, at least, that whispered recognition that … life is hard.

And I don’t think we’re caving into some kind of therapeutic wimpiness if we say so.

I have a little project going about the 22 men and women from Millersburg who never came home from World War II. I call it Valley of Lions: The story of the Millersburg 22 and the families who lost them. If I ever manage to retire, I hope to turn my little ten-year-old hobby into a book.

Do you realize that in the final eighteen months of the year, a family in this little town was getting a telegram notifying them that their son or daughter was Missing in Action or Killed in Action on the average of once every month. The final push into Germany in late 1944 and the first half of 1945 was really brutal. So far, I’ve tracked three of those awful telegrams arriving to little Moore Street alone. Moore Street, across the street and a few blocks down from what was my little Moore Street School, with the likes of Mrs. Heckert, Mrs. Wert, Miss Shomper, and Mrs. Lenker loving us forward.

I can’t imagine the darkness that descended on this little town from the time that Blaine G. Walter, Jr. was lost on Guadalcanal in 1942 to the days just after the end of the war when Josephine Strohecker died in Naples, Italy and 2nd Lieutenant William Jones’ plane exploded and crashed on landing as it took off from a Pacific Island on his way home after the war. He’d logged more than 900 hours across 43 bombing runs over Japan. And now the war was over … and he was coming home. Lieutenant Jones is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery beside his mother, his only survivor.

Life must have been incredibly hard in our little Valley of Lions during those years.

Life was hard. Life is hard. Probably life is always gonna’ be hard.

Or am I the only one who feels this way?

===============================

Well, if the heaviness of this reality presses you down this morning … or if it has … then you’re not living something that’s contrary to the Lord’s people at any time.

The so-called psalms of lament provide us with words to pray when loss and sorrow are our lot.

And then there’s this one spectacularly vivid example of faith as it expresses itself in sorrow. We call it the Book of Lamentations.

It’s just five chapters long and easy to miss.

But we shouldn’t miss it. It’s there in our Bibles, waiting to orient us … to gather us in its sad arms … to teach us to wait without denying our pain.

===========================

But let’s not float up on the surface this morning now that I’ve taken the risk of preaching a one-off sermon on loss and sorrow and how to conduct ourselves when those experiences overwhelm.

Let me take us deeper into the hardness of life. Let’s take this to a whole new level.

586 years B.C, the part of Israel that still clung to the name was all but wiped from the map. These people are actually known as Judah, but they’re all that’s left of Israel those six centuries before the time of Jesus. Jerusalem was is capital. When they wax romantic, they call their beloved city ‘Daughter Jerusalem’ or ‘Daughter Zion, the Beautiful/Beloved’. 

So much that represents God keeping his promises is anchored in that city. The king in the line of King David. The Temple, where the Lord is encountered as nowhere else. The priests, charged with moderating the relationship between this sometimes dangerous God of Israel and the people who locked themselves into covenant with him. The sacrifices, that all-important, God-given mechanism for maintaining access to the Lord and closeness with him.

It is in every sense of the word the promised land. Every building, every stone, every family who manages to get to Jerusalem every year or from time to time is participating in something that the Lord has promised and delivered. Jerusalem is for the sons and daughters of the Exodus from Egypt no ordinary place.

And then, decades—even generations—of warnings from the prophets and political/religious battles about whether the Lord would actually allow Holy Jerusalem to be lost, it happens. The Babylonian Army, its lines fattened up by all kinds of hired mercenaries, descends on Jerusalem. They tear down its temple. They level its royal houses. They turn the place of sacrifice into dust. They kill many of the priests and put the rest in manacles. They catch the fleeing king, but they don’t kill him right away. First, they gather up his sons and snuff out their lives one by one as he is forced to watch. Then they put out the king’s eyes, so that the last thing he will ever see is the reality that none of his sons will ever sit on his throne again.

Then they carry off the nobles who’ve survived to Babylon to disappear into the mists of loss and tragedy, just like every other deported people of the time eventually disappeared and were forgotten.

=======

Psa. 137:1         By the waters of Babylon,

                                    there we sat down and wept,

                                    when we remembered Zion.

Psa. 137:2            On the willows there

                                    we hung up our lyres.

Psa. 137:3            For there our captors

                                    required of us songs,

                   and our tormentors, mirth, saying,

                                    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

Psa. 137:4         How shall we sing the LORD’s song

                                    in a foreign land?

Psa. 137:5            If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

                                    let my right hand forget its skill!

Psa. 137:6            Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,

                                    if I do not remember you,

                   if I do not set Jerusalem

                                    above my highest joy!

Psa. 137:7 ¶        Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites

                                    the day of Jerusalem,

                   how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare,

                                    down to its foundations!”

Psa. 137:8            O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,

                                    blessed shall he be who repays you

                                    with what you have done to us!

Psa. 137:9            Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones

                                    and dashes them against the rock!

=========

Now we’re talking loss. Now we’re talking sorrow.

We call this disaster ‘the Exile’. It is to the Old Testament what the death of Jesus is to the New Testament. And the Jews’ unlikely return to the land seventy years later is to the Old Testament what the resurrection of Jesus is to the New. We are talking about a national death … and eventually, a national resurrection.

=============

I wonder sometimes, when I’m trying to convey to my students the absolute horror of the Exile what modern events we could compare it with without cheapening either the one-of-a-kind experience of Exile or the modern comp we’re using to try to bring it home.

Probably the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, 1933-1945, compares, though the numbers are far larger. It’s no accident that many Jews prefer to use the same term Sho’ah that the biblical prophet Isaiah employed to speak of the biblical exile. Sho’ah means ‘storm’ or ‘destruction’ or both.

Maybe—and I say this carefully—Ukraine would be a modern comp if, God forbid, Kiev were to be leveled, Ukraine’s ability to self-govern erased, and all attempt to maintain a Ukrainian identity were successfully stomped down. Let us hope and pray that never happens. If it were to happen, maybe then we’d find it easier to get close to the darkness of the biblical Exile.

But let me just say this: our petty discomforts and injustices and our more modest and very real losses don’t come close. However, what they do share with the Jewish experience of exile is loss and sorrow. You and I both know, in some inescapable degree, what those things mean. And if you’re too young to know what I’m talking about when I use words like ‘loss’ and ‘sorrow’, well, I have hard news: One day you will.

==================

I mentioned the book of Lamentations. In fact, it’s the book that provides our Scripture text for today.

I love that a book like Lamentations gets included in our Bible, alongside other ruffians like the Book of Job, the Psalms of Lament, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs. These are not easy voices to listen to. They challenge and they prod sometimes far more forcefully than they console. But all of them are God’s own Word to us and we do well to linger over them from time to time.

We don’t know exactly who wrote the five chapters of this little book. What we do know is that they were penned in the aftermath—probably the immediate aftermath—of Jersusalem’s destruction. The lines of this poetic biblical text speak to us of what it meant for Israel to lose so very much. I’ve described Lamentations to my students as one, long poetic scream. That’s what it is.

Let me warn you about Lamentations. The writer is sure that God is behind the calamity. He describes the Lord through most of this poem as his enemy, as Israel’s enemy, as fallen Jerusalem’s enemy. He’s equally sure that Jerusalem has deserved all this. But he thinks the Lord has been awfully severe … even savage … in meeting out justice to his people and he wonders how much longer it will go on. He doesn’t know if he can take any more.

I wonder if you’ve ever felt like this. I have. The cause of our sorrow … of our loss … may be different than the stubborn rebellion of Jerusalem in this writer’s day. But the consequences may feel very much like what he describes.

=====================

What are we to do in the darker chapters of our pilgrimage? How can we live faithfully in the shadows of sorrow and loss that afflict us? How can Lamentations be a word from the Lord to us this morning?

Let me read (again?) our text for today. I must tell you that it’s the brightest spot of all five chapters. It’s the climax of some very steep hiking. The road from chapter 1, verse 1 up to this pinnacle I’m about to read is pretty steep. And shortly after this passage, things descend again.

Yet these verses allow us to see the truth and the hope to which this biblical author, writing as though he is Jerusalem itself, has battled. The verses read like this:

Lam. 3:19       Remember my affliction and my wanderings,

                        the wormwood and the gall!

Lam. 3:20       My soul continually remembers it

                        and is bowed down within me.

Lam. 3:21       But this I call to mind,

                        and therefore I have hope:

Lam. 3:22       The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;

                        his mercies never come to an end;

Lam. 3:23       they are new every morning;

                        great is your faithfulness.

Lam. 3:24       “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,

                        “therefore I will hope in him.

Lam. 3:25       The LORD is good to those who wait for him,

                        to the soul who seeks him.

Lam. 3:26       It is good that one should wait quietly

                        for the salvation of the LORD.

What I want to express to the people of God from the Word of God today does not depend completely on these eight little verses. Yet it takes the hope that is expressed here in this pinnacle of the entire book and it looks backwards in the book … and forwards in the book to get a grip on what Lamentations means to followers of Jesus today.

In this spirit of peering at the whole book through the lens of its finest verses, let me offer you four Biblical words of exhortation for when darkness and sorrow have become your companions:

  • Say it out loud!
  • Say it to God!
  • Say it all!
  • Then do the next thing.

===================

The ‘it’ I’m taking about is the reality of my suffering.

Sometimes we’re squeamish as Christians about naming before God just how bad things have become for us. We feel we shouldn’t offend God or that we should not feel as badly as we do.

The Biblical witness doesn’t share that reluctance to speak out of our depths, to name our sorrow, even to use strong words to present before God what we have experienced.

A book like Lamentations invites us to say it out loud. 

By the time we get to Lamentations 3, verses 19 and 20, the author has been crying out before God about what he calls there ‘my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall’ for two and a half chapters. He’s been pouring out his heart in the strongest possible words, remembering, as he says here the very depths of his affliction. 

His lament … his complaint … is honest and open and authentic and very, very real. 

He takes risks in the way he names the cause of his pain. He is not ‘too careful’ or ‘too precise’.

He says it out loud!

He says it like the many psalms of lament, given to us so we’ll have words to pray in our darkest moment.

He says it like Jesus on the cross, when he prays aloud the words of Psalm 22, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’

He says it out loud.

I believe his honesty is a crucial part of his healing.

================

But note a critical element in all the lamenting that the Bible places into the hands of the Lord’s sons and daughters. This lament, from start to finish, is taken to God himself.

All that this writer has to say, he says it to God!

He knows that God can take it. He understands that the only sin that lurks around at moments like this is not saying offending things to God but rather abandoning the conversation with God. That’s the thing that’s to be avoided, not strong speech to God himself.

Scripture invites us to trust sufficiently in God that we can take all that we are to Him in prayer. And the invitation doesn’t get switched off when the only thing we have to offer him is groaning … and tears … and even, like the author of Lamentations, anguished screams and hopelessness.

======================

Third, Lamentations teaches us—it seems to me, anyway—that in moments of great suffering it’s important that we say it all.

Now here I want to take you on a little bit of a detour. Don’t jump off the train on me. I need you to stay engaged while I try to explain something about the book of Lamentations.

As one of my teachers at the Moore Street School used to say to us when she wanted us to pay attention and not drift off, Put your thinking caps on!

The book of Lamentations is an acrostic.

There, I used a technical term, something that an old prof like me tries to avoid when preaching. But if you’re a dentist or an engineer or a lawyer or a machinist or a farmer or an executive assistant, you know the value of technical terms. You don’t want to have to make up words every time you refer to an important point. You just wanna’ say it. 

So here’s a new word for some of you: ACROSTIC.

An acrostic is an alphabetical poem. The psalms and the book of Lamentations and much of the Bible are poetry. That simply means they’re constructed with very special attention to how words work. That’s what poetry is.

So it’s no surprise that a book of laments called Lamentations would be poetry … that it would care very much how words work and construct them so that they work in the way the author intends.

What is surprising is that Lamentations is an acrostic.

So what’s an acrostic? Well, I’ve already said that an acrostic is an alphabetical poem.

That means that the writer starts out with a line that begins with the letter ‘A’. Next, he writes a line that begins with ‘B’. Then ‘C’.  What do you think his next line would begin with?

In reality, sometimes it’s 3 or 4 lines that begin with ‘A’. Then 3 or 4 that begin with ‘B’.

Now we can’t see this in our English Bibles, because he wasn’t writing in English. He was writing in Hebrew.

So we miss out on this acrostic thingy. But he didn’t. He was deadly serious about it.

Now here’s the thing: Acrostics — alphabetical poems — fit well and work well when the topic is a happy one. In the psalms they show up when the psalmist is praising the order or the beauty or the productivity of creation … or of God’s law.

Happy themes, right? Well-ordered, predictable topics, right? That’s where an acrostic — an alphabetical poem — makes hay. Because the fit between the order of the topic and the order of the poem play very nicely together.

Are you following me?

Now here’s another thing: Sorrow, loss, and catastrophe are nor ordered events. Psychologist, sociologists, and just any of us who cares to think about it for a moment will explain that sorrow and loss are disordered moments. They are at the opposite end of human experience from the carefully configured construction of an acrostic … an alphabetical poem … with its almost obsessive dedication to order and design.

When one of the Millersburg mothers took that telegram from the postman in 1942 (Blaine Walter) or 1943 (Richard McBride) or 1944 (Ray Kohr, Asa Romberger) or 1945 (Gene Lentz) and read the words she hoped she’d never see, that was not an ordered moment. When you collapse in tears before the grave of your husband or wife, that’s not an ordered moment. When your spouse walks away, that’s no ordered moment. When millions of Ukrainian mothers climb onto evacuation trains with children and pets in tow and their husbands and fathers left behind, that is not an ordered moment.

When Jerusalem the Promised went up in pillars of smoke and clouds of ash, that was not an ordered moment.

So why does the writer of this biblical lament choose the most highly ordered form available to him for his long shriek before the God whom he hoped was hearing his prayer?

Well students of this book—and I am one—have come up with some interesting explanations. I’d like to share two of them with you this morning.

One explanation says that this prayer comes in this form because it obligated the pray-er to name every painful fact as he sat in Jerusalem’s ashes and expressed a people’s grief to their God. A to Z. One at a time. Nothing left out.

I think this makes some sense, and it leads me to my third piece of instruction that I believe Lamentations hands to us this morning: Say it all! 

When you’re praying out of the depths, name everything. Whether it’s your own sin, an unjust abuse you’ve suffered, the loss of a loved one. Take a page from the writer of Lamentations and walk through it in conversation with God. First A, then B, then C…

Say it all.

But there’s another way to understand the strange use of an acrostic to express the worst possible grief and loss. 

When you’ve been run over by a freight train, and you don’t know what to do, try this: Do the next thing.

No matter how small, no matter how ordinary, no matter how insignificant in the face of your pain, just do the next thing.

Look, my life has been a good life and God has blessed me beyond words. But like many or most of you, life has at different times chewed me up and spit me out. I’ve seen dreams die. I’ve had people walk away. You know, it’s nothing dramatic, but it’s my life and I have my quota of scars just like you do.

I’ve come to believe that the way faith manifests itself after loss is trusting God that there’s a future by taking a brick and starting to build the future. One tiny, measly brick at a time. It doesn’t sound very spiritual, does it? But I think it’s post-traumatic faith in action.

And I think it may well be what the writer of this Biblical lament is doing by saying to himself (and centuries later, to us), today I’m gonna’ work on ‘A’. Tomorrow I’ll get up, I’ll shower and shave, and then I’ll set to work on B. This is how the future is born. This is how we partner with God in creating a future when everything we’ve experienced suggest there won’t be one.

===================

But if everything I’ve shared this morning up to now represents reliable, biblical instruction on how to live and survive our loss and our sorrow, then I’ve managed to save the best part for last.

The best part is the God who accompanies us in our loss. Strangely, he is often silent when we feel like we need to hear his voice more than we ever have. But the biblical witness assures us that he is still there.

Let me read a portion of our text again:

Lam. 3:21       But this I call to mind,

                        and therefore I have hope:

Lam. 3:22    The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;

                        his mercies never come to an end;

Lam. 3:23       they are new every morning;

                        great is your faithfulness.

Lam. 3:24       “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,

                        “therefore I will hope in him.

Lam. 3:25    The LORD is good to those who wait for him,

                        to the soul who seeks him.

Lam. 3:26       It is good that one should wait quietly

                        for the salvation of the LORD.

In these most amazing verses, the pray-er of this long lament discovers that there is in fact reason to hope in the Lord and to wait for the Lord.

If you’re reading slowly and thinking clearly, you might wonder how in the world a person who has suffered so much … who has been so articulate about the God-wrought devastation of his people … should turn and affirm that it makes sense to hope in the Lord … that it’s not crazy but actually reasonable and life-giving to wait for the Lord’s salvation.

How did he come to this conclusion?

Well, I bet what he claims to be true here will bring an ‘Amen!’ out of more than a few bruised hearts here this morning, because what this writer has discovered to be true is also what you have discovered to be real and true. 

It goes like this: 

The steadfast love (חסד) of the Lord never ceases.

His mercies never come to an end.

They are new every morning.




Great is your faithfulness.

Do you hear the totality of the claim in the words never, never, and every?

The whole declaration pivots on one of the Bible’s richest claims about the God of Israel and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

That claim insists that his loyal love // covenant love // persistent loyalty is simply inexhaustible.

What that doesn’t mean is that we experience God’s love in a kind of straight-line, unremarkable, always-on sort of way. It doesn’t mean that. And we don’t!

In fact, we sometimes cry with the writer of Psalm 22 and with Jesus on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why do you stand so far off?’

But we also learn that his chesed is like a life-giving river … that sometimes goes underground and stays there for a very long time … but eventually … in our desert … we find ourselves amazed when that river springs up again to the surface and invites us to drink of its waters, to cool ourself in its refreshment.

His mercies, we learn, are experienced as though new with every fresh morning. Some of those mornings come after a very long night.

This we know. This we base our lives on.

This is why verse 3.25 can pick up Israel’s long chant that ‘the Lord is good. His lovingkindness is forever’ and add a little twist that makes all the sense in the world: ‘The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.’ 

And then this little bit of instruction for those who have ears to hear: 26. ‘It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord’.

Now he has hardly been quiet, this writer of Lamentations. His waiting has been pretty noisy. But he’s battled his way to the realization that the Lord is indeed trustworthy, even in the darkest of nights.

I think his lament is his way of living out that second part of 3.25: ‘The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.’

And I think it can be yours, too.

So when sorrow and loss become your companions, don’t you dare abandon your conversation with God. Pursue him … seek him out, with whatever words you have. And when you tell him about all that’s wrong….

Say it out loud!

Say it all!

Say it to God!

And then what are you gonna’ do? Do the next thing.

When we do these things, we so often discover what we could never discover in our comfort and our ease:

The steadfast love (חסד) of the Lord never ceases.

His mercies never come to an end.

They are new every morning.




Great is his faithfulness.

Amen.

Read Full Post »

a thoughtful (re)consideration of an academic pinnacle: George E. Walker et al., THE FORMATION OF SCHOLARS. RETHINKING DOCTORAL EDUCATION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Posted in denkschrift, reseña, tagged , on September 11, 2020| Leave a Comment »

For a scholar bone-weary of the educationalist wars, Lee Schulman’s introduction to The Formation of Scholars is both balm and hearty invitation to risk the reading of the book that follows. His emphasis on the carefully vetted vocabulary of ‘formation’ and ‘stewardship’ frames up the work’s inspection of what must change in this pinnacle of educational achievement that we call the PhD without neglecting what must be conserved.

The book’s lead-off chapter (‘I. Moving Doctoral Education Into the Future’) profiles the dimensions of what is at stake. On the one hand, massive numbers of human beings enroll in doctoral programs. On the other, a shocking half them leave their programs prior to completion. The challenges that foment the carnage are both long-standing or traditional and relating to new challenges around novel technologies and other environmental variables. This early attention to the both-and dynamic in a context that lends itself to revolutionary screed is encouraging from the outset.

The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID) professes to bring to this formidable nexus a jaunty confidence that things can improve, motivated in part by the doctorate’s native inclination to ask hard and uncomfortable questions. An early axiom that corresponds to this hopefulness is the expectation that, where hard questions are unleashed in a permission-giving environment, profitable changes will be identified and in time implemented. 

The formation of scholars, we are told at this early juncture, involves identity, training, and formation. The process cannot be reduced to any one or even two of the features of the long path that is entailed. Already, hope becomes anchored to scholarly integration and intellectual community, two motifs that will recur throughout this volume. A third critical concept—at least in this reviewer’s eyes—emerges in this first chapter, that of the steward. It is worth pausing to absorb some defining expressions:

‘The contemporary environmental movement has adopted the word steward by focusing on sustainable management that will make resources available for generations to come. Here the emphasis is on people living in concert with the environment and on preservation with an eye towards the future. A steward, then, thinks about the continuing health of the discipline and how to preserve the best of the past for this who will follow …’

‘A fully formed scholar should be capable of generating and critically evaluating new knowledge; of conserving the most important ideas and findings that are a legacy of past and current work; and of understanding how knowledge is transforming the world in which we live, and engaging in the transformational work of communicating their knowledge responsibly to others.’

‘By invoking the term steward, and by focusing on the formation of scholars who can indeed be good stewards, we intend to convey a sense of purpose for doctoral equation that is larger than the individual and implies action. A scholar is a steward of the discipline, or the larger field, not simply a manager of her own career.’

In this first chapter, such agreeably anchored thinking leads to a brief advance look at the structure of a book that is meant to tease out the implications for both continuity and change which such concepts all but require.

The book’s second chapter (‘Setting the Stage for Change’) sketches the relative novelty of doctoral education in America and its migration from an environment whose chief virtue was that ‘no one is in charge’ to the point where established traditions often pass unexamined from one cohort and one generation to the next.  The survey sheds light on two distinct stories:

‘On the one hand, the story is of change—gradual, yes, but ongoing and significant as PhD programs have evolved in response to new funding source and incentives, more and different students, recalibrated purposes, and other changing circumstances both within and outside of the academy. On the other hand, the story is one of stasis—of structures and assumptions that have become increasingly difficult to budge.’

These stories in turn engender ‘four larger ideas’ that become the stuff of ensuing scrutiny: (a) The (Partial) Myth of Money, (b) The Power of the Disciplines, (c) The Double-Edged Sword of Decentralization, and (d) Students as Agents of Change and Improvement. The last of these—students as change agents—comes in for persistent mention precisely because the CID discovered that students are both deeply invested in their programs and capable of enacting real change when they seize or are granted the opportunity to become genuine actors in the process which has claimed a large share of their lives.

The authors open their third chapter (‘Talking About Purpose’) by conjuring the often terrifying beast called ‘qualifying exams’ and then arguing that the purpose of this mile-demarcating ordeal is about as opaque as can be imagined. The obvious desideratum of clarity is then pursued by way of the three-part metaphor of mirrors, lenses, and windows:

‘Mirrors, lenses, and windows improve vision—and thus understanding and motivation to change—by providing new views. Mirrors allow us to see ourselves … Lenses enhance the ability to see by sharpening focus and magnifying detail in one area .. Windows provide the opportunity to gaze at the work done by our neighbors.’

The burden of this chapter lies in its implicit exhortation of doctoral constituencies to summon the courage to design to purpose. Encouragement towards amply populated conversations about purpose and then the identification of the structural components that sustain its pursuit pervade the chapter, together with the recognition that not all of these conversations will be easy ones.

The book’s fourth chapter (‘From Experience to Expertise’) explains how one learns to think like a practicing and productive member of his or her guild. Where lies the path from early experience to that established presence and competence that are captured by the word ‘expertise’?

The CID discerns three principles that mark the road with milestones. The first is ‘progressive development’. This developmental pathway includes the acquisition of research competence, a fluency in the art of teaching what one has learned, and those interactions within one’s field that produce enduring professional identity. A second element of becoming expert (somehow, the adjective seems more accurate than the noun) is ‘integrative learning’. The most effective doctoral programs encourage their subjects to ‘make connections across settings and over time’. Thus, one becomes fluent in the history and dominant dialects of one’s discipline as well as capable of conceiving of that discipline as one among many, some of which are in fact contiguous with one’s own area of expertise.

Finally, the CID makes a plea for ‘collaborative learning’, rooted in the conviction that the world is becoming ever more complex and so isolated research ever more incapable of comprehending sizable pieces of it. A series of three imperatives rounds out the chapter, calling for greater awareness of the structure(s) of an expert’s knowledge and the need consciously to introduce students into these; a call to students to develop a keen sense of how they learn; and a plea to all to interact as genuine partners.

The fifth chapter (‘Apprenticeship Reconsidered’) engages the hoary ‘apprenticeship model’, its roots extending back to Medieval origins and its whispered ‘When it works…’ dynamic acknowledged out loud.

‘The solution, it seems to us, is not to abandon the apprenticeship model but to reclaim and urge it in directions more purposefully aligned with the vision of learning that is needed from doctoral programs today, combined with known ways to foster that learning.’ CID’s solution becomes ‘a shift of prepositions: from a system in which students are apprenticed to a faculty mentor, to one in which they apprentice with several mentors.’

CID would pry the apprenticeship model from its one-on-one ‘Darwinian’ manifestation and reconfigure it ‘more broadly as a theory of learning and a set of practices that are widely relevant’. The constituent elements of this theory and practice are then described with reasonable specificity. One might query, however, whether the apprenticeship model requires incarnation in a one-on-one relationship and whether its relecture as theory and practice risk a gnostic dissipation of its genius.

In what is arguably the strongest entry of the volume, chapter six (‘Creating and Sustaining Intellectual Community’) focusses on ‘intellectual community as a synthesizing concept that pulls together our major themes: the formation of scholars, integration of research and teaching, and stewardship. Intellectual community is also essential to the new vision of apprenticeship …’ It is, after all, precisely in community that the noble ideas put forward by so many educationalists and both identified and named in the present volume become real. They are of little value as abstractions. Yet they are both generative and catalytic when they take shape in the mix of human beings united by a common intellectual cause.

The chapter approaches intellectual community from three principal angles. First, it names the characteristics of intellectual community. Next, it identifies activities that foster such community. Finally, it describes the impact of such community upon the formation of scholars, both in its presence and its regrettable but too common absence.

Nowhere is the belief in doctoral formation as plainly evident as in the final summons of the book (Chapter 7: ‘A Call to Action’). One senses that the principal and supporting actors in CID consider the PhD too valuable to be left untouched. Reform is needed and meaningful change will require all constituencies to bend shoulder to harness.

Five appendices provide details and documents of the CID methodology.

This reviewer is engaged in a thriving theological university in Colombia, where a long history of providing solid, undergraduate level is producing adventurous forays into graduate level education, with a PhD beckoning from just over the horizon. In this context—where words like ‘relevant’, ‘practical’, ‘interdisciplinary’, ‘contextual’, and ‘accessible’ are often considered self-authenticating icons worthy of enthusiastic genuflection—The Formation of Scholars brings its thoughtful examination of what one might call ‘responsive traditioning’. In this reader’s experience, the book achieves this with all the refreshment of an August rain. The Formation of Scholars should remain at the elbow of all shapers of high-level graduate education.

Read Full Post »

In times like these…

Posted in denkschrift on June 9, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Times like these are best met with lament.

Not with firm declarations and explanations in the name of God, or calls for peace and stability above all else. As though we knew more, understood more than we do.

Just lament. We have been given words for it, why not use them?

Yet even in this present darkness one must confess a persistent hope, one that will not die.

Gerard Manley Hopkins captures this tenacious hope as only he can. 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
     It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
     It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? 
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;      
     And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;      
     And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 

And for all this, nature is never spent;      
     There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; 
And though the last lights off the black West went      
     Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent      
     World broods with warm breast and with ah!
         bright wings. 

          —Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, The Grandeur of God







      





Come. Brood now, brood again over us.

					
Read Full Post »

				

							


		
			

				

					
Aim high: Arthur F. Holmes, THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN COLLEGE

					

					Posted in denkschrift, tagged , , , ,  on May 15, 2020|
													Leave a Comment »											

				


				

					
The Idea of a Christian College by [Arthur F. Holmes]This little work, revised in 1975, distills the thinking of one of the most profound conceptual minds behind the modern history of Illinois’ Wheaton College, arguably the flagship of the North American ‘Christian Liberal Arts College’ fleet. Phrases like ‘all truth is God’s truth’ and ‘the integration of faith and learning’ subsequently became common and even anodyne slogans of Christian liberal arts colleges throughout North America.


But in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Holmes was breaking new ground in defense and cultivation of the Christian college. The desire to break free from an inward-looking and fearful Fundamentalism never lay far from the surface. The book still expresses itself with an almost alarming lucidity and is perhaps as much a counter-cultural manifesto in these pragmatic times as it was when Wheaton’s great philosophy teacher was holding forth with his English accent and scribbling the lines of this book with his forceful pen.


Two of the book’s nine chapter titles are questions. The first makes its query in the broadest possible terms: Chapter 1, ‘Why a Christian College?’.


In this opening salvo, the author alleges a veritable jungle of ignorances and misconceptions about what a Christian college is actually for. In this spate of ground-clearing, Holmes is already arguing against a protective and certainly a defensive purpose for such an institution. Holmes finds the answer to his ‘Why?’ in the interpenetration of two distinctives, the educational and the religious. Educationally, the Christian college exists not in order to indoctrinate but rather to educate in ways that are both deep and daring. Religiously, such a college does not keep its piety separate from the other disciplines that come in for research and teaching. Rather it engages all appropriate disciplines from a faith commitment that is articulated and foundational.


From Holmes’ perspective, theology is bound to exercise a sort of queenly function in this endeavor, even if the author is at pains not to allow his queen rights of tyranny. Significantly, ‘Theological Foundations’ is the title of the book’s second chapter and, in a manner of speaking, of its first declarative chapter. Holmes discerns four theological pillars for the project of the Christian College. First, the fact of creation means there is much to be explored and investigated, all of it coming from a Maker’s good hand. The bugbear here is Gnosticism, which would counteract Holmes’ program by placing that truth which is worth one’s while in the sphere of the esoteric, far removed from the creative sphere that humankind is invited to and charged with investigating.


It is perhaps unfortunate that Holmes capitalizes ‘Gnostic’, inadvertently pointing his reader to a defined religio-intellectual movement that can be historically located rather than to the general disdain for the created physical realm that he clearly intends. The gnosticism he wishes to rebuke is with us today as an unorganized and largely unreflective set of mind whose exponents know little both of the historical Gnostics and of the family resemblance that Holmes glimpses in them.


The second pillar is the human person, a complex and rich feature of creation who is at his or her best when curiosity ranges wide across the created plain. Indeed, ‘(T)he educator’s task is to inspire and equip individuals to think and act for themselves in the dignity of persons created God’s image.’


Third, the fact that the realia that present themselves to us are the work of a single, benign Benefactor means, first, that all truth belongs to God no matter where it is found (that is, not exclusively nor even principally through the lens of theology) and, second, that truth is a unity no matter how beguiling its complexity. Faith, then, does not impede one’s quest to engage and understand truth; it empowers it: ‘Faith is neither a way of knowing nor a source of knowledge. Faith is rather an openness and wholehearted response to God’s self-revelation.’


Holmes’ fourth theological pillar is the oft-referenced ‘cultural mandate’. Human beings are cultural creatures. As such, we imitate God as we engage with and create culture. ‘To confess God as Creator and Christ as Lord is thus to affirm his hand in all life and thought. It is to admit that every part of the created order is sacred, and that the Creator calls us to exhibit his wisdom and power both by exploring the creation and developing its resources and by bringing our own created abilities to fulfillment.’


The Christian College’s theological foundations, then, fuel a robust and fearless education enterprise.


In his third chapter (‘The Liberal Arts: What and Why?’), Holmes traces the historically shifting lines of what has come under study in the enterprise to which we now refer as ‘the liberal arts’. But he is more concerned to move beyond this ‘extensional definition’ to an ‘intensional definition’: ‘the liberal arts are those which are appropriate to persons as persons, rather than to the specific function of a worker or a professional or even a scholar’.


One might consider Holmes’ person as person here to be the second accusative often attached to the verb ‘to teach’. That is, one teaches something to or for someone. His emphasis upon the formation of a person sets his approach and indeed the practices of a ‘liberal arts college’ off from vocational and other forms of education. There may be no more violent rupture than this between the author’s program and the pragmatic spirit of the age that renders unremarkable proposals to assess the value of an educational institution principally or even exclusively by counting the dollars its graduates earn within, say, ten years of their departure from it. Holmes believes that educating the person represents a larger and more compelling ambition than that, nor will he concede that to do so is not to attend to matters of a graduate’s employability.


When we ‘make a person’, in Holmes’ view, we are dealing with a multi-faceted though integrated creature. He or she is a reflective, thinking being, a valuing being, and a responsible agent. There is a place for other kinds of education, Holmes avers, but it is the particular remit of liberal arts education to provide ‘an opportunity to steward life more effectively by becoming more fully a human person in the image of God, by seeing life whole rather than fragmented, by transcending the provincialism of our place in history, our geographic location, or our job.’


Because the entire trajectory of Holmes’ apologia for liberal arts education tacks towards the formation of a person rather than the transmission of skills, Chapter 4 (‘Liberal Arts as Career Preparation’) flows as something other than the rearguard maneuver to which it might otherwise have been reduced, particularly in the face of prevailing notions that any education worthy of one’s dollar must demonstrate a short path to a (well-)paying job. The author is entirely convinced that the liberal arts education is solid preparation for a vocation, but not via a mechanical or short path. Rather, Holmes argues, such education forms a complete person who is eminently employable precisely because she has been pressed into significant scrutiny of her attitude towards work, exposure to a wide breadth of education, and development of conscious values that are patient of articulation. In a day in which one’s vocation may include serial dedication to a sequence of jobs, this—in Holmes’ view of things—is the kind of applicant that any employer should be loath to overlook.


Although an unsympathetic reader might by this point have begun to conclude that Holmes wants the church qua church to keep hands off the education of its young, his deep dive into how faith and learning integrate suggest otherwise (Chapter 5: ‘Integrating Faith and Learning’). Here Holmes argues that if a mature faith does not lie at the root of a Christian liberal arts college’s shared life, then it ought to abandon the adjective ‘Christian’. Yet this centering of Christian faith at the core of the college does not take us back to the notion of indoctrination.


Sometimes even interaction (reviewer: between faith and learning) has been repressed in favor of indoctrination, as if prepackaged answers can satisfy inquiring minds. Students need rather to gain a realistic look at life and to discover for themselves the questions that confront us. They need to work their way painfully through the maze of alternative ideas and arguments while finding out how the Christian faith speaks to such matters. They need a teacher as a catalyst and guide, one who has struggled and is struggling with similar questions and knows some of the pertinent materials and procedures. They need to be exposed to the frontiers of learning where problems are still not fully formulated and knowledge is exploding, and where by the very nature of things, indoctrination is impossible.


Holmes moves on from a soaring paragraph like the one just quoted to survey four approaches to the integration of faith and learning: attitudinal, ethical, foundational, and ‘worldview’. He finds a thoughtful Christian appropriation of each of these approaches as the needed, if composite, thing. The volume’s chapter four is, as one says, worth the price of this little book all by itself. Nearly fifty years on, this propositum rings remarkably undated.


It is patently obvious that ‘academic freedom’ is nowadays either a push-and-pull activity within Christian educational institutions—and not merely the Christian liberal arts college—or a topic of derision by secular critics who regard it as impossible within a religious framework or both. Holmes recognizes the dilemma that the alleged existence of the thing surfaces. His sixth chapter, entitled simplify enough ‘Academic Freedom’, addresses ‘(1) why academic freedom is important in the Christian college, (2) how it may be conceived, and (3) some criticisms it meets.’ His discussion is prefaced by a simple definition of his principle term: ‘Academic freedom is the recognition that faith and intellect, like love, cannot be forced and must not be, if each is to play its part in relation to the other.’


Holmes is also cognizant of the damage that is achieved in its absence.


To deny academic freedom is historical suicide. Rather than confirming men in the truth it will drive them from it. Rather than cherishing orthodoxy it will render it suspect to every inquiring mind. Rather than developing the intellectual resources essential to Christian thought and action it will stifle them. Rather than launching a strategic offensive into the citadels of secularism it will incarcerate us in the ill-equipped and outdated strongholds of past wars.


Holmes’ summons to professors to attach the words ‘responsibly’ and ‘carefully’ to their practice of academic freedom will not satisfy all trustees and all alumni, nor indeed will it be applauded by all professors. But it does set off academic freedom in the context of a Christian college context from that intellectual unaccountability which imagines itself devoid of presuppositions and is in other ways painfully and historically naive. One imagines that Holmes would agree that academic freedom is a core principle that in practice is a matter of constant negotiation. 


If the book’s high-water mark has been reached by its fifth or sixth chapter, this does not imply that subsequent chapters represent a winding down. Rather, for example, Chapter 7 (‘College as Community’) anchors all that has been said in a realistic—one might even say unsentimental—view of the college community. Perhaps today more than at the time of writing, ‘community’ is patient of a number of interpretations. Holmes would doubtless reject the most romantic of them, for he is convinced that community is not easily achieved and is built around the reality that the college community’s common cause is educational. One belongs to and participates in this community because one has chosen to learn and to do so in the company both of teachers and of other student learners. One can imagine elements of community that Holmes would happily discard on the grounds that they make little or no contribution to learning. 


Having suffered through chapel services in which the speaker appears to be on a mission to discredit learning, this reviewer finds Holmes’ take on college chapel to be particularly helpful:


So can the college chapel service that is a regular part of community life in the Christian college. It should not be peripheral to the educational task but should constantly renew the vision of a Christian mind. When the well-intentioned speaker discourages intellectual pursuits or cultural involvement or political action, he turns off many students. Chapel speakers should realize that a Christian college exists to cultivate the intellect and involve people in their culture, and that it is therefore more than a conserving influence in the world. A college is Christian in that it does its work in a Christian way, not by encouraging an unthinking faith to counterbalance faithless thought. If education is God’s present calling to students, then no question arises about whether God or studies comes first, for God is to be honored in and through studies. Compartmentalization has no place on the Christian campus.


Holmes constructs his penultimate chapter (8, ‘Experience is not Enough’) around two premises. First, ‘experience alone is not understanding.’ Second, ‘Education requires understanding.’ About a half-century after the book’s first printing, it is challenging to recognize Holmes’ erstwhile antagonists with completely clarity, though it is not difficult to name their daughters and sons. One can surmise that he was battling a reduction of education to quasi-educational ‘practical experiences’ as well as the corresponding diminution of rigorous reflection that accompanies this, as other, reductionisms. Regardless, the chapter’s final paragraph suggests a certain baring of teeth at the approach of adversaries, whether intramural, extramural, or both.


Liberal education develops the person. It is an open invitation to join the human race. Christian liberal arts education is an invitation to become increasingly a Christian person. But neither the excitement of traveling in Europe, nor the trauma of living in a ghetto, nor simply looking at paintings or making them, not unexamined religious experience and service activities can develop an educated person. Experience must be humanized if it is to be educational; to be humanized it must be educated. In the final analysis that is why raw experience is not enough; uneducated experience cannot educate. Experience alone is not education.


This reader was drawn inexorably towards the final chapter with its promised personification of the author’s argument for a certain kind of education. In his ninth chapter—‘The Marks of an Educated Person’—Holmes considers two fictional but highly recognizable individuals who have enjoyed the benefits of a liberal arts education but in fact have not emerged from the process with the desired qualities. His final page is dedicated to a description of another. Her name is Pat, and Holmes’ profile of her is worthy of quotation in full though it will easily signal the five decades that have passed since he conjured her image.


Pat is widely read. She has read Plato and Augustine, Shakespeare and William Faulkner. She’s acquainted with both Bach and Bartók, and enjoys Monet and Picasso. She thinks of them all as her friends. But she does not brag: she wears these friendships lightly.


Pat is alert to the issues of the day: she feels the injustices of apartheid and admits there are ambiguities in Nicaragua. She listens to the other side, rather than reacting with an outburst of ridicule or anger. She measures her judgments before she acts, and before she votes. Her vote, in the end, is the kind of vote a democracy needs—informed, principled, and caring—not just blindly partisan. Her friends tell me she always gets to the heart of an issue.


Pat is aware of some new developments in science and technology, biology in particular, and the moral dimensions of genetic research both interest and concern her greatly—even though her major was literature. She continues to read, to learn, to grow, for she realizes that however large the circumference of her knowledge, just as large are the borders of her ignorance. Yet she doesn’t worship either knowledge, or art, or influence, or even her relationships with her friends. She worships the One from whom all blessings flow, the One who gives but also takes away. Whatever her abilities, whatever her development, whatever her accomplishments, she blesses the name of the Lord.


Pat, I say, is an educated person.


Beyond longing for the increase of Pat’s tribe, what ought one to do with a little and old book like The Idea of A Christian College?


One might begin by placing it at the center of intentional conversation in any number of Christian educational institutions, whether or not they aspire to the moniker ‘liberal arts’. The work is accessible, compelling, and remarkably up to date in the light of its age.


Holmes never insists that the kind of education he describes is the only or even the best kind of education. One suspects that he would wish a thousand flowers to blossom, though he would tenaciously resist any attempt to uproot his particular plant. What he persistently—and by this reviewer’s lights, effectively—combats are the short-cuts, the settling, the mere self-preservation cum indoctrination, the gnostic alternatives to engaging the world as it comes to us, the vicious and purblind pragmatisms that claim to know what is ‘relevant’ and what is not. 


One might wish to query Holmes as to whether the Christian liberal arts education he admires is, is not, or can be made accessible to more than a sliver of the globe’s inhabitants. Alas, he is not present to respond. One guesses, however, that the response we cannot hear would begin by a gently persistent probing of the assumptions behind such a question.


This reviewer, feet firmly planted in a South American context that no one would call privileged, is convinced that—no matter where we begin—Arthur Holmes’ little apology for something larger, more beautiful, and more enduring would move us higher, move us closer to a shared life of learning and teaching that is worthy of all our sweat and tears.

					
Read Full Post »

				

							


		
			

				

					
(losing our) fear of snakes: Isaiah 11.1-9

					

					Posted in denkschrift, tagged ,  on January 28, 2020|
													Leave a Comment »											

				


				

					
A sermon delivered at Faith Church, Mansourieh, Lebanon


26 January 2020


 


If you begin to type into Google, ‘Are there snakes in Lebanon?’, the computer will complete the sentence for you by the time you get to the letter ‘L’.


That means lots of people have wanted to know the answer to that question.


But by the time you’ve arrived at the letter ‘e’ of ‘Lebanon’, Google will also show you that lots of people have asked ‘Are there snakes in Lesotho?’ and ‘Are there snakes in ‘Lefkada’?’ and ‘Are there snakes in…’ several state parks in my country that begin with the letter ‘L’.


Lots of people are afraid of snakes, it seems. I have an intense interest in natural ecosystems and have several bookshelves groaning under the weight of books about the birds, the animals, and the trees and plants in the places I have lived. But even I must confess that I share a fear of snakes.


One of the most fearful moments of my life occurred many years ago as I stood in the surf off a beach in Costa Rica, where I lived, with one of my two small boys in my arms. I watched in horror as my younger son—just a toddler—walked on the beach towards where I could see a snake moving about the sand. Johnny was surrounded by many adults who could have rescued him—and eventually did—but none of them was paying attention. I watched, terrified by what I was watching as though in slow motion from out in the sea, too far away to get anyone’s attention, fearing for the life of my little boy.


Let’s listen together as our brother Rabih reads our Bible passage for today, Isaiah 11.1-9. Listen carefully for good news about snakes.




وَيَخْرُجُ قَضِيبٌ مِنْ جِذْعِ يَسَّى، وَيَنْبُتُ غُصْنٌ مِنْ أُصُولِهِ،وَيَحُلُّ عَلَيْهِ رُوحُ ٱلرَّبِّ، رُوحُ ٱلْحِكْمَةِ وَٱلْفَهْمِ، رُوحُ ٱلْمَشُورَةِ وَٱلْقُوَّةِ، رُوحُ ٱلْمَعْرِفَةِ وَمَخَافَةِ ٱلرَّبِّ.وَلَذَّتُهُ تَكُونُ فِي مَخَافَةِ ٱلرَّبِّ، فَلاَ يَقْضِي بِحَسَبِ نَظَرِ عَيْنَيْهِ، وَلاَ يَحْكُمُ بِحَسَبِ سَمْعِ أُذُنَيْهِ،بَلْ يَقْضِي بِالْعَدْلِ لِلْمَسَاكِينِ، وَيَحْكُمُ بِالإِنْصَافِ لِبَائِسِي ٱلْأَرْضِ، وَيَضْرِبُ ٱلْأَرْضَ بِقَضِيبِ فَمِهِ، وَيُمِيتُ ٱلْمُنَافِقَ بِنَفْخَةِ شَفَتَيْهِ.وَيَكُونُ ٱلْبِرُّ مِنْطَقَهَ مَتْنَيْهِ، وَٱلْأَمَانَةُ مِنْطَقَةَ حَقْوَيْهِ.


فَيَسْكُنُ ٱلذِّئْبُ مَعَ ٱلْخَرُوفِ، وَيَرْبُضُ ٱلنَّمِرُ مَعَ ٱلْجَدْيِ، وَٱلْعِجْلُ وَٱلشِّبْلُ وَٱلْمُسَمَّنُ مَعًا، وَصَبِيٌّ صَغِيرٌ يَسُوقُهَا.وَٱلْبَقَرَةُ وَٱلدُّبَّةُ تَرْعَيَانِ. تَرْبُضُ أَوْلاَدُهُمَا مَعًا، وَٱلْأَسَدُ كَالْبَقَرِ يَأْكُلُ تِبْنًا.وَيَلْعَبُ ٱلرَّضِيعُ عَلَى سَرَبِ ٱلصِّلِّ، وَيَمُدُّ ٱلْفَطِيمُ يَدَهُ عَلَى جُحْرِ ٱلْأُفْعُوَانِ.لاَ يَسُوؤُونَ وَلاَ يُفْسِدُونَ فِي كُلِّ جَبَلِ قُدْسِي، لأَنَّ ٱلْأَرْضَ تَمْتَلِئُ مِنْ


There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide disputes by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins.


The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:1–9 ESV)


Scripture presents Jesus to us in many ways.


Here, the Old Testament prophet, writing eight centuries before angels would announce Jesus’ birth, glimpses Jesus ahead of time.


Now I’m convinced that he doesn’t yet see Jesus with the clarity of those of us who are privileged to live on this side of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. But he sees him, nonetheless.


The prophet sees Jesus as a ‘shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots’. Did you hear that in verse 1 of Rabih’s reading?


Jesse was David’s father. David of course has been dead for two hundred years when the prophet writes these words. Worse yet, Isaiah knows that David’s royal line will very soon be cut off. What little remains of ancient Israel will be king-less and lost in Babylonian exile.


Their whole world will have ended, and all the promises of God—apparently—will have been lost along with their land, their temple, and their king.


Isaiah writes from close proximity to this tragedy. Yet the prophet also sees that, out of that cut-down towering tree that was David, a little shoot—a tiny branch—will surprise us by emerging.


This will be an unexpected new son of David, the one we know—although Isaiah did not yet know him by name—as our Savior, Jesus.


With a beautiful poetic touch, Isaiah describes him in three way: First, by his endowment. Second, by his conduct. Third, by the results of his rule.


First, let’s look at Jesus endowment … his magnificent saturation with the Spirit of God.




وَيَحُلُّ عَلَيْهِ رُوحُ ٱلرَّبِّ، رُوحُ ٱلْحِكْمَةِ وَٱلْفَهْمِ، رُوحُ ٱلْمَشُورَةِ وَٱلْقُوَّةِ، رُوحُ ٱلْمَعْرِفَةِ وَمَخَافَةِ ٱلرَّبِّ.وَلَذَّتُهُ تَكُونُ فِي مَخَافَةِ ٱلرَّبِّ، فَلاَ يَقْضِي بِحَسَبِ


And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. (Isaiah 11:2–3 ESV)


The Spirit of the Lord will rest upon this ‘shoot from the stump of Jesse’. The expression in the language of Isaiah is a rich one. It speaks of the kind of resting that saturates a location. We could think of the way thick, billowy clouds sometimes roll over your Lebanese mountains and come to cover … to rest upon … the valleys in between those magnificent ridges.


When the Spirit rests upon a person in this way, there can be no shortage … no deficit … no need of more of the Spirit.


Isaiah counts seven aspects of this Spirit, drawing upon words that have become famous in the Old Testament for intelligence, perception, and strength. This new son of David will be supremely endowed with these qualities. He’ll see correctly … he’ll perceive accurately … and he will act effectively. There’s no distracting him, no confusing him, and no stopping him.


You can almost hear Isaiah’s ancient listeners, their kings taken from them, crying ‘Hallelujah!’ when they anticipate this new root, sprung from the stump of Jesse. I hope it makes you say ‘Hallelujah!’ as you consider this Jesus who now rules over us.


Second, the Spirit will make this ruler one who is not deceived by appearances. Let’s hear again, in Arabic, verses 3-5:




وَلَذَّتُهُ تَكُونُ فِي مَخَافَةِ ٱلرَّبِّ، فَلاَ يَقْضِي بِحَسَبِ نَظَرِ عَيْنَيْهِ، وَلاَ يَحْكُمُ بِحَسَبِ سَمْعِ أُذُنَيْهِ،بَلْ يَقْضِي بِالْعَدْلِ لِلْمَسَاكِينِ، وَيَحْكُمُ بِالإِنْصَافِ لِبَائِسِي ٱلْأَرْضِ، وَيَضْرِبُ ٱلْأَرْضَ بِقَضِيبِ فَمِهِ، وَيُمِيتُ ٱلْمُنَافِقَ بِنَفْخَةِ شَفَتَيْهِ.وَيَكُونُ ٱلْبِرُّ مِنْطَقَهَ مَتْنَيْهِ، وَٱلْأَمَانَةُ مِنْطَقَةَ حَقْوَيْهِ.


He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide disputes by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins. (Isaiah 11:3–5 ESV)


You know what the problem with rulers is, in your country as well as in Colombia and the United States, where I live? They are driven by appearances rather than by reality.


They cater to the well-dressed and the well-scented. They are misled by the open wounds of the poor, the smell their clothes and body accumulate from living in the street, the unshaven cheeks of the fathers and the sunken eyes of the mothers as they struggle to care for their children.


But not this ruler.


His insight penetrates appearances and goes right to the heart of the matter. As a result, he restores relationships among those whom he rules according to the reality of the thing. When he strikes, he strikes the truly wicked who resist his rule. When he uplifts, he uplifts with righteousness and faithfulness, those who truly need his restorative touch.


This ruler cannot be corrupted. His judgements are always true and right. This is why those who have been rescued by his gracious rule can only praise him with gratitude in their hearts. With gratitude in our hearts.


Finally, let’s come back around to snakes. I’ll ask Rabih to read verses 6-9, where we learn the results of Jesus’ rule:




فَيَسْكُنُ ٱلذِّئْبُ مَعَ ٱلْخَرُوفِ، وَيَرْبُضُ ٱلنَّمِرُ مَعَ ٱلْجَدْيِ، وَٱلْعِجْلُ وَٱلشِّبْلُ وَٱلْمُسَمَّنُ مَعًا، وَصَبِيٌّ صَغِيرٌ يَسُوقُهَا.وَٱلْبَقَرَةُ وَٱلدُّبَّةُ تَرْعَيَانِ. تَرْبُضُ أَوْلاَدُهُمَا مَعًا، وَٱلْأَسَدُ كَالْبَقَرِ يَأْكُلُ تِبْنًا.وَيَلْعَبُ ٱلرَّضِيعُ عَلَى سَرَبِ ٱلصِّلِّ، وَيَمُدُّ ٱلْفَطِيمُ يَدَهُ عَلَى جُحْرِ ٱلْأُفْعُوَانِ.لاَ يَسُوؤُونَ وَلاَ يُفْسِدُونَ فِي كُلِّ جَبَلِ قُدْسِي، لأَنَّ ٱلْأَرْضَ تَمْتَلِئُ مِنْ


The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6–9 ESV)


A passage like this takes us back to the garden of Eden, before humanity’s rebellion against our maker. But there is a twist that tells us that we are not truly being taken back to Eden but rather forward to a time when Jesus’ rule will have become complete.


You see, careful readers of Isaiah learn that he is not really talking about animals … about wolves, leopards, calves, lions, even about snakes. Rather, this imagery refers to peoples and to nations.


Jesus’ rule will bring to this bleeding, haunted world a time of peace when we will be free to lose our fears. Our fear of snakes, perhaps, but more importantly, our fear of violence … and conflict … and turmoil. Fear of our enemies.


Why? Well, our ancient rivalries will have become obsolete. They won’t make sense any more and we’ll gladly get rid of them. Our world will have become transformed. That last verse says it best:




لاَ يَسُوؤُونَ وَلاَ يُفْسِدُونَ فِي كُلِّ جَبَلِ قُدْسِي، لأَنَّ ٱلْأَرْضَ تَمْتَلِئُ مِنْ


They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:9 ESV)


Why do you think Scripture presents us with a ‘forward look’ like this?


I’m convinced it’s so that we align ourselves with Jesus’ rule of justice and peace starting from the moment in which we live. In fact, I think that by doing so we become agents of his increasing dominion over this earth.


We become more and more saturated with God’s own Spirit. We learn to see clearly, penetrating beyond appearances to the reality of those who surround us. And we lay aside our ancient anxieties and enmities and commit to doing no more harm on God’s holy mountain.


A text like this one rarely releases its grip on us before it has asked us one or two awkward questions.


Is your life aligned with Jesus’ rule in this way? Is mine?


Behold, your King. Jesus, the shoot out of the stump of Jesse.


 


 

					
Read Full Post »

				

							


		
			

				

					
All, rise!: HANDEL’S MESSIAH (Patrick Kavanaugh & Charles Jennens; Trinity Forum Reading)

					

					Posted in denkschrift, reseña, tagged ,  on December 18, 2019|
													Leave a Comment »											

				


				

					
Why is it at once surprising and unsurprising to learn that George Frideric Handel wrote Messiah in one of the lowest moments of his life. England’s debtors’ prisons beckoned and all seemed bleak.


This is but one of the details that Patrick Kavanaugh’s lovingly written introduction to the Handel-Jennens libretto of this most majestic and enduring musical, human, and spiritual accomplishment brings to light. I am listening to yet another rendition of Messiah as I tap out these observations. Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s worknwsa-messiah2 is adorned in this case by Kiri te Kanawa, Anne Gjevang, Keith Lewis, and Gwynne Howell. But this is just one of a dozen offerings of Messiah that I might have chosen from Apple’s iTunes offerings on his cold Connecticut evening, proof perhaps that civilization has not ended just yet.


As the author of Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers and Spiritual Moments of the Great Composers, Kavanaugh treats seriously Handel’s religious motivation as indeed the overwhelming spiritual experience of writing Messiah over a period of weeks that the composer himself described in the moment.


We are reminded that King George II of England spontaneously rose when ‘the first notes of the triumphant “Hallelujah Chorus” rang out …” Audiences have been rising ever since.


Hearts too, accompanied sometimes in the life of this listener and of many others by irresistible tears before the sheer force of such a beautiful telling of what Christians believe to be the largest and best story of history.


 

					
Read Full Post »

				

							


		
		
Older Posts »