Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘textures’ Category

strength in famine: Habakkuk 3

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 18, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Like others of the twelve ‘Minor Prophets’, the book of Habakkuk is not an easy ready.

The writer reels under the unceasing violence of a society run amok and besieged by tormentors whom it has seemed to invite to their terrible task. Masochism at a civilizational level might not be too harsh a description of the conduct that Habakkuk laments.

Anticipating modern inquiry into ‘divine absence’, Habakkuk wonders aloud how YHWH can remain silent in the face of unrelenting calamity. Although YHWH responds to this prophet’s plea, he does not appear in the prescribed manner. All is not suddenly set right with the whoosh of the deity’s arrival on the scene. Yet neither is Habakkuk’s complaint left untouched as an adequate description of what is really going on.

In the end, the book credits Habakkuk with an extraordinary declaration.

Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will exult in the God of my salvation. GOD, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights. (Habakkuk 3:17-19 NRSV)

In famine and disappointment, the prophet discovers the capacity to praise his unresponsive God. And in this, he finds strength.

Read Full Post »

worth avoiding: Proverbs 30

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 17, 2010| Leave a Comment »

The biblical Proverbs know the corrosive effect of things. No naivete lingers in these lines, only the most intelligent realism.

Throughout this biblical book, scarcity with honor has been recognized as an almost distinguished condition, or at least a circumstance that is preferable to familiar alternatives. Wealth, too, has been appraised as a worthy blessing so long as the heart and the conduct of the one blessed by it are well tended.

Yet the passage before us turns to assess the real danger that both poverty and riches bear within themselves. Suggestively, these economic conditions of apparent woe and weal, respectively, are placed alongside ‘falsehood and lies’ on a short list of things worth avoiding.

Two things I ask of you, O LORD; do not refuse me before I die:

Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.

Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’
Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.

Although the Proverbs underscore the capacity of the wise man or woman to shape life and even to mold a desired future, this articulated fear reckons with forces that are not so easily wrestled into blessing. Finding themselves in such a place, the Proverbs loose a rare prayer to the God who can manage invisible threat.

Read Full Post »

hearing things: Proverbs 30

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 16, 2010| Leave a Comment »

When the New Testament describes the ‘word’ of the Lord as ‘living’, ‘active’, and ‘potent’, it is by no means staking claim to a new truth. Rather, it aligns itself with the Hebrew Bible’s insistence that YHWH reveals his own heart and mind by speaking.

The biblical tradition privileges speaking and hearing as the principal means—though not the exclusive way—by which the Creator discloses himself to his creatures. Frequently, we are told that those who would hear face the daunting task of developing, disciplining, and refining their powers of audition. God speaks, one might say, but not everyone hears.

Proverbial wisdom places rather less emphasis upon the speaking Creator and relatively more on the capacity of the observant learner to trace his ways in creation. So it is a little surprising to find, near the end of the biblical anthology of Proverbs, this nearly prophetic assurance and warning:

Every word of God is flawless;
he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.

Arguably, this counsel comes into our hands as legacy of the non-Israelite ‘Agur’. It may be significant in this light that the word translated as ‘God’ is not the ordinary Hebrew expression (Elohim) but rather than less common Eloah. Perhaps a ‘pagan’ sage addresses Israel with a truth that familiarity may have obscured.

Every word spoken by God is without defect. His word—or, better, the speaking God—becomes for the attentive listener a secure hiding place in a world where both words and deeds too often prove hostile and even lethal.

The speech of this conversational Creator is so valuable, so sure—elsewhere we are told that it is also sweet like honey—that modification of it should not be risked. We blabber-mouthed humans too quickly add to it our accretions, bend it into our shape, make it sound like we sound when we talk.

Agur the outsider knows how dangerous such verbosity becomes when the most important thing is to listen, to hear, to be taught, in the midst of the luxury that it is to live before a God who speaks.

Read Full Post »

at night: Psalm 134

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 15, 2010| Leave a Comment »

The night trembles with specied ambiguity.

It is the time of darkness, yet a candle shines the brighter for it. The dark’s terrors stalk most lethally at night, yet church and temple double their welcome to those who gather then.

Night, like a desert, seems a deathly void. Yet as for those who patiently search the desert’s mysteries, so does night offer a thousand fascinations to the eye that accommodates itself to the night-time’s odder shades.

The night, whether for those who stand at orders through its long stretch or for those who gather to worship at its unrushed hours, is a time to bless the One who made both night and day, then refashions them before our astonished eyes with each turn of the globe.

Come, bless the LORD, all you servants of the LORD, who stand by night in the house of the LORD!

Lift up your hands to the holy place, and bless the LORD.
May the LORD, maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion. (Psalm 131:1-3 NRSV)

Night is a time to bless and a time to receive YHWH’s blessing.

Night is not merely the Nothing that its hurried dismissers, intoxicated by the day’s glare, claim it to be.

The night caresses its own glow, brilliance, blessing.

Read Full Post »

Jonah’s lament: Jonah 2

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 14, 2010| Leave a Comment »

The narrative of the great fish sent by the Lord nicely brackets the odd prophet Jonah’s lament. In the first verse of the second chapter of the book that describes this prophet’s mishap by bearing his name, the great fish sent by the Lord swallows Jonah up. In the last verse of the same chapter, the fish spews the remarkably undigested Jonah out onto dry ground.

In between and from the stomach of a fish, Jonah looses a lament that settles comfortably into the contours of lived distress, whether that of an individual sufferer or of an exiled nation:

Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, saying, ‘I called to the LORD out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, ‘I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?’ The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O LORD my God. As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the LORD; and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty. But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the LORD!’ Then the LORD spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land. (Jonah 2:1–10 NRSV)

Jonah’s complaint takes into account both divine protagonism in his calamity and the unthinkable tragedy of separation from the divine.

The lament, for all its unsettling interweaving of realism and poignance, does not go unanswered. Though majoring on his own incapacity, Jonah also registers two divine movements: the Lord hears and the Lord brings his life up from the pit.

So do the laments—and so does Jonah—provide a ray of hope to the suffering person and the exiled people: First, God may hear again. Second, the Lord may lift this other life up from its pit, turning despair into sacrifice and weeping to thanksgiving.

Biblical prophetism makes uncommon cause with a saying that nearly achieves the status of a folk proverb: you just never know.

Read Full Post »

no comforter: Lamentations 1

Posted in textures, tagged , on October 29, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Five times in the twenty-two grief-stricken verses of the book of Lamentations’ first chapter, the poet wails out a most forlorn cry: אין מנחם, there is no comforter.

In point of fact, one of the two reasons by which the book of Lamentations finds a place in the biblical anthology is precisely because this claim is factually wrong.

The other reason is that human experience shrieks from both good hearts and bad ones that the claim is right.

There is indeed one who comforts. Yet in Zion’s debris—or ours—he makes himself invisible. His footsteps become almost—though rarely completely—silent.

We cry with the poet of Lamentations that no one comforts. We are bereft, left with only poetry and tears.

And hope. It is this third ash-dusted treasure that we guard in an inner pocket of our shredded jacket, touching its tiny lump from time to time to assure ourselves it is still there.

One must not believe that hope alone bears witness to a Redeemer who might yet appear. Tears and poetry do that also. Yet hope endures more stubbornly than they. Tears flow down our cheeks, poetry pierces the air and penetrates the audition of those who share our shaken Zion. But hope, that one we keep on the inside pocket, whispering to our neighbor that we have a store of it for when the need should undo us. We touch our coats. It is still there. We do not pull it out, do not ask others to gawk at it, do not risk it falling from our trembling fingers to become lost beneath stones or the desperate mob.

This hope, it is ours. Yet more than that it is mine.

Even as we cry again that ‘eyn menachem, we know better.

A small lump in our overcoat interrupts the otherwise level, sweating, fearful line between our forsaken flesh and the betraying air. We touch it again.

It is still there.

Read Full Post »

Edom’s negligence: Jeremiah 48

Posted in textures, tagged , on October 25, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Prophetic oracle finds few reasons to go gently with Edom.

This too-close-for-comfort neighbor of Israel-Judah comes in for uncommon diatribe and unflinching condemnation from the prophets of Israel-Judah. Just as those who stand—or sleep—nearest to us wound us the most grievously, so does Edom fail to go gently into the good night when the Hebrew prophets have got their dander up.

Curiously, Edom’s announced demise does not turn on pure Hebrew nationalism. Edom is condemned for the same reason that humans everywhere fall afoul of YHWH’s way: they crush the most vulnerable among them.

Concerning Edom. Thus says the LORD of hosts: ‘Is there no longer wisdom in Teman? Has counsel perished from the prudent? Has their wisdom vanished? Flee, turn back, get down low, inhabitants of Dedan! For I will bring the calamity of Esau upon him, the time when I punish him. If grape-gatherers came to you, would they not leave gleanings? If thieves came by night, even they would pillage only what they wanted. But as for me, I have stripped Esau bare, I have uncovered his hiding places, and he is not able to conceal himself. His offspring are destroyed, his kinsfolk and his neighbors; and he is no more. Leave your orphans, I will keep them alive; and let your widows trust in me.

For thus says the LORD: If those who do not deserve to drink the cup still have to drink it, shall you be the one to go unpunished? You shall not go unpunished; you must drink it. For by myself I have sworn, says the LORD, that Bozrah shall become an object of horror and ridicule, a waste, and an object of cursing; and all her towns shall be perpetual wastes.’

YHWH in the Hebrew Scripture only seldom appoints himself the guardian and vindicator of half-pagan orphans and widows.

Yet he sometimes does, which in itself distinguishes him from all other gods.

YHWH the defender of Edom‘s orphans and widows.

The rabbis cultivate an uncommon instinct for moving from the lesser to the greater. The New Testament, in its quite distinct dialect, does the same.

Both press upon us the comforting, judging logic that runs something like this:

And if of Edom‘s orphans and widows, then what of ours?

Then what of us?

Read Full Post »

I shall not want: Psalm 23

Posted in textures, the great sadness, tagged , , on October 23, 2010| 4 Comments »

Jon Foreman’s magnificently understated rendition of the twenty-third psalm flavors the crisp morning air of this apartment in Cape Town, its door swung open to southern African sun and sky. Life-Long-Friends (LLF) John Bernard, Fritz Kling, and I seek shelter here after long and fascinating days among the Pentecost-like throngs that fill the city’s convention center at this epochal Lausanne-inspired gathering of the Global Church. Into that massive hall and the vein-like corridors and meeting spaces that encircle we bring our worship, open hearts, hungry minds, intense conversation, privileged hugs, and that shared life thing that makes everything worthwhile.

Glorious is not too large a word.

Yet this place and this gathering will ever bear a double meaning for this pilgrim and his broken hallelujah. Here, in the Marimba Restaurant that has become my afternoon cave, I received the email that ended Something Important. A quixotic project and promise, it endured and often thrived for twenty-eight years. It is over now and she is gone. (more…)

Read Full Post »

the too convenient attraction of balance: Exodus 34, 1 Corinthians 13

Posted in textures, tagged , , on October 17, 2010| 2 Comments »

When the conversation become difficult, we agree to bow together before the idol named Balance.

‘Well, it’s really a matter of balance,’ we intone, only half suspecting that we are confessing a lie.

A slightly more sophisticated half-truth, half-lie stakes its seductive claim thus: ‘Well, these things must always be held in tension.’

We speak carelessly of love and truth as though they were fruits of the same size placed into our refrigerating care. We discourse with all the shallow persuasiveness of truism about ‘Grace’ and ‘Law’ and their needful equilibrium.

So does good intention come to smell of distortion, divine disclosure of human fabrication. (more…)

Read Full Post »

redemption’s slow cooker: Jeremiah 29

Posted in textures, tagged , on October 17, 2010| Leave a Comment »

We desperately want good news. In time of distress, our minds scan their half-remembered data for a word of hope. As we need food and water, we sense that there must be a happy description of what is happening under our feet that will declare things not be as bad as they appear. Salvation is just around the corner. It must be so.

In Jeremiah’s day, prophetic voices of easy hope abounded. The canonical text calls them false. In the literature that comes to us bearing Jeremiah’s name, YHWH’s verdict upon such happy criers is almost violent for its brevity: ‘I did not send them’. (more…)

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »