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Archive for the ‘textures’ Category

rage: Revelation 12

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 21, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Anger, we are resolutely assured, is not a bad emotion. If societal instruction comes to us in unanimity on any topic, this one surely occupies the top of the list.

It is also true: anger is not in itself a bad thing. (more…)

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being see-through: Psalm 139

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 20, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The searching eye of the Lord is not always for the biblical writers a pleasant notion. In his agony, Job finds it ruthless. Sinners, we are told, consider it laughable and, sometimes, a paper tiger meant to scare people straight but quite powerless once you get a clear angle on things. (more…)

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unsingable: Psalm 137

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 18, 2008| Leave a Comment »

No voice speaks more poignantly from exile than the writer of the one hundred thirty-seventh psalm. ‘By the rivers of Babylon’, he explains, ‘we sat and wept for Zion.’

To these captors of the exile Judaeans, the songs of Zion seemed mere entertainment. The exotic accent, the strange musical lilt, must have appeared to offer a respite from empire’s deadening tedium. All they wanted—it didn’t seem like much—was to prod their captives to sing a tune or two from the Old Country. (more…)

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a prayer for the night shift: Psalm 134

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 15, 2008| Leave a Comment »

A special bond links those who labor by night. Few volunteer to lay their energies down on the dark side of the day’s cycle. Usually extraneous considerations have made it necessary, often unpleasant ones. The world looks different from the angle of nighttime work. People who have seen it understand this and become part of a loosely linked tribe defined by its members’ shared nocturnal journey.

A psalm speaks to those whose temple assignment finds them waking to their nightly duties while others retire. Fittingly, it is brief and spun of well-wishing.

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 bless you from Zion, he who made heaven and earth! (Psalm 134:1–3 ESV)

One thinks of the night attendant breaking the monotony by mouthing these words quietly from the shadows. He lifts his hand towards the most holy place. From his solitude he blesses the Lord. No one knows except the unseen God who receives the blessing and, more often than not, returns it in grace.

Those, too, who labor through the soul’s dark night recognize each other. From their shadow, they raise a hand towards a holy place. Quietly their lips form their blessing, shaped by darkness, spoken quietly as befits the night and its sounds that carry far.

May it, too, be returned from Zion, speeded to its destination by the maker of heaven and earth. May it rest gently on the shoulder of the one who stands alert in his corner while others sleep, unknowing.

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the fear of man: Proverbs 29

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 13, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Our predicament is on display from several angles. All that is productive, good, and joy-crafting in us is marred, dented, even chained. We are not what we could be and we cannot will ourselves out of this mess.

Nor are we doomed.

One of the angles of approach that provides a clear view on our damnable situation is the fear of other people that we suffer. It seems not to matter whether they possess the authority—moral or otherwise—that would make us subject to them or even eager to please. Nor does our own personal and professional coming of age solve our dilemma. We still live anxiously in the presence of other flesh, as the biblical dialect styles other human beings in order to bring out the limping, provisional, conditioned fragility of them. (more…)

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no choice: Amos 7

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 12, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The prophet Amos found himself walking the turf of No Man’s Land in a way that seems almost characteristic of the biblical prophets. In the face of indignation and hatred, he delivered a message to the northern kingdom of Israel in which he himself found no pleasure.

His work, like that of the more famous Jeremiah, disgusted him. (more…)

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self-restraint: Proverbs 29

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 10, 2008| Leave a Comment »

It is almost impossible to overvalue self-restraint. This is particularly true of the spoken word. When in doubt, a quiet pause is almost always a good idea. To think rather than speak right now is rarely a mistake.

Proverbs 29.20 gets at the matter from the negative side:

Do you see someone who is hasty in speech?
There is more hope for a fool than for anyone like that.

Not often is ‘hope for a fool’ the more likely of two outcomes. So does the proverb-teller underscore the disastrous path of what Seinfeld might have called the ‘fast-talker’.

It’s odd that creatures with an organ of speech planted right in the middle of our faces should inhabit an environment where using it is more often than not a bad idea. The Proverbs bear a second burden, that of teaching us to speak well. But before we can accomplish that, we must be taught to say less.

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two I’s: Revelation 1

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 9, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Rarely does the identity of a drama’s principal players come so clearly stated. At the beginning of the apocalyptic scroll that we call John’s Revelation, both the Lord God and the work’s human author declare themselves. It is a most pregnant juxtaposition:

‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.

The Lord God declares himself earlier and later than all reality that is knowable from our human perspective. He is its antecedent and its epilogue. There is no seeing beyond him, no shape or substance outside of him and his creative will. He has no shelf date, no competitor in the race of time.

This is conventional stuff, though hardly superficial. Faith in one God is capable of absorbing these statements without violence to its tissue, although the knowing of God in the flow of time will absorb all the energy, conviction, and life of those who determine to know him here. (more…)

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refusing reduction: Jude

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 8, 2008| Leave a Comment »

It is the nature of pragmatism to reduce the task to a single thing. Whether this be ‘to save souls’ or ‘to plant churches’ or to ‘show compassion’, the allure of reductionism is—like the poor—seemingly always with us.

It is perhaps most important for those who strive to be ‘biblical’ and who find an identity marker in the urgent purity of their faith to pause over the multifaceted nature of the task as the biblical materials themselves present. (more…)

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pursuing the knowledge of YHWH: Hosea 6

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 7, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Hosea is a torturous work, not chiefly for its unending textual complications but more immediately for the fearful conundrum in which its northern Israelite originator and its Judean stewards find themselves. We read time and again that YHWH has turned against Israel, has become its chief antagonist, has determined to wipe the slate clean of his troublesome, rebellious sons. (more…)

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