Posted in textures, tagged 2 Thessalonians, biblical reflection, textures on October 15, 2009| Leave a Comment »
With all the herding prowess of the aphorism, a popular saying corrals us into agreeing that the heavenly minded are no earthly good. The apostle Paul will have none of that kind of celestial religion.
In a letter that has much to say about transcendent matters, Paul directs a torrent of words to the necessity of working hard and the requirement of self-reliance. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Psalms, textures on October 14, 2009| 2 Comments »
Worship is a crystallized form of proximity to YHWH. The joy and completion we feel in worship do not demean similar experience elsewhere, for ‘liturgy’ is expansive without hegemony, inclusive with no eradicating instincts. Worship’s embrace shelters those it gathers in but none is lost there, none negated.
Though worship is an intensified version of wider life lived before YHWH, there is nothing like it.
Worship is paradoxical to the bone, for though YHWH ‘fills both heaven and earth’, as the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, it is worth the trek to his house to encounter him as he can be known nowhere else.
Some are fortunate enough to linger in that dwelling place.
Even the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself
in which to set her young,
near Your altar, O LORD of hosts,
my king and my God.
Happy are those who dwell in Your house;
they forever praise You. (Psalm 84:4-5 JPS)
We come in, we go out. We make pilgrimage, we return home. We weep, shout, lift our hands, stomp our feet, spin our bodies like a top without the embarrassment we would feel in doing so anywhere else, because to stand before YHWH’s altar is like nothing else we know.
Yet it is like everything, for all life lived purposefully culminates in this, in doxology.
We may admire the fortunate sparrow and the swallow, who bears and nurtures her young in the rafters of YHWH’s house, so close that her babies might topple onto his altar were they to stray too early from the confines she has lovingly built for them. Yet we cannot stay, as she does. We can only depart when the hour for homeward things is due, worship so sewn into our hearts that we live longing for our next visit to this place, so like the rest of our lives, so unlike anything, so near to YHWH whose invitation shall one day no longer speak of adjournment.
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Colossians, textures on October 4, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Paul’s articulation of Jesus’ being lies often at huge distance from the cautious language of the church’s later creeds. To make this observation casts no shadow either upon Paul or upon the creed-makers, for they were pursuing similar ends by very different means. Each employs his own code, so to speak.
Like all true monotheists, Paul is convinced that strength and peace come through serving just one, supreme deity and not worrying about the rest. Even to refer to ‘the rest’ is to allow for heavens packed with or perhaps loosely populated with other powers. Biblical monotheism never denies the possibility. Its ends have less to do with ‘scientific’ description of all who—the personal pronoun is intentional—might exist. It is unconcerned with filling out the roster. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Philippians, textures on October 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »
When the apostle Paul urges his readers to practice joy, he is not mixing categories. On the surface, one might expect the opposite. How can joy be commanded? How does one pursue and practice what is widely regarded as an epiphenomenon of fortunate circumstance? Or, to put things in more adversarial terms, who does this man think he is to be urging psychological tricks upon his befuddled followers?
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Yet Paul is hardly pollyanish. Indeed, he can be quite frontal about his own quota of suffering.
Far from opting out of reality in favor of a convenient construction that resides only in his mind, Paul is ever the realist. He truly believes that reality—seen for what it is most deeply, most unalterably—is cause for joy. It is the frailty of human perception and the vagaries of the human heart that cloud our view. This, for Paul, is not some inherent deficiency of the soul that can be cured by the right set of enlightenment techniques. On the contrary, Paul believes that darkest evil has too long had its way with the world. The nature of things is badly torn. Human rebellion has shat upon the Creator’s most generous gifts and then loudly proclaimed its false victory. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Philippians, textures on October 2, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Apart from the fresh angle of view that faith in Christ provides, it is almost impossible adequately to discount human achievement and—more importantly—to abandon self-evaluation that employs such ‘success’.
The apostle Paul could, for the sake of his argument, step back into the arena of conventional mathematics. Writing to his friends at Philippi, he could add up the receipts that genealogy and long enterprise had scattered on the floor around his feet and acknowledge his own formidable ranking according to that now alien system of measurement. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Proverbs, textures on August 21, 2009| Leave a Comment »
A form of wickedness mixes longing for improved status with a sense of entitlement, then shakes vigorously. The recipe makes a deadly cocktail.
The craving of the lazy person is fatal,
for lazy hands refuse to labor.
It is one thing, we are instructed to understand, not to aspire to a better lot. The nicer homes and fuller accounts just a block away might well hold no appeal. One is born to this lot, not some other, and waddles unreflectively in it. (more…)
Posted in denkschrift, tagged biblical reflection, Proverbs, textures on July 3, 2009| 2 Comments »
Wisdom’s demanding dialectic: three things they will tell you that you must believe, and three other things you must believe instead
Caribbean Graduate School of Theology, Kingston, Jamaica
Graduation 3 July 2009
The Governor General of Jamaica, The Most Honourable Sir Patrick Allen and Lady Allen, Senator Hyacinth Bennett, Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors, Rev Dr Alston Henry, other members of the Board of Governors, President Dr Les Newman, Vice President of Academic Affairs, Dr Anthony Oliver, other members of the platform, graduands and their families, well-wishers and friends, may I express my gratitude to you for the honour you have afforded me of speaking to you on this occasion?
My dear graduands, this is your day, not mine. Yet it falls to me as a great joy to offer some words of encouragement and orientation in this, your moment of achievement. I am so very grateful for the opportunity.
I have entitled these brief remarks ‘Wisdom’s demanding dialectic: three things they will tell you that you must believe. And three other things you must believe instead.’
Dialectic, of course, is that form of interaction that begins when a statement is laid out as a thesis. Someone else counters that thesis with an opposing statement. We call this the antithesis. Finally, out of consideration of the two statements there emerges a synthesis. In the best of cases, this endpoint does justice to the initially contradictory claims of the synthesis and the antithesis.
We might feel a sense of harmonious satisfaction at the moment of discovering a synthesis. Yet life is not so simple, for that synthesis becomes in due course a new thesis, which invites an antithesis, which in the best of cases is resolved into a synthesis. And so does life march on, stumble on, limp on, or in the style of your estimable Mr Bolt, sprint on.
This is dialectic. It is a sketch of the way things behave, the way human minds and human communities work out their journey.
Entire philosophies have been built upon the observation of this pattern of human behaviour. One thinks of Mr Hegel, whom you might have met in your studies. His name is often associated with the term ‘dialectic’, though I come to you today as a fellow disciple of Jesus Christ rather than as a Hegelian. I have little stomach for comprehensive philosophical statements and, besides, the event that brings us together in this place is not really a moment for philosophizing.
My purpose this evening is much more modest. I wish simply to invigorate our graduands with the assertion that wisdom takes shape in the quest for synthesis. Wisdom is seldom to be found in the convenient absolutes that demagogues and well-intentioned wordsmiths pour into our ears, whether such persons be followers of our Lord Jesus Christ or not. On the contrary, wisdom emerges in the radical, thoughtful, alert middle ground between banal assumptions of how things are and how things must be. Though wisdom is sometimes simple, it is never simplistic. It takes account of competing claims and discovers truth and reality among them.
That great anthology of accumulated sagacity which we call the biblical book of Proverbs offers us this stunning observation, which immediately upon being heard strikes us as true to our experience:
tsaddiyq hari’shon beriybo uba’ re’ehu vacheqaro (Prov. 18:17)
The first to present his case seems right,
till another comes forward and questions him. (NRSV)
Now note, my friends, that the proverb does not claim that the first to present his case was wrong or misleading or misguided or a dangerous liar. The scriptural maxim simply alerts us to the fact that a second speaker’s coherent word makes it seem less certain that we knew the whole truth when we had heard out the first.
Life, we are being told here, is seldom adequately guided by uncritical acceptance of assumptions about how things are or how things must be. Rather, wisdom emerges in the battle for understanding that occurs in the hurly-burly of human affairs. The quest for wisdom allows us little time to rest and affords us less certainty than we might have preferred. It invites us into the invigorating experience of immersion in the life, affairs, and times of real people with deep and abiding needs, dilemmas, hopes, fears, anguish and joys.
Wisdom emerges in life’s ever-pressing dialectic. It is to be found both in the street and in the library, in the philosopher’s study and at the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, in the I.C.U. and at Savina Park.
Facing this elusive, demanding character of wisdom, a dear friend of mine puts it this way:
It is not the passion of your convictions that matters most, but rather the integrity of your compromises.
Dr. Timothy Laniak, of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, does not refer with this ingenious maxim of his to any moral laxity or failure to shape our lives around unbending truth. He does not mean compromise of that sort. Rather, in his own way and out of the furnace of his own experience and affliction, Tim recognizes that wisdom emerges most often in the lives of those who engage competing claims with eyes wide open and hearts attuned to the movement of God in the real-world matrix of human experience.
Wisdom, as often as not, demands engagement with competing claims. It requires the patience to consider what is best here and now in this or that combination of circumstances. It asks us to become intelligent, discerning, reflective. It requires that we be buyers of truth more than sellers, that we listen more often than we pronounce. The wise among us show us that they have become so because they have chosen to listen for a very long time before they open their mouths to speak. They have developed a holy resistance to quick and easy slogans. They know that the devil, as another folk proverb of our times has it, resides in the details and that he is not best opposed by pretending he is not there.
The reason the wise men and women of the Bible are called elders is precisely because one has to spend a lot of years observing how things work before one can develop the quality we call wisdom. It takes a very large amount of time to grow wise because wisdom gives up its lessons in small doses.
Now all of this is prelude to what I really want to share with you this evening, so let me get on to two or three of those things. I want to chat with you about things they will tell you that you must believe.
Someone will ask, ‘Who is the “they”, Dr. Baer?’
It is right of you to ask me to identify my villains. Yet I am going to refuse to name names. I do this with a purpose. Most of the damaging simplicities that threaten your continual journey into wisdom are things that people whom you love and respect would never lay claim to in a word-for-word way. Rather, some of the most lethal wolves that crouch at your door are unarticulated assumptions. They have few vocal partisans. They sneak around and fill up our consciences with half-truths that claim to be whole truths. These half-truths have few proud parents. They are orphan children whose paternity is largely unknown. Yet they constitute a dangerous mob.
They will stop your path to wisdom, dear graduates, if you give them half a chance.
They say things like this:
You don’t know anything!
All that head knowledge you’ve accumulated is worthless. The mastery of Greek and Hebrew, the analysis of history, the intense immersion in theories that attempt to explain the movements of the human psyche or the family system or of political economies good and bad, this is all a waste of time. You should instead spend all your time meeting the needs of people. Your studies are irrelevant!
If they tell you this, they are wrong.
You have invested these years of study in learning to see the world as God Himself sees it, so that you might think God’s thoughts after him, as one of our great theologians has put it. You have read many books because you realize that truth and wisdom have been articulated not only by people who live in your moment and close enough for you to touch them and hear them. Truth and wisdom have also reigned in the lives of people who have lived and died long before you, human beings who have lived too far away for you ever to meet them. My dear graduands, you have received the gift of immersion into the Great Conversation. You are most fortunate. Don’t ever let them tell you, in some spasm of egotistical privileging of their own historical moment, that you don’t know anything.
You have sat and you will continue to sit with the masters, wherever and whenever they have lived. Ah, but you know some valuable things, things to be treasured, things to be turned day in and day out into wisdom, insight, and service. Grow this knowledge. Turn your eyes to heaven every day and thank God for it. Smile courteously when they tell you that you know nothing, but turn a deaf ear to that lie.
They are wrong.
Ah, but they are also right: you don’t know very much.
The closest thing to a definition of a fool in the pages of biblical wisdom goes like this:
The fool is wise in his own eyes.
You really don’t know very much, at least not yet.
You must continue to read, to think, to listen, to probe, to study, to analyse, to reflect, to grow. Auspicious as this graduation day is, it is only one day. If you serve your people for the rest of your lives by repeating only what you’ve learned to this point, then may the graduation certificate you hang on your wall shrivel and fade. May worms devour your lecture notes!
You know far too little to stop now!
Discipleship is a life-long process of learning to understand God’s world as he understands it. If you ever stop engaging this rigorous process of learning, you have only two justifiable causes for doing so: death or senility.
You know so little today! But you are equipped to know so much more. May you live lives of doxology as learning fills you up with two empowering impulses: to praise, on the one hand, and to serve, on the other! These are the two proper outcomes of knowledge.
And then, they will tell you this:
It’s all about you!
You are the educated professional, you are the robed pastor or vicar or priest, you are the Christian leader who will by force of will and strength of conviction transform Jamaica or Puerto Rico or Trinidad.
Ah, but they are wrong.
It is not about you. When you have given all of your strength, poured out all your prowess in service to your fellow man, accomplished all that God allows you to achieve in his name and, yes, in yours, you are merely a broken reed, a fatigued servant, an empty vessel.
You are not sufficient to any cause that matters. Yet grace is always sufficient.
It is not about you!
And yet, somehow, it is.
If you do not walk in the ways of justice and mercy and call others to walk with you, who will? If you do not invite others with winsome grace to build and rebuild their lives by the grace of Jesus in Christian community, who will? If you do not give a cup of cold water to the famished or the prisoner, who will? If Jamaica cannot count on you to do the right thing today and tomorrow, to whom will Jamaica turn? If the nations of the Caribbean zone cannot look to select followers of Jesus for well-considered wisdom on drugs, justice, the economy, corruption, poverty and the production of wealth, why should anyone look to our Christian community for those other matters that are more familiar to our shared discourse?
Our cousins the rabbis taught their followers—and allowed us to listen in as they did so—by means of compact phrases like this one:
Whoever performs one act of mercy creates the world to come.
My friends, it turns out that it is about you! You must not turn away from the challenge, you must not settle for mediocrity, you must not shrink from that kind of golden opportunity that may this very moment rest very near to your hand.
It is not about you! It is about you! Truth and wisdom require that you embrace both these realities in that wisdom-drenched synthesis that God alone makes possible.
May I offer one more simplistic half-truth that you will be asked to believe, and then offer a slightly more complex truth in its stead?
You will find fulfilment in Christian leadership.
They will tell you this. It is not true.
Here is the better truth: you will find difficulties much too large for you to bear. You will be brought time and again to tears and anguish. You will hear your motives questioned, your competency demeaned, and your character discussed by people who have no idea what your service has cost you.
Where you expected happiness and approval, you will instead experience apostolic tears not unlike those of the biblical Jeremiah and Paul. Where you anticipated celestial intimacy with God, you will find that he has asked you to traverse deserts in solitude, catching only furtive glimpses of Him along the way.
What you thought was a calling to be celebrated will turn out to have been a burden to be endured.
When you have spent sleepless nights preparing for some formidable task, you will be told your words were precisely what was not needed. You will become acquainted with stunning ingratitude.
This, not happiness at every turn in Christian service, is the truth.
But, my friends, I mean to encourage you not to discourage you. It is not difficult for me to attempt to do so, for here is another truth, which I place before you in antithesis to the former one so that you can find God’s own synthesis along the path of your service:
You will find the deepest, most satisfying fellowship in the gospel. You will learn to love those who dare to weep and to laugh with you and you will luxuriate in their love for you. You will watch in astonishment as colleagues of demanding countenance and varied opinion work with you to solve one knotty problem after another. You will glimpse God’s own redeeming hand when people report to you long after the fact how this or that word or deed of yours marked a turning point in their own lives.
You will sing for joy at the evidence that God has transposed your own little song into a symphony you could not have imagined.
You will say, ‘Why me?’, not in bitterness or anguish but in stunned gratitude as God employs even you for means and ends that are gloriously his own.
You will learn to glimpse his beautiful face both in your pain and in your delight. You will learn to count on his presence in both feast and famine. You will know his friendship via his apparent absence and in his abundant presence. Sometimes you will not know for sure whether your soul is laughing or crying, but you will know that He is listening to its sounds.
May I close by asking you to listen once more to the ancient wisdom?
tsaddiyq hari’shon beriybo uba’ re’ehu vacheqaro (Prov. 18:17)
The first to present his case seems right,
till another comes forward and questions him. (NRSV)
You are poised today to become wiser servants of Jesus Christ than you were yesterday. As you walk the path of wisdom, engaging its demanding, dialectical way, you will be wiser still ten years from now as God gives you breath, and still wiser ten years after that.
From that vantage point, the old slogans will seem pale, a bit lifeless, good perhaps in their moment but useless for articulating what you now know of God and his world. Truth will have become ever richer, ever more layered, ever more beautiful and you will find yourselves sought out as its gentle, insistent teachers.
Dear graduands, may you become wise indeed without ever realizing you have become so. May no claim to special knowledge ever fall from your lips even as ever-increasing knowledge lights your path.
May your words instead be syllables of gratitude, of mercy, of insight, and of praise.
Such sounds make for an offering that, on earth, constructs the world to come and, in heaven, is always and forever well received.
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Proverbs, textures on June 20, 2009| 1 Comment »
In one important way a friend lacks what a brother possesses by definition: shared blood.
Yet in one important aspect the friend defies this elemental distinction, acting for all intents and purposes like the best of brothers: a friend is present permanently as can only be expected of the best of brothers.
The biblical collector of proverbs does not miss out on this most stubborn comfort:
A friend loves at all times,
and kinsfolk are born to share adversity.
As one tips toward the tribal end of the scale of social glues, the friend’s behavior becomes all the more remarkable.
The woman who finds herself navigating life’s most turbulent waters with family aboard is a fortunate woman, yet a true friend in the mix—even if only one—makes her richer still. A man does battle, sadly, against all manner of treachery, disappointment, and fickle allies. Yet just one friend makes adversity a passing affliction rather than the anteroom to ruin.
This permanence, this stickiness, this circumstantial ubiquity can be expected of blood ties. A friend does it because he chooses.
There is one, perhaps two or at most three comparable kinds of wealth in the whole world. That is all.
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Psalms, textures on June 14, 2009| Leave a Comment »
The biblical tradition struggles mightily with the apparent excesses of YHWH’s commitment to David and his city.
It is unlike the Mosaic tradition to make promises without outlining the responsibilities that accrue to divine generosity. Yet one or two of the classic ‘Davidic’ or ‘Zion’ covenantal statements do just that. In my judgement, the largest theological errors lie by the side of the road where one attempts to restrict divine liberty. Still, we ought to consider the possibility that an implicit conditionality inhabits even the most absolute YHWH-promises to David and his offspring. At the end of the day, YHWH is in the biblical drama a master at the creative rescuing of situations placed in peril by human weakness, stubbornness, or both.
If these caveats sound obtuse and at some remove from the text that lies before us, they are not unlinked to it. The tradition’s very struggle suggests that angles of view that we might label as ‘theological’ emerge from the content of the YHWH-promises themselves.
Leave it to the psalms—arguably one of the less cautious genres when it comes to articulating things that really matter—to juxtapose YHWH’s sure oath to David to an outsized if that towers above Zion and its royal/religious edifices:
The LORD swore to David a sure oath
from which he will not turn back:
‘One of the sons of your body
I will set on your throne.
If your sons keep my covenant
and my decrees that I shall teach them,
their sons also, forevermore,
shall sit on your throne.’ (Psalm 132:11-12 NRSV)
Though a pedantic logician might swallow hard at the appearance of naive contradiction, the tradition that is here inscripted is conscious of two realities. First, the poetic legacy is well aware of YHWH’s inscrutable decisiveness. Second, it will not disavow the deeply rooted responsibility that YHWH’s uncanny way with those upon whom his love falls presses into the lives of those who seem rarely to have reached out to him. More often such people—David chief among them—become ensnared in the web of divine amour. They find it difficult—if, in theory, not impossible—to break free from the tenacious, enwrapping netting that has found their feet, their legs, their arms, then all of them.
YHWH promises. Human beings more or less screw up the postlude. YHWH finds a way.
On such a dialectic redemption, this world, and the next appear somewhat safely—if not without tragedy—to hang.
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Proverbs, textures on June 13, 2009| 2 Comments »
We could go to school on the strength of how we react to calamity suffered by another. Our response tells us that much about ourselves.
He who mocks the poor shows contempt for their Maker;
whoever gloats over disaster will not go unpunished.
The German language loans us English speakers the delicious term Schadenfreude. It is the joy one feels upon observing another’s loss. This often unanticipated response represents one of evil’s deepest impresses upon our life.
The biblical anthology of accrued wisdom tell us that Schadenfreude is not a mere defect in our social skills. Rather it spits in the face of the poor man’s Maker. It allows us to glimpse something we believe that is too awful for utterance and so only rarely rises to the level of awareness. That something is a hellish doctrine: the suffering of another means less than mine, is more deserved than my own, and ought to bring no sorrow to my more superior heart.
Such conviction smells of sulphur. We cover it well, mask its stench, posture ourselves to lean against it when people are looking.
The proverbial anthology knows both the damage Schadenfreude inflicts upon human community and the judgment it brings upon those who feel its brief, shallow thrill.
Schadenfreude is a deadly serious matter, a canary in the mine that leads its explorer ever onward towards the Accuser who lurks deep within. So long as it passes unremarked, he knows the sound of footsteps that press inexorably, satisfyingly towards his lair. He need not lift a finger, for hell’s direction is set and unaltered.
Canter Bridge 