To Unscrew the Inscrutable

IMPORTANT:  Read Psalm 25:1-10; Genesis 9:8-17; I Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15 before you read another word!

I call the Bible my first love.  I loved the Bible before I loved the Lord.  I went to seminary, not because I wanted to serve God or anyone else; I went to seminary because I wanted to learn the Bible!  Now I consider myself somewhat expert in the subject. 

But that passage in I Peter beats the living daylights out of me!  I don't know what it's talking about!  I've heard many, many interpretations.  This transition from "suffered in the flesh" to "preached to spirits in prison" to "hence prefigures baptism" is something I've never been able to work through.  But that's okay.  I know God.  I know his love.  I know his power.  I know how imcomprehensibly magnificent he is.

What do you suppose happens when an infinite God touches a finite world?  Incomprehensibility, that's what!  Logically indefensibile paradox!  Theologians have wasted forests of paper and rivers of ink trying to define the indefinable, "unscrew the inscrutable".  For instance, God.  One God, three Persons.  Hmm.  Okay.  Which is it?  Is God one or is God three?

The answer is Yes.

Jesus.  Is he human, or is he divine?  Yes.

When we break the bread and serve the wine in the Lord's Supper, what really happens?  Children receive and comprehend the truth.  Theologians stutter and gasp. 

The Flood Narrative begins with another of those mysteries I find inscrutable. 

¹When the human race began to multiply on the face of the ground, daughters were born to them. ²The sons of the gods [literal Hebrew] saw how lovely the daughters of humanity were, and they took all they desired for wives. ³Then the Lord said, "My Spirit will not put up with humanity forever..." (Genesis 6:1-3a, my translation)

Any of you who wish to explain this to me, please do.  While you're about it, have a go at explaining why the angel of the Lord decided to kill Moses when he decided to accept the mission to free the people from Egypt.  Miriam saw  her husband lying on the floor of the tent, dying, so she reasonably circumcised their baby son, threw the bloody foreskin at Moses' feet, and the angel of the Lord quit killing him.  "Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me," she said. (Exodus 4:24-26.  Look it up!)  Then you can ease my mind on Jacob's wrestling match at Peniel (Penuel?  Genesis 32:22-32).  For that matter, Balaam begs God's permission to go see what King Balak, God finally says, "Okay, go ahead", then God changes his mind and decides to kill Balaam for going (Numbers 22:1-...Aaah, read the whole chapter!  It'll be good for you.  Read the next two chapters and get the whole story).

ANYWAY, the Flood.  For centuries scholars have tried to debunk it.  My favorite piece of evidence is that virtually ancient civilization has a narrative of a flood that wipes out the world, except for a few survivors.  The multitude of legends proves it never really happened, right?  (How's that again?)

One Hebraic conception of pre-Creation chaos is that the universe is water, endless water.  God has in effect created a bubble (the firmament) in all that, with land and water at its bottom and the sky at its top.  The Flood wasn't just a huge, heavy, too-long rainstorm.  "In the 601st year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that very day the fountains of the great deep were cleft open, and the windows of heaven were opened" (Genesis 7:11).  The water fell from the sky and erupted from the ground.  It must have been terrifying to the people, a return to the chaos God found "in the beginning" (Genesis 1:1).  It must have seemed as if God were uncreating everything, just erasing what he had done.

 When I read this week's gospel lection, I asked my wife, "Why did Jesus have to be baptized?"  Wisely, she said, "What are you talking about?  Do you mean why did Jesus have to be baptized, or why do we have to be baptized?"  Well, I meant Jesus, but I was open to going from there to us.  The most frequent answer is he did it because we must, he took our sin on himself.  He had his own personal flood experience, his annihilation with water, as it were (Not half bad as a Pauline definition of baptism, by the way--Romans 6:1-11).

Okay, but immediately after his baptism, the Spirit led him into the deadly Judean wilderness to fast for forty days.  I'm a good Wesleyan, and, like John Wesley, I approve of fasting.  I do it myself, on a small scale, regularly.  But why 40 days?  Doesn't that seem a bit extreme?  And only after such a death-defying trial, and only after the news of the arrest of John the Baptist, does he begin to preach.

Mystery upon mystery.  Unanswered question.  What's going on here?

Maybe we may find a hint of the answer in one of those wonderful products of Hollywood that so subtly, so deftly, show us pieces of eternal truth?  There is one that may suggest an answer, a grand epic, a classic, exalted and praised almost universally.  Perhaps you've heard of it?  "The Karate Kid"?

Daniel-san wants to learn karate, and Mr. Miyagi agrees to teach him.  How do his lessons begin?  "Sand-a porch!"  "Wax on!  Wax off!"  "Paint-a fence!"  Hour after hour, every weekend until, in disgust, Daniel angrily confronts Miyagi, feeling discouraged, exploited, maybe a little stupid. 

Has your life left you feeling that, ever?  Mine has.  It does, once in a while.

But how did it end up?  Miyagi showed Daniel that the motions he had had him repeat ad nauseam were the very moves he needed to master karate.

What if the inexplicables of our lives are the very things we need to become all God wants us to be?  What if the things that make no sense, the things that  hurt, the things that burden are the gateways to strength, to accomplishment, to freedom, to the Kingdom of God?

In the last couple of decades, I've become convinced we aren't going to spend eternity sitting on our angelic rear ends growing spiritually fat on spiritual food.  Jesus said "My father works and I work."  God's a working guy.  Work isn't a curse.  Futile toil is a curse.  Work is a blessing.  To have done something difficult, to have accomplished something that took everything we had to give, to stand back and see what you have done--THAT is joy!  Self-indulgence is suicide, both here and in eternity.  But hearty enjoyments of the fruit of what you have done, of what you have earned, of what you have built is perhaps the greatest human fulfillment there is.  Why do you think God didn't give us a world with houses built and fields planted bulging with rich harvests?  Why do you think God set it up so that we must sow first, work first, then eat?  God wanted us to know the joy, HIS joy--the joy of being Creators. 

So I am convinced that when we enter heaven, we will enter into our true work, the work for which God created us, the perfect work, the work that will suit us perfectly, in which we will find perfect fulfillment, perfect joy, perfect peace?

And this life here is practice.  Here is where we learn to be the people God wants us to be, the people with whom he will rejoice to share eternity.  Life here is to eternity what childhood is created to be to adulthood.  Have you ever noticed that all the games children play, they are pretending to be adults?  They naturally practice, prepare, strengthen their muscles, as it were, for adulthood.  One of my seminary professors said children naturally learn, all the time; that the only way to make children stop learning is to put shoes on their feet and make them sit at desks.

Our life here is heaven practice, preparation to enter into the labor, the joyful work, ahead.  Here we begin go grow into the "likeness and image" of God.  Here the dream may start to come true.

About my second or third year of seminary, I went to visit my parents.  After a good long sleep, after a long drive, I sat with my parents at the kitchen table for hours, talking.  My mother made pot after pot of coffee and we visited.  It was the first time in my life we talked like that--not parent to child, but adult to adult.  And that was the relationship my dad and I enjoyed until he died.  It was a joy I never could have expected.

Now my daughter is 21 and brilliant.  I visit her at college, we go out and eat and talk.  People around us listen in on our conversations, conversations like most people never get to enjoy; we talk as one adult to another, and this is a joy I hope you all may know.  She is a remarkable woman.  She is like me, she is like her mother, and she is totally her own woman, with her own magnificent mind. 

What if I told you God wants something like that?  What if I said God doesn't want sheep, and he doesn't want infants, and he doesn't want slaves?  What if what God wants from us is the joy of companionship with people who have grown to be as much like him as possible?

He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords.  Who are the kings he will be King over?  You, that's who!  I don't know a gender-neutral word that carries this freight, so I have to say it this way:  Sisters and brothers, you were created to be kings.  God is waiting now for you to build the kingdom over which you are to be king.  He has made it every bit as easy as it can be, and every bit as hard as it has to be, for you, for your growth.

"God has done everything for us we could not do in order that we might be saved; God has done nothing for us we could do in order that we might be strong."

Floods and wilderness starvings, baptisms and proclaiming Gospel to the damned; inexplicable, inconceivable, incomprehensible.  Infinity touches finitude.  God becomes human and humanity now may become divine. 

Who would have thought it?  Who can explain it?

Thanks be to God!

Tears for Whitney, Tears for Me

Okay, so Whitney's dead.

For the record, I was NOT her number one fan. 

Okay, so she was both beautiful and almost heartbreakingly cute, with that supernova smile and that sweet little girl's nose that could crinkle and bring in the spring thaw all by itself. 

Okay, so she had a three-octave range and was every bit as brilliant at the low end as she was at the high.

Okay, so she could sell a song like almost nobody else you ever saw.

I enjoyed her, when I happened upon her performing.  I didn't go out of my way to see her, but I always enjoyed her when I did.

Scratch that--I wasn't going to watch that horrid reality show on a bet.  I saw the commercials, and I did NOT want to see Whitney portrayed like that.  Though I wasn't her number one fan.

I can't keep the tears out of my eyes today. 

Because Whitney's dead.

And the world is just that much less beautiful today.  There is not enough beauty, for the eyes or for the ears.  Whitney looked as beautiful as she sounded.  There aren't nearly enough beautiful singers.  There's not nearly enough beautiful anything.

I don't know what the coroner's report will say.  But, like everybody else who knows anything about her story, I expect it will say something about how drugs and alcohol had weakened something or other.  If she hadn't done those things, she would still be with us.  Unintentionally, but truly, she killed herself.  She stole from us.  She stole herself from us.  Just like Elvis and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Mama Cass and John Belushi, she robbed us.

There is not enough beauty in the world.  And there is too much pain, and too much evil.

Whitney wasn't evil.  She was beautiful.  And she was in pain.  Self-medicated.

Like me.  Only I eat--my drug of choice.  I've gotten so fat my chest tingles where the huge fat gut intersects my lower ribs.  It will kill me as surely as that illustrious roll call above were killed.  I don't know their pressures and their pains.  But I know mine.  And right now there is a jar of lightly-salted dry roasted peanuts I can't keep my hand out of.  Because one handful of peanuts won't make that much of a difference, right?

Is that why I can't keep the tears out of my eyes?  Because Whitney was a fellow addict?

Have I lost a sister?

Maybe we all have.

Recquiescat in pacem, Whitney Elizabeth.  You made the world better.