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Volcanoes and ash plumes: Ruminations on global interconnectedness

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The most recent news from Iceland is mixed: new tremors in the volcano, but a lower ash cloud. That should help free up air travel and help thousands of stranded passengers get to their destinations. Most of us know somebody who got grounded, and was trying in vain to get home from a business trip, or to fly to Boston from Europe for the fabled marathon there today.

The situation reminds us that we do live on a small planet where all our lives are interconnected.

Jim Gordan, who blogs from the UK at Living Wittily, reflects thoughtfully on this in his post “when the global becomes local and the international becomes personal.” Here is an excerpt:

Ease and safety of travel has become such an integral part of what we take for granted as normality, that this past week has created a new level of awareness of just how vulnerable technology is to the elemental physical forces that drive and shape our planet.

Easy now to slip into apocalyptic scenarion; but just as easy to assume that once the direction of the wind changes the situation will revert to normal. Somewhere between apocalyptic meltdown and complacent unconcern is the harder reality of having created a world dependent on air flight, air freight and air defence systems. And for the first time total shut-down has simply negated that assumption. The unprecedented now has precedent. In a world where risk assessment, risk management and rehearsed emergency scenarios have become standard activities of corporate bodies, it seems this particular combination of circumstances escaped the risk assessors and the Hollywood script writers.

Jim continues to write about the upcoming British elections, which may or may not be of interest to you depending on where you live, but he concludes his post with a call for prayer for the manifold needs of our world, and that is a message all can heed.

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“Thumbs down” to Hewlett Packard! Ruminations on the Morality of Built-in Obsolescence

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Is anybody else out there as frustrated as I am by the built-in obsolescence of IT products?

When I upgraded my Mac to “Snow Leopard” (OS 10.6) recently, all of a sudden my wonderful Hewlett-Packard “All-In-One” printer, scanner, copier became a “One,” that is, just a printer.

So I bit the bullet and called HP support, and got a charming and helpful person who basically said, “We don’t support that product.”  I asked her if they anticipated creating drivers for it? “No, we no longer support that product.”

Which translates into, “We are not creating drivers to make the product you bought from us a few years ago functional, because we want you to buy a new product from us and put the old one in the land-fill.” SHAME!

My machine was about three years old.  Would we accept that from a company that made, say, refrigerators or lawn mowers?

But their policy of built-in obsolescence is smart from a purely economic point of view, because I did end up buying another product from them, a good product at a good price (I had to spend the better part of another afternoon on the phone with them to get it to work on my Mac, but that is another story for another day.)

So I didn’t even punish them for their policy by buying from another company.  Why?  Because their product was better and cheaper, and every hardware company, even my much-favored Apple, builds in obsolescence with constant newer, better and faster software.  If you want to stay up, you have to pay up!

But what happens to all these old computers and printers that still work fine, or would if they could run the newer software?  They get thrown away and added to the garbage of the planet.

So what would a “Green” IT company look like?  And at what point would it become in these companies’ best interest to attend to being good stewards of the earth?  Just wondering.

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Willis Elliott on Atonement vs. Reconciliation

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My friend and Confessing Christ co-conspirator Willis Elliot, who is a polymath, Biblical language scholar, churchman, provocateur, nonagenarian, and a long-time interlocutor, is the guest poster today.

I asked, somewhat rhetorically, in an earlier post why so many in the church like the word reconciliation, but do not like the word atonement, even though they translate the same Greek word (Katallage)?  My answer was that reconciliation is something that we need to do, and atonement is something only God does, and that we tend to prefer the things we have control over rather over the work of God in Christ, not that they are in any way unrelated.

Willis’ response (on the Confessing Christ Open Discussion), as per usual, was thick with insightful word study, and is not for the faint of heart.  But you atonement scholars and fans who visit this blog, and you know who you are, will find his insights useful.
Willis writes:

“ON TARGET, man!  “Reconciliation is something that we need to do, and atonement is something only God does.”

Katallage – the word you mention as for both – had, as its street-meaning, money-exchange. No matter how high & wide a plant grows, it never loses the reality of its SOIL: no matter how diversified the meanings of a word (its “semantic domain”) become, it never loses its contact with the STREET (by which I mean its origin in common, earthly life).

Now, Rick, I’m probably about to tell you nothing you (an “atonement” scholar) don’t know. I’ll call it “How to access [enter into] a word.”

1
Back to the plant metaphor: first, I want to know the ROOT(s) of the word. Kat[a]-all-ag-e is the action (ag) of interchange (kata) with another (all-os). Second, I want to know the STREET meaning(s): (1) money-exchange, commerce, business; (2) the change from enmity to friendship; reconciliation, restoration. Finally, I want to know the CHURCH meaning(s) – “church” in the broad sense of special, particular.

2
The Greek general & Christian lexicons note a special Christian meaning of katallage: reconciliation with God through Christ, at the divine initiative (“by God alone,” & therefore “received” [*lamban-*] as a gift by believers – believing receivers). / But I found none using “atonement”: that technical word seems limited to Greek theological dictionaries. The Eng. wd. (says Mer.-Web. Online) – earliest, 1513 – meant “reconciliation” (now obsolete); means “the reconciliation of God and humankind through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ”; & (3rd meaning), “reparation, satisfaction.”

3
Synonomies expand from verbal “semantic domains” to conceptual domains answering the question What word-group relates the word-meanings to what “central truth” (the phrase on p271 of R.C.Trench’s Synonyms of the NT (1854; my copy, 1906). In article lxxvii, he’s discussing apolytrosis/katallage/hilasmos– “three grand circles [or ‘families’] of images” of the Cross’ verbally “inestimable benefits.” “Scripture . . . approach(es) the central truth from different quarters,” which “supply the deficiences of one another.”

The article is six pages, assumes a reading knowledge of Latin, & uses extensively the Greek & Latin Fathers. Here, I’ll only mention the first word (redeeming from captivity through payment of a ransom; cessation of bondage from sin as slavery) & the last (Christ as both “priest and sacrifice” propitiation: it’s “richer” than katallage – which states only THAT we enemies have become God’s friends: hilasmos explains HOW this came about [“satisfaction, propitiation, the Daysman, the Mediator, the High Priest”]). / Now for the middle word, KATALLAGE – reconciliation (“the making up of a foregoing enmity”); “atonement” in its original sense (but it has come to have the full meaning of hilasmos: propitiation). (For the meaning-change, Trench refers to Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language.)  Rick, I’ve hit the high spots of Trench’s article, which uses Greek/Latin/German. A classic widely-deeply researched & profoundly thought through, written while carrying on his day-work as an Anglican archbishop!

4
Trench’s article fights those who want so to translate these words as to delete “the wrath of God.” Today, we have to fight what you well call a “bloodless theology.” Not just “God is love,” but (as a Methodist pastor, a niece of mine, wrote me a few days ago), “God is only love” (her description of the theology of the BOM [Board of Ordained Ministry] on which she serves). Said she to me, “when [against that narrowness] I mentioned obedience, sacrifice, and accountability,” there was “only silence.” “Few speak on behalf of the Scriptures, . . . honoring the Lord, who has so graciously given them [the Scriptures] to us.” / If God is “only love,” he’s not fully personal, with the full moral sense & full range of emotions. Note how Trench (156 years ago!) insists that without God’s wrath, theology trivializes sin, which is no longer an enmity against God setting God in enmity against sinners.

In katallage, God “laid aside his holy anger against our sins, and received us into favour, a reconciliation effected for us once for all by Christ upon his cross” (p273; the “secondary” meaning is that we are “daily,” “under the operation of the Holy Spirit,” to dispose of “the enmity of the old man [within us] toward God”: “‘Be ye reconciled with God‘ [2Cor.5.20]”). The anti-wrath-of-God crowd make the secondary meaning primary “to get rid of the reality of God’s anger against the sinner,” & “sin as a state of enmity (echthra) with God (Ro.8.7; Eph.2.15; Jam.4.4), and sinners as enemies to Him and alienated from Him (Ro.5.10; Col.1.21; which sets forth Christ on the cross as the Peace, and the maker of peace between God and man (Eph.2.14; Col.1.20).” On pp275-6, Trench goes into detail (with a flood of texts!) on the NT deleting of blood sacrifice for the appeasement of deity: “priest and sacrifice,” previously divided, were “united in Him, the sin-offering by and through whom the just anger of God against our sins was appeased, and God, without compromising his righteousness, enabled to show Himself propitious to us once more. All this the word hilasmos, used of Christ, declares.” (Hilasmos is sacral, its context sacrificial; katallage is only reconciliation-restoration, without the later sacral meaning of “atonement.”)

(Thank you Willis. Used by his permission.)

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Doubting with Thomas: Ruminations on John 20:24-29

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“How can I believe in God” asked Woody Allen, “when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?” Allen is humorously raising the question of how a good God allows bad things to happen.  He raises the question about religious knowledge when he says, “I am plagued by doubts . . . if only God would give me some clear sign; like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.”

That makes us laugh, but who among us has not been troubled by questions and doubts at some time in our life. I think that the story of “doubting Thomas” is probably in the Gospel of John because, even in the early generations of the church, faith in the Risen Christ was not an automatic thing. Faith was hard to come by and hard to keep in those days just as it is today. So Thomas is a stand-in for all the doubters then and now.

The problem was that Thomas was not present the first time that Jesus came to the disciples, and he won’t accept their claim that Jesus is alive unless he can see him with his own eyes and touch him with his own hands.

The disciples had been hiding. They had bolted the door and were listening for the dreaded sound of footsteps on the stair when suddenly Jesus was among them. He stood there in their midst and he told them to breathe in his breath, his holy breath and spirit, so that they could go out into the world again and perform his holy work.

Thomas is told of this event, but he says that, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.” And a week or so later Jesus does appear to them again and this time Thomas is there, and he sees Jesus and touches the wounded hands and side, and only then can he say, “My Lord and my God!”

Jesus replies to Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not see and yet believe” which refers to every generation since then which cannot see Jesus but relies on the testimony of those like John and Mary Magdalene who did see.

And yet often we remain like Thomas. We do need some evidence. Roughly two thousand Easters have taken place since Thomas’s day, two thousand years’ worth of people proclaiming that the tomb was empty and the dead Christ alive among us to heal, sustain and transform. But in one sense it is not enough. If we are to believe in his resurrection in a way that really matters in our lives and in the life of the world, we must have some experience of it.

And so it is that when and where people believe in the resurrected One, they have in some sense seen him, or at least known him, sensed him. If we are not to see him and touch him as Thomas did, we still must know him.

For now as then, it is not Jesus’s absence from the empty tomb that convinces us, but his presence in the midst of us.  Easter is not the celebration of the absence of his body from the tomb, but his living presence with us now.

So how do we know him when we can’t see him or touch him? In Luke’s Emmaus story the disciples knew him in the breaking of the bread, and we still know him in the supper he told us to continue in memory of him. And it is not just his memory we know but his real presence.

We may know him in the Word while reading the story in the Bible or hearing a sermon. We may know him in moments of prayer, in moments of deep need or dark despair, or in moments of great joy, such as a baptism. We may know him in service with others, in the joys and challenges of living in the church, which is his body. We may know him by a sick bed or in the hour of trial over a life-changing decision. There are many ways to know the risen Christ, but touching the wounds of his body, as Thomas did, is not one of them.

So we walk by faith and not by sight. Our faith lives among our doubts. “Doubts,” says Fred Buechner, “are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.” It is often our doubts that get us thinking and moves our faith to a more mature level. In some real sense we never stop being Thomas the doubter.

Life is complex and mysterious, many questions and concerns do not lend themselves toward easy answers. Yet it is precisely there in the complex world where faith must live if it is to be faith at all and not mere wishful thinking. But that is precisely where we still meet the living Christ, in the real events and commonplaces of daily life. An apocryphal gospel that didn’t get into the canon supposedly written by Thomas himself depicts Jesus as saying, “Cleave a piece of wood and I am there. Lift up the stone and you will find me there.” Which is to say there is no place on earth or in our lives too remote or outlandish for the One who came to save us all.

So we must again and again look for the risen Jesus in the ordinary day to day events of our lives. And we look for him amid our doubts. Unlike Thomas we do not get to touch him. But we can know him, and in the end we really do walk by faith and not by sight. But our faith in him is not blind faith. Faith is trust, and we generally trust only those whom we have experienced as trustworthy.

If we believe that Jesus is alive it is because at some time in our life he has made himself known to us. If we have not touched him, he has touched us, so that we have been able to say, as Thomas did when he touched that wounded side and held those ruined hands, “My Lord and my God.” Amen.

(This is an excerpt form a sermon I preached on April 14, 1996, entitled “We Walk by Faith.”  Picture:  Caravaggio, The Incredulity of St. Thomas)

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“Witnesses to the Resurrection” Church scandals and the faithful who stay

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My friend Tony Robinson, author, speaker, preacher, and peripatetic traveler for the good of the church, is an acute observer of what is going on in our world.

I heartily recommend his website Anthony B. Robinson, and especially the page called “What’s Tony Thinking?”  A few days ago he posted some good thoughts from Peggy Noonan on the Roman Catholic clergy sex abuse story.  He wrote:

“I am becoming a fan of Peggy Noonan’s Saturday columns in the Wall Street Journal. This week she wrote on the Catholic clergy sex abuse troubles concluding by saying, “There are three great groups of victims in this story. The first and most obvious, the children who were abused, who trusted, were preyed upon and bear the burden through life. The second group is the good priests and good nuns, the great leaders of the church in the day to day, who save the poor, teach the immigrant, and literally, save lives. They have been stigmatized when they deserve to be lionized. And the third group is the Catholics in the pews–the heroic Catholics of America and now Europe, the hardy souls who in spite of what has been done to their church are still there, still making parish life possible, who hold high the flag, their faith unshaken. No one thanks those Catholics, sees their heroism, respects their patience and fidelity. The world thinks they are stupid. They are not stupid, and with their prayers they keep the world going, and the old church too.

One might say the same of many “heroic laypeople” in all sorts of congregations and communities of faith amid failures of leadership and scandals and disarray among higher ups. So many good people keep on keeping on in the face of disappointment, deceit and challenge. They are the witnesses to the resurrection.”

 

That last observation is a particularly wise one, I think.  I can remember sometimes looking out at the congregations I have served after a particularly nasty fight over something ephemeral and wondering, “Why do they even bother to come back every Sunday?  There must be more here than meets the eye.”  And, of course, the answer is that there is!

As somebody once said about Noah’s ark: “If it wasn’t for the storm outside,  one couldn’t stand the stench inside.”   Still, Tony is just right.  These faithful are living witnesses to the resurrection.

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Spring busts out in the Berkshires, but “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

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T. S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruelest month,” but it was another poet that better described our Berkshires today.

After recent rains the season’s first really hot day brought out the early buds, as well as lawn rakers and walkers out taking the air after a long winter indoors.

The Forsythia bloomed since yesterday, and the branches are full of the delicate gold that a week from now will be the green leaves of spring.

Our great New England poet Robert Frost described such days in his poem:

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost
(October 1923, The Yale Review)

(Photo:  R. L. Floyd)

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Eastertide Ruminations on Committal Practices around Cremation

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My mother died young at age 53 in 1967, and by her request was cremated. There was a moving memorial service for her at our little church, but the “cremains” remained in a box inside a cardboard box on my father’s dresser for years, since my bereft and broken-hearted Dad either didn’t know what to do with them, or just couldn’t part with them.   Some good pastoral care would have been helpful.  For years I felt no sense of place to pay my respects to my mother or grieve or do whatever one needs to do at a graveside.

Many years later my Dad remarried a wonderful woman named Virginia, and my Mom’s ashes went along with him to his new household.  He was blessed with ten very happy years with his second wife, and then in 1983 he himself died at the age of 69.  My wife and I were privileged to be with him for a couple weeks at the time of his death, although I had left for a few minutes to have a swim in the ocean when he actually died.  When I saw my wife standing quietly on the shore I knew he was gone.

Later that week I received a phone call that from anybody else but a gracious soul like Virginia might have been extremely awkward.  We were preparing for my Dad’s graveside committal (unlike my mother, he had chosen to be buried), and Virginia asked me and my sister and brother, “What should I do with your Mom’s ashes?”  He had held onto them all those years.

So we all huddled and decided they should go into the ground alongside my Dad’s body and that’s what we did. So my sister, brother, my Dad’s wife, and I saw both my parents committed to the ground in “The sure and certain hope of eternal life,“ despite the fact that they had died 17 years apart.   And it probably wasn’t with those words since it was a Quaker cemetery (Virginia was a Quaker and my Dad had become one), and Quakers are short on liturgy.  Nonetheless, now we have a place, even if it is far from where we live.

We know their remains are just that, but rituals and sacred sites have their place in our lives.  Once in answer to a question about multiple spouses in heaven, Jesus said that “when the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven,” so I anticipate in faith that God will sort it all out on the Great Day of Resurrection.

Cremations were rare back in 1967, and my mother was a practical Christian woman with a proto-Green streak.  Today cremations are much more common, but our committal practices have not caught up with that reality.

A friend of mine sent me a link to today’s Christian Century blog. There is a moving and instructive article by Thomas Lynch called The holy fire, Cremation: A practice in need of ritual.  Lynch is a writer (a good one) and a funeral director, and I recommend that every pastor should read this piece, which can be found here.

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The Resurrection is not a metaphor: “Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike”

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A few years ago, a friend of mine, a college professor, was driving by a local Lutheran Church and saw in big letters on their sign, THE RESURRECTION IS NOT A METAPHOR!

Those who read this blog know my love for the work of John Updike, one of our best Twentieth Century Christian novelists. His poetry is pretty good, too.  Here’s his take on the wise Lutherans’ signboard.


Seven Stanzas at Easter
by John Updike

 

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body.

If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the

amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,

each soft spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the

eleven apostles;

it was as his flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart

that – pierced – died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of

enduring Might

new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a thing painted in the faded credulity

of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier mache,

not stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will

eclipse for each of us

the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel,

weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the

dawn light, robed in real linen

spun on a definite loom.

Let us not make it less monstrous,

for in our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour,

we are embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance.

– John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” in Telephone Poles and Other Poems (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964), 72–3.
(Photo by David Macy:  Easter, yesterday, North Haven, Maine)

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On Easter Day, on Easter Day

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On Easter Day, on Easter Day
The angel rolled the stone away.
Let all good Christians sing and pray
On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, on Easter Day
A new creation came to stay
To take the sting of death away
On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, on Easter Day
Christ came among them, so they say,
And shared his story on the Way
On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, this Easter Day,
We come to worship, sing and pray,
And share his presence, come what may
On Easter Day.

©Richard L. Floyd, 2004

(Picture: Resurrection by Matthias Grunewald, Colmar, France)

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“He descended into Hell.” Ruminations on the Work of Christ between Good Friday and Easter

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One of the most problematic phrases in the Apostles’ Creed for many people today is the assertion that Jesus “descended into Hell” (descenit ad inferos in the original Latin.)

Some congregations just omit it, others alter it. Some say he descended “to the dead, ”which seems to me to be redundant after we have just said, “He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” The United Methodist Church omits it altogether. It doesn’t appear at all in the Nicene Creed, although there is a long tradition of iconography in the Eastern Church of the “Descent into Hell.” The Athanasian Creed contains it.

For this post I am going to skirt the complex question of what the term “hell” even means.  For many believers today the phrase means nothing more that the agony of Jesus’ death on the Cross, a metaphorical Hell. It was certainly at least that. I think it is means more.

It must be admitted that the Scriptural evidence is slender. Among the texts used are: Ephesians 4:7-10., 1 Peter 3:18-20, and 1 Peter 4:6. None of them are without ambiguity.

But the belief that Jesus descended into Hell is an early one in the church. A creed from Syria in the Third Century says that Jesus was “crucified under Pontius Pilate and departed in peace, in order to preach to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the saints concerning the end of the world and the resurrection of the dead.”

The early doctrine based on this phrase is “The Harrowing of Hell,” attested to by several of the early important Church Fathers, including Tertullian, Origen, and Hippolytus. Later Ambrose of Milan (who may have been the principle author of the Apostles Creed) refers to it.

The thrust of the doctrine can perhaps best be stated by the current catechism of the Roman Catholic Church which asserts: “In his human soul united to his divine person, the dead Christ went down to the realm of the dead. He opened Heaven’s gates for the just who had gone before him.”

Since I generally operate out of what I call “a hermeneutic of trust” for both Scripture and the ancient traditions of the church, the first questions I ask are why is it there? And what does it mean?

The obvious answer is that there are three days between the death of Jesus on Good Friday and his Resurrection on Easter. So where was he and what was he doing?

My answer to both those questions is a simple one.  It seems to me the descent into Hell functions theologically to show the scope of God’s saving work in Jesus Christ. Eastern icons often show the Resurrected Christ rising out of Hell dragging Adam and Eve with him, one with each hand.

Whether it is symbolized by this deliverance of our original forebears, the preaching to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or to all who died before the first Good Friday, his descent affirms that there is no place, even Hell, where Jesus’ saving work cannot go, no corner of the cosmos untouched by his atoning Cross. This reminds me of the words in Psalm 139, where the Psalmist asks God, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there? If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. (Vs. 7, 8.)

This is the love that will not let us go.  This is what Jesus died for.

To end this meditation I share an irreverent contemporary prose-poem sent to me from a friend of mine, which imagines Jesus waking up in Hell:

Goodtime Jesus
by James Tate

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ’bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.