Friday, October 11, 2024
Five Minute Friday :: Flee
or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
Psalm 139:7
• Five Minute Friday :: Flee Linkup
Psalm 139:7-10
7 Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
10 Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
Almost every translation of verse 7b says "flee!" That sounds fast—probably desperate and frightened. We claim to know God best in the loving, compassionate Savior Jesus Christ. After all, he lived a human life like ours (though in a very different place and time), so he "gets" pressure, temptation, disappointment, anger, sorrow, and joy. But even so, don't we often look askance on our own shortcomings and try to hide from God as well as from other humans?
This week I've been studying the book of Hebrews in preparation for my weekly scripture reflection. The assigned passage is a study in law and gospel.
Hebrews 4:12-16
12 Indeed, the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 13 And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.
14 Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested [or tempted] as we are, yet without sin.
16 Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Exodus 25 instructs, "you shall make a cover of pure gold; two cubits and a half shall be its length and a cubit and a half its width." (verse 17) and continues, "there I will meet with you, and I will speak with you from above the mercy seat... verse 22
Scholars who know Hebrew explain the root of kapporet that Martin Luther translated as Gnadenstuhl or "mercy seat" is a place of covering that logically would extend from the physical gold covering of the ark to covering for sin, made especially clear as every year they sprinkled blood on it.
It's only a slight exaggeration to say Luther perceived Jesus Christ in [almost] every passage in the Hebrew Bible. For Luther the Gnadenstuhl, the definitive mercy seat, the place of grace, was the cross of Jesus Christ.
After explaining that Jesus as high priest, as mediator between heaven and earth in his resurrection and ascension, knows us and sympathizes – resonates! – with us, Hebrews 4:16 advises us to "approach the throne of grace with boldness in order to receive mercy."
Do we still want to flee from God?
Tuesday, October 08, 2024
Five Minute Friday :: Two
• Nos duo turba sumus – Ovid, Metamorphoses
Two is more than one.
And the Lord God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him." Genesis 2:18
Several translations say "companion." I love the implication in that word of breaking bread together.
"Ezer" is the Hebrew word for helper, help meet. Scriptorians tell us sixteen of the twenty-one occurrences of ezer in the Old Testament refer to God. Although servant God, servant people, is a persistent biblical current, "ezer" implies overall equality rather than the status of a slave or a servant.
Two is more than one. Two is the start of community; the beginning of shared life and the start of the end of loneliness. Two initiates living the way God intended for humanity.
Eating alone is a disappointment. But not eating matters more … Let us sit down soon to eat with all those who haven't eaten; let us spread great tablecloths, put salt in lakes of the world, set up planetary bakeries, tables with strawberries in snow, and a plate like the moon itself from which we can all eat. For now I ask no more than the justice of eating. Pablo Neruda, from The Great Tablecloth / El Gran Mantel
Eating together is equalizing and leveling; it often makes class and economic distinctions irrelevant. A shared meal or snack sometimes becomes a cross-cultural experience!
From "Please come to Boston" by Dave Loggins (RIP)
Please come to L.A. to live forever
California life alone is just too hard to build.
• 1x1=1 12=1
• Two starts something greater than itself:
• 2x2=4 22=4
Monday, September 30, 2024
Sky Horizon
In Winters Past
There are some beautiful performances on YouTube; I quit linking to YT because so many vids are here today, gone tomorrow.
Friday, September 27, 2024
Five Minute Friday :: Advantage
• Five Minute Friday :: Advantage Linkup
Advantage flea and tick medicine. Advantage credit card. The advantage of greater height, of speaking the language—different things are advantageous at different times in different places. A trait that's an advantage in some settings sometimes becomes a disadvantage in others. Tall in height? Can't get into that small space.
Since last winter I've been doing a kind of gap half or three-quarters of a year. Time to breathe, to reflect on the pasts, to dream of some futures. To live a clean break from years that – of course – I learned from and took advantage of, but that I need to admit were altogether far less than I was worth and worthy of. Particularly related to that intentional interval between what was and what will be, at the end of most days I thank God for the gifts of that day. Most of those turn out to have given me an advantage, sometimes over other people(!), often an advantage over my previous self.
In either intro cultural anthropology or anthropology of religion (both were with same wonderful professor) we studied The Ritual Process by Victor Turner. People sometimes refer to almost any inbetween as a liminal time (and in some ways almost any inbetween does position us on the limen or threshold), but in a ritual and liturgical sense, liminality isn't simply an undefined interval; it's an intentional opportunity to be stripped of dysfunctional and unneeded aspects of how I was and who I was before, an emptying that prepares me to take on ways of being that relate to the next chapter. You are a different person after the liminal time than you were before it: you've been undone and you get redone!
This is a free write, so I'll continue by mentioning the early church demonstrated our identity before baptism and afterwards in a far more dramatic way than even most contemporary churches do at the Easter Vigil. Still, although the length of the liminal liturgical interval is brief, baptism is an excellent illustration. FMF host Kate wrote about the advantage of hope Christians possess; baptism bathes us in the hope of Jesus Christ's death and resurrection. How's that for an advantage?
About my header image: we have the advantage of cost-free photographs with legal reuse rights. And I have the advantage of love, love, loving salads! So much that I want to illustrate almost everything I write with a salad.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)