Dry Bones

Jessica preached this past Sunday on the dry bones of Ezekiel.  The people of Judah had a "small view of God."  This view manifested itself in 1) a casual view of sin, 2) a lack of love for others, and 3) they no longer trusted God.  "They thought God abandoned them, but they had drifted."  In the vision of the dry bones, Ezekiel's view of God gets bigger.  This is shown in these ways: 1) God restores.  Because of Jewish laws regarding contact with the dead, bones also represent defeat and humiliation.  Uncleanness.  Yet, even all this is restored.  2) God resurrects.  God's power is such that dead things come alive again.  Dead bones can live.  So can dead Judah.  Physically dead people can live again.  So can spiritually dead people.  Finally, 3) God works through Ezekiel.  God could have done all the work.  Instead, God tells Ezekiel to prophesy.  In the Bible, humans are expected to just watch God do things.  God does his work through people.

God's words will bring the dead to life again, and this will come through human words.  This made me think of the Bible.  The Bible consists of real human words written by real human people.  So are all other books.  So where does the uniqueness come in?  As I heard Jessica read from Ezekiel 37, it occurred to me that the biblical God claims the power to create from nothing and to bring the dead to life with his own words, but also insists on using human words.  We see that God's word expresses itself in human words.  Ezekiel prophesies.  Is he just making up words?  Or is he God's puppet?  Isn't it both?  God's word expresses itself in Ezekiel's words.

Jessica shared that God brought those bones back to life and that God put flesh and tendons on them.  This is where I want to place my hope today.  Death is all around.  I'll be participating in a memorial service this Saturday.  I'll die too someday, and so will all of us.  God looks at Ezekiel and refers him to the dead bones.  "Can these bones live?"  If God has that power, he can use it.  But he looks at Ezekiel, and at you and me, so that we'll reason within ourselves and decide if death is the greatest power in the world, or if God has power to bring life from death.

Ezekiel answers, "Sovereign Lord, you alone know."  That's right!  Only the Lord knows.  And the Lord's ultimate answer comes when Jesus' dead bones live.  Easter answers the dry bones, for Jesus Christ, and by extension for all who belong to him.

I trust the message spoke to you too.  You can find it at the MPC website.

Psalm Singing in the Reformation

Alec Ryrie describes the role that Psalm-singing played in the Scottish Reformation:

"The praying and the singing of the Psalms as a means of cementing religious identity was one of the most distinctive features of Reformed Protestantism across Europe.  Metrical Psalms were a form of music which was irreproachable even to the dourest Reformed theologian.  They became a badge of Reformed identity, and their texts were peculiarly well suited to peoples under persecution.  When Adam Wallace's Bible was finally taken from him, he spent the night before his execution 'in singing, and lauding God...having learned the Psalter of David without book, to his consolation.'  George Buchanan, imprisoned in Portugal by the Inquisition, passed his time by composing metrical Psalms.  When the Edinburgh Protestant Elizabeth Adamsoun was on her deathbed, in about 1556, she asked her companions to sing Psalm 103, which she said had first taught her soul 'to taste of the mercy of my God.'" (Ryrie, The Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 122)

John Calvin's love of the Psalms was characteristic of this continental movement:

"Certainly as things are," Calvin explains, "the prayers of the faithful are so cold, that we ought to be ashamed and dismayed.  The psalms can incite us to lift up our hearts to God and move us to an ardor in invoking and exalting with praises the glory of his Name." (Calvin quoted in Boulton, Life in God, 34)

Matthew Myers Boulton goes on to describe broad qualities of this movement:

"...for many in the sixteenth-century reform movements, the psalms became identified as the music of the people, God's Word once only accessible to a few, now sung by one and all.  Indeed, in an era when women's voices were prominently heard in public worship only in convents, and children's voices only in specialist choirs, the joyous roar in Genevan churches rose from the entire assembly, men, women, and children singing together - with children often leading the way, teaching the adults the new psalms, a method Calvin recommended.  Both the music and the singing practices met with enthusiastic acceptance, as well as enthusiastic resistance, well beyond Geneva: Queen Elizabeth I is said to have dubbed the new psalms "Genevan jigs."  For both adherents and detractors, psalm singing became a distinctive signature of the Reformed movements.  Soon after the complete Genevan Psalter was published, the congregation at Saint-Pierre was singing through the entire Psalter in twenty-five weeks of public worship, or roughly twice a year - a clip of more than thirty stanzas per week." (Boulton 35)

The re-discovery of the Bible is a well-known point of unity among the European reform movements of the 16th century.  What interests me is the re-discovery of singing the Bible, and the role that played in forming the identities of these familial groups in the midst of hardship.  Whatever one may say about the power of singing or of music, it is a powerful way to experience a text in community at the same time.  It builds unity.  It establishes shared vision.

When Jayber Stopped Mowing the Lawn

Jayber Crow, the titular character of farmer and author Wendell Berry's novel, writes about ceasing to mow the lawn in his old age:

"For the first several years I was here, I kept a sort of yard cleared for some distance around the house, once a year scything down the nettles and wild grasses and elderberry bushes and seedling trees.  And I kept open a prospect on the river.  This suited me for a while and seemed the proper thing to do.  I loved the clarity and neatness my mowing and cutting made.  And then one year I stopped, not from laziness (though using a scythe on a hillside will produce sweat enough) but just to give room and welcome to whatever would come.  Since then I have mowed mainly my paths down to the river and across to the garden and up to the road and the woodpile and out to the privy.  When the trees send their branches too close, I cut them back to keep them from scraping the walls or banging on the roof.  The windfalls are big enough I saw up and split for stovewood.  Otherwise I let it be as it will.  Now, sitting out on the porch in the summer among the tops of the young trees, I am among the birds.  And in the last few years something wonderful has begun to happen.  Not just near the house but all along the hillside, the seedlings of the true forest have begun to come to the higher ground: sugar maples and hickories and chinquapin oaks.  Now that I am old, I talk to them, I talk to the birds, the way Athey Keith used to talk to the stray dogs and cats in his own exile up in Port William." (Berry, Jayber Crow 304)

Resistance by Theater

Pope John Paul II died over a decade ago.  In his lifetime, he has been widely credited with helping to resist the Soviet regime’s attempt to undermine Polish Christian culture, which was the pope’s homeland.  George Weigel writes in his biography of Pope John Paul II – who went by the name Karol Wojtyla before becoming pope – that the young Christian had earlier resisted the Nazi’s attempt to undermine Polish Christian culture.  Although he would later resist as pope, at this earlier time, he resisted as a playwright:

“Karol and his literary friends were determined that the German attempt to stamp out Polish culture would not deter them.  In fact, the deliberate effort to decapitate Poland seemed to charge these young actors and authors with an even more intense sense of purpose.  In October 1939, a few weeks after returning from his trek to Poland’s eastern borderlands, Karol and his Jagielonian classmates, Juliusz Kydrynski and Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, joined by Danuta Michalowska, a high school student passionate about the theater, met at the Kydrynskis’ home to recite classic Polish texts, each taking different parts.  Two months later, Karol wrote his first play, David, which has been lost.  A letter to Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk described it as a “dramatic poem, or drama, partly biblical, partly rooted in Polish history…” (Witness to Hope 62)

He also joined a theater troupe:

“Another aspect of Karol’s intensified dramatic activity involved the famous Polish actor and director Juliusz Osterwa, whom the Nazis had forbidden to practice his craft.  Like Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk, Osterwa thought of theater as a vocation as well as a career.  During the Second Polish Republic he had founded a theater company, Reduta, to bring the classics of the Polish stage to a mass audience.  The members of the company lived as a community, in an almost monastic style, and were deeply committed to the ideals expressed in nineteenth-century Polish Romantic literature.  Meeting Osterwa through Juliusz Kydrynski, Wojtyla soon found himself involved in various of the older actor’s projects, including fresh translations of the world’s dramatic masterpieces into contemporary Polish.” (63)

This theater came to be called the Rhapsodic Theater.  Weigel sums up the meaning of this time in Wojtyla’s life:

“The word of truth, publicly, indeed almost liturgically, proclaimed was the antidote the Rhapsodic Theater sought to apply to the violent lies of the Occupation.  The tools for fighting evil included speaking truth to power.  That was what Kotlarczyk and his Rhapsodic Theater believed, and lived.  That belief and that experience made an indelible impression on Karol Wojtyla, who would not forget when, on a different kind of stage, he would confront another totalitarian power in the future.” (66)

More:

“Some have suggested that, confronted by the horror of Nazi-occupied Poland, Karol Wojtyla retreated into a religious quietism.  In the light of the evidence, it is clear that he had a decision to make.  Some young Poles chose armed resistance or clandestine sabotage.  The evidence makes clear that Karol Wojtyla deliberately chose the power of resistance through culture, through the power of the word, in the conviction that the “word” (and in Christian terms, the Word) is that on which the world turns.  Those who question the choice he made are also questioning that judgment about the power of the Word and words.” (66)

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky once made the mysterious remark that although politics wouldn’t, “beauty would save the world.”  It sounds as though the young Karol Wojtyla and future Pope John Paul II would have had some thoughts about that.

Leisure

Philosopher Josef Pieper describes leisure:

“…Leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit.  The inner joyfulness of the person who is celebrating belongs to the very core of what we mean by leisure…Leisure is only possible in the assumption that man is not only in harmony with himself (whereas idleness is rooted in the denial of this harmony), but also that he is in agreement with the world and its meaning.  Leisure lives on affirmation.  It is not the same as the absence of activity; it is not the same thing as quiet, or even as an inner quiet.  It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.  In Holderlin’s poetic fragment, die Musse are found the following three verses: “I stand in a peaceful meadow / as a beloved Elm tree, and as vines and bunches of grapes, / the sweet play of life coils around me.”  And as it is written in the Scriptures, God saw, when “he rested from all the works that He had made” that everything was good, very good (Genesis 1:31), just so the leisure of man includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation.” (Leisure the Basis of Culture 33)

As Pieper describes it, true leisure is not idleness, nor is it quietness, and yet it does resemble a kind of stillness.  This is something we struggle to grasp.  Perhaps a good place to begin is with where Pieper says that leisure is only possible not only when “man is in harmony with himself” but when “he is in agreement with the world and its meaning.”  We might ask, “what does the world mean?”  What does it mean that there is a world?  What is the significance of food, water, trees, people, dirt, sky?  What communication do these things give about themselves?  Then we might be able to answer what it means to live in agreement with such a world as this.

Stars and Soil

Why is the date of Easter different every year?

Philip Pfatteicher points out that the answer lies in the stars and in the soil.  First, the stars:

“Passover was originally a spring new moon festival, its date determined by the vernal equinox and the first full moon of the spring.  We cannot now know all that the moon meant for the origins of Passover, but that ignorance is reason enough to leave the date of Easter as it is and allow it to vary from year to year.  Ancient intuitions embedded in the mystery of the moon, three days dark, are fulfilled and perfected in Christ, three days in the darkness of the tomb.  The moving date of Easter, varying as does Passover, preserves the Christian connection with the tradition from which it came.  That connection with Judaism, Christianity’s elder brother and first to hear the Word of God, is essential for an understanding of who Christians are and what the Church is.” (Journey to the Heart of God 230)

Second, the soil:

“The ancient Hebrews counted seven weeks from the Feast of Unleavened Bread to the Feast of First Fruits.  These were two agricultural festivals, the first the consecration of the grain harvest by waving a freshly cut sheaf of barley (Lev. 23:9-11), the second, the Feast of Weeks, fifty days later, ended the harvest.  After the destruction of the temple and the exile in Babylonia, a new awareness of the work of God in human history developed, and the festivals of the ancient Hebrew calendar were reinterpreted and associated with great historical events of past ages.  Events thus had meaning for the generation in which they occurred but also for all who followed afterward.  Every devout Hebrew was thus a participant in the formative events.  Passover became the anniversary of deliverance from slavery and thus had meaning for all who were in any kind of bondage.  The Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), once a spring festival associated with the barley harvest, became the anniversary of Moses’s reception of the Law on Mount Sinai and a reminder of God’s will and human obedience to it.” (231)

Our Christian holy days are intimately tied to Hebrew holy days, just as the New Testament is intimately bound to the Old Testament.  And Hebrew holy days were intimately tied to cycles of the earth, and to changing seasons.  The value of this?  It reminds that it is inescapably part of human existence that the world around us does not accommodate itself to us, but that we learn the ways of the world, of the stars and the soil, and accommodate ourselves to laws of life that we can never change no matter how hard we would like to try.  We learn to look on the world and ask, not “how can I get all this to do what I want?” but “How do I use this wisely as my home, but also as a tool, not for what I want, but for what God wants?”

Discipleship Curriculum

If I had to come up with a curriculum for discipleship for this day and age, to go through with one other person who is motivated to know God, it would include: 

1) your inner voice is not God’s voice.  

2) Being drawn to Jesus is the surest sign that God is with you.  

3) God’s greatest work is to build a church.  Contribute to the church’s singing, confessing, praying, listening, communing, and serving.  Think very locally about how to give of yourself.  

4) Have very deliberate morning and evening rituals of prayer.  Include others if you can.  

5) Be a good steward of words first, and this will teach you to be a good steward of everything else.  

6) Be child-like and do something you love for its own sake, everyday if possible.  What can you begin to write, paint, read, craft, or do in five minutes a day?  This is a practice that will likely embody a basic truth about the Christian worldview for insiders and outsiders alike: that God creates and redeems not as a means to an end, but simply because it is good.