Category: Spirit

Categories
Scripture Spirit

Who Am I, that I Should Go to Pharaoh?

I haven’t blogged in quite some time.  Partly that has been because I’ve been spending most of my theological energies on my dissertation, partly it’s been for other reasons.  One of those other reasons resonates with the title of this post, which is a quote from Exodus 3:11.

Exodus 3 is the famous story of Moses and the burning bush.  Moses had fled from Egypt because he was wanted for murder (Exodus 2:11-15).  He had married the daughter of “the priest of Midian,” Jethro, and was working Jethro’s flocks when “[t]he angel of the LORD appeared to [Moses] in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed.”  (Exodus 3:1-2 (NASB)).  God spoke to Moses “from the midst of the bush” and commissioned Moses to “bring My people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt.”  (Exodus 3:4-10).

I’d like to think that if I experience a theophany like this I would respond with humble faith.  In fact, Moses’ response could be read that way:  “Who am I,” Moses said to God, “that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?”  (Exodus 3:11).

“Who am I that I should blog?”  “Who am I that I should teach law, or write about theology and culture, or try to raise children, or say anything to anyone?”

But Moses’ humility in Exodus 3, I think, was false.  Moses, born a condemned Israelite slave baby, was rescued from death by Pharaoh’s daughter and was raised as a prince of Egypt.  (Gen. 2:1-10).  Among the shepherds of Midian, he would have been the most educated and cultured of men — qualities the Priest of Midian surely recognized when Moses lived in his tents.  There is a hint of this excitement about Moses when Jethro’s daughters report to him “‘An Egyptian delivered us from the hand of the shepherds, and what is more, he even drew the water for us and watered the flock.”  (Gen. 2:19).  How else to fill in the interstices of the terse narrative in Exodus 2:16-21?  I wish we had reports of some of Moses’ conversations with Jethro deep into the night.  No one outside Egypt was better qualified by birth or training to rescue Israel from Egypt than Moses, the Jewish-born Egyptian prince.

Well, I am no Moses.  In any social network with which I am connected, there are people with better qualifications than mine, and with life narratives more dramatic and obvious than mine.  Yet I suspect that these narratives about Moses can speak to someone like me as well.  For each one of us stands before the burning bush every day.  If we wake with breath in our lungs we find ourselves in the presence of the God who created us and whose glory continually fills His creation.  We each, from the most accomplished and able to the most humble and “dis”abled, are given gifts, struggles, and circumstances that as things given can be invested and multiplied.  Let the recognition of these things as “given” turn our thoughts away from ourselves — “who am I” — and towards the giver, who also told Moses:  “Certainly I will be with you.”  (Exodus 3:12).

Categories
Poetry Spirit

Poem: Theologian's Lament

Since we are always bumping up against
the limits of what we can and cannot see,
we must admit this discipline is sore,
a horse hair shirt drawn tight against the skin,
a flagellation of the lonely mind.

Perhaps if we could glimpse the lovely face,
a beatific vision of the God
whose thoughts we strain to comprehend, just for
a blink of time, we might surpass the soul’s
captivity and apprehend the Truth.

But none can see the face of God and live,
so our sacred scriptures say.  Perhaps the
scribe who first put this to parchment knew too
well the contemplative frame.  Perhaps he
wished to warn us off, to make us close the book.

Yet here we are before the mysteries,
straining to reconcile opposing thoughts,
making careful distinctions with our words,
as though our language were the substance — the
ousia, to be smart — of our subject.

No, our subject hides like a mythic beast,
a Behemoth rumored to inhabit
these seas, who swallows the universe whole.
We are in his belly without knowing
we have been consumed, stewed, and digested.

Still, a hint of beauty draws us out, past
our subjectivity, something glimmering
in the peripheral field of vision,
where sight is most sensitive in darkness
to movement and the light from distant stars.

 

Categories
Poetry Spirit

Poem: The Psalmist's Profession of Uprightness

“No one who has a haughty look and an arrogant heart will I endure.”  – Ps. 101:5

The King enthroned: a glorious sight!
He sparkles in his ermine robes, his garnet rings, his crown.
His holds his staff erect, above the gathered crowd, a flash of gold,
the sign life or death.

His Court arrays in splendid form at his right hand.
Their glistening silks flow toward the throne
and back again. Electric arcs of power trace their mouths, a low expectant hum.
They smell of ozone and of smoke.

The Guards, their bronze-tipped spears like stars,
form ranks behind the Court. Their breastplates sculpt the shape
of muscled beasts. Their faces, cut from stone, unflinching, stare toward the King,
desiring his command.

The Priests and Monks hold silence at the King’s left hand,
in ruby cloaks or cassocks black as tar. They lightly sway and chant a hymn,
their song and incense sweetening the air. A sacrificial dove is held above the bowl,
its blood a recompense for sin.

The Subjects wait before the throne. They kneel, abased, and kiss the cool grey floor,
their calloused palms turned up in prayer. They wear their finest farmer’s wool,
rough garments for this place, and offer bowls of figs and grapes, and bread,
and honeycombs.

The King, his arms held wide, arises from his throne,
the purple lining of his robes like wings unfolding in the Sun. His eye
surveys the multitudes who gather at his word. The Earth falls still. Now he will speak,
and all will hear the voice of God.

Categories
Church Spirit

Change and Grace

I heard a story recently about a woman who had grown up Catholic in another country.  As the story is told, it was one of those Catholic upbringings — lots of guilt and obligation and rigid authority.  She came to America as a child, and throughout her life here she searched for God, until, finally, she was “saved” in an independent evangelical church, at which she tearfully told her story.  In this experience and in this community, she found the Grace that had eluded her all her life.

I heard another story about a man who was raised in an independent evangelical church.  It was one of those independent evangelical upbringings — lots of noise and action floating lightly above an undercurrent of reactionary anger and denial.  He became a famous writer, he wrote Important Books that would reform his church.  He realized that all along he had been searching for God, and in the middle of his life, he converted to Catholicism.  In the quiet presence of the Eucharist, in the long, slow history of the Tradition, in the nuance of the great Catholic minds, he found the Grace that had eluded him all his life.

I’ve heard this story many times:  Charismatics becoming Episcopalians; Episcopalians becoming Eastern Orthodox; Eastern Orthodox becoming Pentecostals; Pentecostals becoming Quakers; Arminians becoming Calvinists; Calvinists becoming Arminians; Catholics becoming Evangelicals; Fundamentalists becoming Liberals; Liberals becoming Fundamentalists; Evangelicals becoming Anglicans becoming Catholics becoming Eastern Orthodox becoming Evangelicals again; all of them searching for God, finding, perhaps, some measure of Grace along the way.

Maybe Grace only appears when change becomes necessary.  Or, maybe Grace is always there, and we don’t see it until the weight of our inherited and accumulated self-righteousness provokes a crisis of change.  Maybe the final surrender to the inevitability of change releases our souls to receive Grace.  Maybe it’s more about the change than the substance.

Yet the Word is full of grace and truth (John 1:14).  So, maybe the change moves us towards the Substance.  Maybe change itself is Grace.  Maybe God draws each person to Himself on pathways known only to Himself for reasons known only to Himself.  The Orthodox and the Catholics and the Anglicans may be right about the Apostolic Succession.  The Orthodox may be right about the Great Schism of 1054, or the Catholics may be right.  The Baptists instead may be right about local independence, or the Presbyterians may be right about oversight (and Calvin) or the Methodists may be right about it all (including Calvin) or the Anabaptists and Quakers and New Monastics might live more faithfully, or the leftist Episcopalians or the rightist evangelical Anglicans or the obtuse Anglo-Catholics. We each have to trust, I suppose, that God is giving us the Truth we’re prepared to handle, and that Grace is pulling us along.