May the Lord Rejoice in All His Works

In an earlier post I indicated that the quotation at the right of this blog was the epigraph for my doctoral dissertation in botany. A portion of Psalm 104 appointed for this Sunday had the same function for the only book I've written. Given that the book was about the natural history of eastern Iowa and western Illinois, it seemed appropriate to use: "You send forth your Spirit, and they are created; and so you renew the face of the earth./May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in all his works."

This Pentecost I am struck by the natural imagery of the readings: a sound like the rush of a violent wind; divided tongues, as of fire; and Paul's statement that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now. All of these are attempts to put into words things that are essentially nonverbal, or better, preverbal. We can give Latin names to plants and animals and Greek-derived names to their parts and imagine that we know something fundamental about them, when, in fact, we do not. Luke calls up as many far-flung languages as he can to describe what happened to those disciples at nine-o'clock Pentecost morning, when in fact all he knows is that suddenly people who had been hiding for fear of being arrested are now boldly proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ.

Something happened that Pentecost morning. What it was we shall never know with certainty. We do know that it had something to do with the falling of the Holy Spirit upon people who previously had other things to do. It was different from the natural order yet somehow intimately a part of it. It had the promise of renewing the whole of creation that was groaning in travail. And it most certainly revealed the glory of the Lord that endures forever. May the Lord continue to rejoice in all his works, as he did on that Pentecost.

Cleaning Out

R and I have been spending the week cleaning out stuff, mostly in the basement. We've lived in our house for 21 years, and anticipate moving soon to be closer to a new position I'm starting at the end of July. I got the call at a reception honoring biology graduates at the institution from which I just retired, and accepted the call on the day of my last commencement. If I have any doubt about God being behind this, I think about that timing! This past Monday I put twenty-seven years of teaching into eight boxes, moved out of my office, and turned in my keys. As the old gospel song says, "no turnin' back!" I'm excited about what lies ahead, and committed to making this blog a greater part of that journey. May you few faithful readers be joined by more!

Last Class

After twenty-eight years, I taught my last class today. There's still a week left officially, but I'll be giving a test, returning it, and then heading off to the semi-annual diocesan clergy conference. So today was it. I ended the way I started, teaching ecology from an outline of the text, weaving in stories as illustration, imitating bird calls, using what students call the "voices" -- accents I've heard where I've lived over the years, definitely not Midwestern. (Someone suggested I use the voices in preaching, but I doubt I'll do that.) R suggested that I wear the Dr. Seuss tie she gave me, so I did. It helped set the tone: playful, not somber. No "last lecture" today. Yet it still feels a bit odd to be done.

Later this afternoon there will be the last of three retirement parties, this one in the building where I've taught most of the time, with current and former students stopping by. I'm planning to give away some of the plants in my office, as a way of extending the joy I've had being a botanist all of these years.

It has truly been a blessing to have wandered in the woods, to have taught about the woods, and to get paid for it! I give thanks to God for that blessing, and for all of the students who have taken my classes. May they in turn be a blessing for all whom they encounter throughout their lives.

Good Friday

Preaching after a reading of the Passion of Christ, whether on Palm Sunday or Good Friday, is always difficult. What more can be said? How can anything match what has just been heard? One can talk about that particular Gospel – pointing out that when John castigates “Jews,” for instance, he reflects the bitter conflict between Jewish Christians and the synagogue hierarchy, not an excuse for a pogrom. This is important, yet it is also analytical, moving us away from the anguish of our hearts into the comfort of our heads. It does not address the Passion as an emotional, gut-wrenching event.

Entering into the emotions of the Passion, imagining oneself there and experiencing all of its horror, is a practice dating from medieval times. The best example is in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola; the most recent is Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of The Christ.” I have never been able to do this. I always end up in despair. Perhaps it was a comforting discipline when a third of the population of Europe was dying from the plague in the fourteenth century, to know that as great as that suffering might have been, God in Jesus Christ had suffered more. But it doesn’t work for me. Even though I know the end of the story, the anguish is too much. And I wonder about someone like Mel Gibson, who dwells so much on torture and death that there is little room for resurrection.

Yet I cannot rush to Easter, much as I would like. The fact remains that Jesus died an excruciating death, whether for our sins or for political reasons (as Crossan and Borg would say). And for the first disciples, his death was the end of hope. We cannot know the power of the resurrection unless we first cross that valley of death, because there is no new life unless the old has passed away. “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” That ministry of reconciliation is the promise that even in the midst of despair there is hope. And hearing that promise, we can kneel at the cross once again, knowing that hope will return in a few short days.

Moses and the Serpent

I have not been a faithful blogger by any stretch of the imagination, and I suspect that even those few people who used to read this blog have given up hope of seeing a new post. Adding something like blogging to a full life only comes about by subtracting something else. The subtractions have their own merit, however, and eventually return to crowd out the new. The trick is to keep everyone happy, the old and the new. Sounds like church, doesn’t it?

This week’s OT lesson about Moses and the bronze serpent is one that makes the scientist in me just cringe. It’s sympathetic magic, plain and simple, and no commentary can convince me otherwise. I imagine the average person walking into a church and hearing that and thinking, well, that’s a bunch of malarkey! Why should I think this Jesus stuff is any less a pre-scientific tale than Moses’ serpent? Why, indeed.

It’s clear that the passage from Numbers was chosen because of the reference made to it by Jesus in John’s Gospel. Yet that hardly helps. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness” sounds like “what I’m about to say next has as much validity as that story about Moses.” I know that Jesus transforms the story; it becomes a story about salvation rather than a story about magic. But why isn’t the salvation story magic as well?

Then there’s the claim to exclusivity that runs throughout the Gospel of John. “Those who do not believe [in the Son] are condemned already,” John writes, “because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” This really is counter to contemporary culture. At least I know where to find some help with this one: Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. I suspect that dealing with that issue will help me with the other.

The trick will be figuring out how to explain all of this so a junior high student can understand it. It’s not likely that someone will walk into church off the street on Sunday. But it is likely that there will be youth there who have their own questions about how such antiquated stories can be read in church, and wonder what they can possibly mean to their lives today. That’s the real challenge of preaching.

Unclean Spirits

A seminary I attended had an ad hoc course on angelology and demonology, taught by a retired icon of evangelicalism. I didn’t take it for a variety of reasons, but sometimes I wish I had. I believe that the biblical notion of demons is still useful, because it allows us to name and objectify those tendencies within us that try to turn us away from God. By naming a demon and bringing it to light we have some power over it. Recognizing the demon of gluttony, for instance, reminds me that sometimes I want to eat a lot more than I need to, for reasons that do not promote my spiritual health. One danger in using such demon-talk is the temptation to abdicate responsibility for our actions (“the devil made me do it”). It is also necessary to be able to discern which spirits are from God and which are not.

The reading from Deuteronomy for this Sunday makes it clear that some prophetic voices originate in God while others do not – and the latter lead to certain death. It is also clear that even demonic voices are subject to God. This is underscored by the interaction of Jesus with the “unclean spirit” in Mark. The people are astonished that Jesus has power over the spirit, although they miss the connection with divinity that implies. (I do realize that illnesses such as epilepsy were attributed to “demons” in biblical times, and that such attribution continues to cast a stigma on any disease that affects normal brain functioning and behavior. I am not talking about that, but rather temptations common to all humanity.)

Walter Wink’s books on the “powers” showed me how institutions can have spirits (angelic or demonic) as well as individuals. Using the addresses to the “angels of the seven churches” in Revelation, Wink shows how churches, industries, nations, and cultures can each have its own angel. But how does one discern whether they are divine or demonic? The criterion of whether they lead us toward or away from God and God’s kingdom still holds, yet with institutions, especially ones in which we live, it is much harder to find a place apart where we can examine them dispassionately. We simply have too much invested in them. That investment can also tempt us to define God’s kingdom in ways that minimize the need to change.

I don’t have a solution for all of this. I simply want to present the value of taking demons more seriously than we do. They aren’t little figures with pointy tails and pitchforks. They are very real tendencies within us that turn us away from God and toward our own destruction. We ignore them at our peril.

Sermons Online

Learning new technology is nothing new to me, but I'm not used to doing it in such a public way. Now that I'm blogging and on Facebook, however, what's left to hide? I recently purchased a digital recorder so I could create an mp3 file of a sermon to send to a parish, and having done that successfully, I'm trying to get it to this blog. The easiest way would be to house the mp3 file on my church's website. However, hoping to learn more, I've chosen to use box.net instead. Click on the link below, and then on "HornEpiphany2.mp3." Let me know if it works, and what you think.

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Epiphany