the God of Peace who brought again from the dead
Outside, 41°F but wind ENE 10 mph gusts to 17 mph make it feel like 31° in this 3:56 AM CST predawn darkness of Xmas Eve Eve, Mon Dec 23 2024.
Opa mug of hot & black with one tsp avocado oil and a thick slice of deliciously heavy pumpkin nut bread, yesterday's gift that made me feel like I'm still a real boy and not something that's faded into the, what? Universe? Multiverse? the ether of endless space.
Again, have you noticed it happening? AI has started answering every question I ask of Google.
From NASA, Hubble and Webb images of two galaxies interacting. Is God there? What is God interested in? Does God have hobbies? Who or What is God? Is God force, intellect, mindfulness, intention, chaos, energy, ... ? Where is God? My seminary theology professor insisted that God, Christ, Jesus is not present with one alone, because the promise is, "Where two or three gather in my Name, there am I in the midst of them." Jenson was a little bizarre, but so have I become in the years since, and I rather enjoy it. Appreciate and enjoy it. It keeps me wondering, asking, seeking.
Matthew 10:31, if God cares about a sparrow, does God care about each flea on a sparrow, or is our God too small to care about other than us? From here, I'm watching the Bay: if God cares about each sparrow, does God care about each mullet that jumps? How does God feel about the osprey circling above, diving, and rising to carry a flapping mullet to the nest, there to tear it apart and eat bits of the fish as it continues to flap and jump - - how sentient is the flapping fish, and how conscious of the pain of being ripped and eaten? What about the wildebeest caught by a crocodile as it tries to swim across the river? How about the reptile itself? I'm not trying to be humorous, this is part of what confronted Charles Darwin's Christianity, the nature of species, creating pain for other species.
The lion will never eat straw, it's an image, the writer's imaginative metaphor for the peace of God.
What bothers me? How animals feel. We don't have bugs here. Our HOA contracts with a pest control service, a technician comes a few Times a year, and once or twice every two or three years we find a dead roach lying upside down on the floor: what kind of sentience did the roach have? Was it aware of danger? Did it know it was invading my space? Am I, are We, invading space that another Being knows as its own?
What about my perpetual interest, ants and their anthill, and warring among anthills, does God care about each ant, or about each ant hill community?
Elephants can be frantic to save an endangered baby elephant, and some apes/monkeys, and sea mammals: what's their level of sentience? Psalm 116 v 15 (Good News Bible) declares, "How painful it is to the Lord when one of his people dies," is it painful to the Lord when killer whales attack and kill another species' baby whale to eat its liver? How does God feel about the raccoon who raids a bird's nest and eats the hatchlings while the mother bird flaps about frantically? It's all in the nature of the species as created and/or evolved. Evolution being the nature of creation.
Everything, at least every wild thing that didn't eat of Eve's apple, simply lives according to its nature, its evolved or created nature, and God says it's all very good.
Does God care about everything, or just about us? If it's only about us, that makes it pretty clear that we have created a God in our image and after our likeness, and not vice versa.
Today is Meandering Monday, you know, and I was thinking about yesterday's Bible reading from Micah 5. At theological seminary we were taught to look first for what the author, the writer meant to say, and to whom, and the writer's "sitz im Leben," situation in life, what was going on that was the occasion for the writer to write. That Micah Five passage is not at all what we make of it every Advent Christmas. Along with Isaiah, Hosea and Amos, Micah was an Eighth Century Prophet of Doom, prophesying God's destruction of God's people Israel and Judah because of their evil ways. The Micah 5 passage is a bit of relief for the remnant, a promise of hope after God's destructive punishment: God will raise up for the surviving remnant, a savior, a caring shepherd who will come from insignificant little Bethlehem, and all will be well. And we end our reading with, "and he shall be the one of peace."
We Christians see Micah's prophecy as having come to Truth in Jesus.
But the fact is, that's not what Micah says. The nice thought that we end with, and make it about Jesus, that he shall be the one of peace, is actually the beginning of Micah's next thought, in which he bursts into a shouting, table-pounding rage of sarcastic irony about how Israel will treat her enemies:
Micah 5:5 "And this shall be shalom, peace: when the Assyrian comes into our land and when he shall tread in our palaces, then shall we raise against him seven shepherds, and eight principal men. 6 And they shall waste the land of Assyria with the sword, and the land of Nimrod in the entrances thereof: thus shall he deliver us from the Assyrian, when he cometh into our land, and when he treadeth within our borders."
The shalom that Micah prophecies does not sound like the peace of Jesus. In the term paper that I wrote about the Micah 5 passage for our Old Testament course, I asserted, "It doesn't sound like peace to me," to which the professor wrote in the margin, "It may not sound like peace to you, Tom Weller, but it sure as hell is peace for Israel!"
Which expands my perspective. Like Humpty Dumpty telling Alice, "When I use a word, it means whatever I intend it to mean," we Christians use the Hebrew Bible to mean whatever we want it to mean. That most noticeably starts with Matthew lifting LXX phrases out of context for his messianic prophecies, and it continues for all of us.
Further to my expanding perspective, and more significantly, it shows me that God's peace is not necessarily my peace. In faith, I have, at any number of Robert Frost's roads diverging in a yellow wood, at a Time of relative personal crisis, taken one road or the other, to know later that I had walked through my non-peace that was in fact God's peace for me. "I AM speaking to you, Tom Weller." It's a faith perspective even as I contemplate my theology professor's favorite question, "Who or What is God?"
God is Whoever or Whatever has brought me safely here thus far. My problem is the Palestinian boy who wept over the bodies of his mother and his brother. The Israeli family who were tortured and burned to death on 7 October. Even the mullet jumping and flapping in the osprey's nest. William Hall dying as I laid on hands and prayed for his recovery, and my own question, "Can the faith of Tom Weller survive the death of William Hall?"
The answer was "No" it did not. I came out of that life experience of the death of William entirely changed. I hate the experience even as I love and appreciate the change it brought in me. Something about the God of Peace, God's Peace.
The peace of God that passeth all understanding ...
Nomesane?
RSF&PTL
T89&c