Ebenezer
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
All of life is a foreign country. - Jack Kerouac, author (12 Mar 1922-1969)
An intriguing notion this morning from Wordsmith, Anu Garg's site A.Word.A.Day, which posts not long after midnight. All of life is a foreign country. It's a metaphor, poetic. And getting less so and more True by the day, day by day. I'm not recognizing Economics genius in this foreign country where I'm living these days, more the bull in the china shop flavor, nomesane? or anger, hatred, vengeance, chaos, intentionality.
Well, you did it and I'm just watching and waiting, which is an Advent theme, not a proper Lent theme.
Seek, seeking, sought, fought. Fought with the text and lost again. Here are our prayer (collect) and a couple of the stories for this coming Sunday:
The Collect
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Old Testament Genesis 15:1-12,17-18
The word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” And Abram said, “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” But the word of the Lord came to him, “This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.” He brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
Then he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.
As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.
When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.”
The Gospel Luke 13:31-35
Some Pharisees came and said to Jesus, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you." He said to them, "Go and tell that fox for me, 'Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.' Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.'"
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My lenten wilderness adventure is reading, including the above. What do I read, and why do I read that particular stuff or person. I've already been there, but I enjoy some short fiction, some books. Reading "Darkness at Chancellorsville" led me face to face with the fact that I'm still on the wrong side of history and my fur is rubbed the wrong way by the superabundantly self-righteous tearing down our statues and changing our street names and the names of our high schools. The last Time I heard a band strike up "DIxie" was decades ago at a Sunday afternoon concert in Trinity Church, Apalachicola, and I was one of several who, remembering who I am, stood. My growing up years, we stood for "Dixie." I don't have to buy into anyone else's Truth or political correctness.
I read Christian Wiman, whose earthshaking life made him what he is, and I read him astonished that he's a professor at a divinity school, a theological seminary. But then, no, I'm not astonished, I can understand that for two reasons, one, because the particular seminary is way off the main track, and, two, because the idea of a theological seminary should be to learn in detail about one's own Tradition while also learning off.the.wall stuff and being stirred to and develop one's own mind, which is the essence of Seeking the Truth.
To Seek the Truth is to acknowledge at the outset that one may not have a fence around it, that what one was brought up to believe is the result of other people's thinking, and that no amount of belief makes anything True.
What people know as Truth evolves over Time. As James Russell Lowell wrote and the lyrics of his discarded hymn say, "Time makes ancient good uncouth."
Why did we discard the hymn? Figure it out for yourself:
1 Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
2 Then to side with truth is noble,
When we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit,
And 'tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses
While the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue
Of the faith they had denied.
3 By the light of burning martyrs,
Jesus' bleeding feet I track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever
With the cross that turns not back;
New occasions teach new duties,
Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still and onward,
Who would keep abreast of truth.
4 Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.
I loved the hymn, and singing it. Lowell's 1845 poem was a 90 verse political diatribe against our Spanish-American war with Mexico to seize territory in the Southwest and Texas. Verses of his poem were lifted to create a powerful hymn that we sang to the powerful and moving Welsh tune "Ebenezer" or "Ton-Y-Botel" meaning tune in a bottle.
Our hymnal revisionists who produced our The Hymnal 1982 were rightly proud of themselves in saving the tune, setting two hymns to it, "Thy strong word did cleave the darkness" and "Singing songs of expectation" - both really great poems and theology, where our slogan is lex orandi lex credendi, the law of praying is the law of believing, which means that our theology is found in what we do and say and sing and pray when we gather for worship.
The hymn "Once to every man and nation" includes the theme that Truth evolves, is fleeting and one must fight to stay abreast of it: as a lenten exercise this wilderness morning, contrast that hymn with the words of the Collect, "the unchanging Truth of your Word."
At any event, I read what I choose, and I read, as part of my commitment to Seek, to find out what others say. For example, I may agree with Wiman's conclusion that I quoted yesterday, "either the incarnation is absolute, or it simply didn't happen" but I don't agree with his further assertion that "Either God is gone, or he never was," because (a) "God is gone" (i.e., the absence of God) is not my experience. "I AM speaking to you, Tom Weller" is part of my adventure, part of my life that, as I said yesterday, at this age is in my mind, my memories; and (b) the NASA image challenges me to affirm or doubt that there's rational thinking behind all this.
Finally: I don't write for you, I write for myself. You don't have to agree with what I write, nobody needs to agree with it but me, and when all is said and done, even I don't necessarily agree with it.
It's a great adventure, out here in the wilderness looking out into infinity and eternity. Eternity? How long until Earth is obliterated by our Sun? 7.6 billion years. How long until the Universe ceases expanding, cools to absolute zero and shrinks to nothing? 100 trillion years. So, there is an end to eternity after all.
RSF&PTL
T89&C
Some may be disappointed in me, my questioning and my doubting: why? I'm the same as you, just trying to figure out my life during this desert Time.
Now I need an image of some sort to go with this nonsense, eh? How about an image of Ton-Y-Botel? Dating from the late nineteenth century, the Welsh legend sprang up that the tune washed ashore in a bottle on the coast of Lleyn.