Point Pleasant

"Tree of Life" and the Search for God

2012-02-11T13:28:00.001-08:00

Every year, I get the chance to see one "grown-up movie." Usually it comes around my birthday at the end of January, just after Academy Awards nominations are made. With the help of On Demand this year, we've been able to watch both The Help and Tree of Life, and it's the latter movie that I feel is worthy of an Oscar-season review here at Point Pleasant.

I'm always amazed at the overt spirituality of the best films that are released every year. Hollywood seems like such a bastion of secularism, but time and again I am humbled by the spiritual connections made in some of my favorite movies. Two years, I blogged about the Easter-connected film, Slumdog Millionaire. I didn't have time last year to discuss my favorite movie of 2010, True Grit.

First, a note about the term, "Tree of Life." As I grew up, I understood that this was the tree that grew in the Garden of Eden, a symbol of eternal life that Adam and Eve consumed, and from which they were blocked by an angel with a flaming sword after their capital-f, Fall (Genesis 3.22-25).

(Four years ago, I blogged about this Tree of Life after I had found the species of tree that grew in the garden.) This tree makes a return appearance in Revelation 22.1-5, bearing twelve different fruits every season and engendering "the healing of the nations."

But there is a different Tree of Life I have studied in recent years--one that draws from Charles Darwin. When I studied biology in school, I understood the plant and animal kingdoms, and I broke those into phyla and other, smaller groups, each kingdom was a pyramid that grew broader and broader toward its base, where I found homo sapien among the list of primate species..

The biological Tree of Life illustrates the biological principal that life is truly broader than mere plants and animals. Ninety percent (or more) of all living things cannot be seen by the human eye, and the Tree of Life tries to incorporate bacteria, viruses, fungi, and the huge assortment of living things into one, circular family--quite a contrast to the pyramidal structure of life that I learned in my high school biology classes (a picture of this tree of life is included into the blog, a more three-dimensional representation can be found here).

This is the proper setup for the movie, Tree of Life, which is obsessed with spirituality, with prayer, with God, but not with Genesis. Instead, the film begins with a quote from the book of Job (my favorite creation account found in the Bible):

"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Tell me, if you understand." Job 38. 4

The central character in the film is a man named Jack O'Brian (yes, the initials spell, "Job"), who has come to question his faith following the death of his brother. The plot of the film takes place inside Jack's head, in a series of recollections of childhood, of whispered prayers, and of wildly fantastical imaginings. Because it takes place inside Jack's head, don't necessarily expect a beginning and middle--nor should the viewer expect to know for sure which of Jack's two brothers has died--I think it's pretty easy to figure out.

At his core, Jack has a God problem. There are two forms of God who battle for Jack's affection and respect--a conundrum that most people of faith would understand. The dilemma is stated succinctly by Mrs. O'Brian: "There are two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.

Jack's mother represents God the Nurturer--the way of grace. She is full of wonder. She is loving. She comforts Jack and his brothers. In one of her voiceovers, she whispers, "Do good to them. Wonder. Hope." This is the kind of God she is--and Jack adores her.

But there is a second embodiment of God, found in Jack's father: God the Naturer, the Striver, the Responsible. "You are not to call me, 'Dad,'" he bellows in one contentious scene, "You are to call me 'Father!'" He tries to instruct Jack, to teach him manners, to toughen him up for the challenges that life will throw at him. (In a particularly heartfelt scene, Mr. O'Brian teaches Jack to fight him, challenging the son to punch him in the face.)

These two forces seem to tear at Jack, who like St. Paul wrestles with the desires to do the things he doesn't want to do while failing to do that which he should do. An illustration of this comes in one of the scenes at church. Soon after a funeral where Mr. O'Brian's strictness and reverence has been on display, Jack can be seen in the empty sanctuary walking across the tops of the pews!

The movie never gives one form of God preference over the other. In the scene where Jack enters transcendence, both of them are there, and both greet him warmly.

The whisper is an important part of the movie. By my recollection, about 15% of the dialogue is whispered in voice over, sounding almost like prayers:

"Are you there?"
"Do you know what happened? Do you care?"
"Where do you live?"
"Are you watching me? I want to see what you see."

I'm not sure how this appears to someone who doesn't have a faith background. It must seem terribly random, this hidden, disembodied dialogue. To me, though, this is the "true" story of experience--the questions that linger, that bring both sadness and wonder.

I was also struck by the dynamic between the two oldest brothers featured in the movie. While Jack is frustrated by the different natures of his parents, his younger brother, R.L, seems to embody them effortlessly. In another transcendent scene, R.L. practices his guitar on the porch outside the room in which his father plays the piano. The two instruments gradually fade into an impromptu duet on Pachelbel's Canon. The look of pride on Mr. O'Brian's face is unmistakable--"This is the one who gets it."

And with mother, the relationship is also warm. R.L. asks Mrs. O'Brian, "Tell us a story from before we can remember," and the movie launches into it's most talked-about scene: a cosmos-spanning depiction of the creation of the Universe. This stunning, watching galaxies spin into existence, seeing the sun emerge through the dust of forming planets, peeking in on two dinosaurs that play in a riverbed.

But R.L. is an Abel to Jack's Cain. Jack's deepest conflicts come to the fore when he is around his brother. At one point, Jack demands that R.L. stick a wire into a lamp. When he isn't shocked, R.L. says, "I trust you." Later, though, Jack asks R.L. to put his finger over the tip of his BB gun, and here R.L.'s faith is destroyed. If Mr. and Mrs. O'Brian are the two sides of God, then R.L. and Jack are the two sides of humanity.

Tree of Life. It's a prayer and a meditation more than it is a story--which is why I don't necessarily think of it as a great movie. Still, it was an opportunity for me to seek God and see God again through Job's eyes and through those of the fictional O'Brian family, too.

Book Review: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx

2011-12-26T07:44:00.001-08:00

Fine Just the Way it Is by Annie Proulx
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've been to Wyoming. Once. It was late spring. I crossed the northern part of the state from the Black Hills to Yellowstone, then climbed down the spine of the Tetons to Colorado. It was the most beautiful place I've ever seen: lush and green, bursting with wildlife, hot springs, and geysers. The worst thing I can say about Wyoming is that I've never been back...

...save through the writing of Annie Proulx. She's been to Wyoming, too, and she's been there a long time. And her time in Wyoming wasn't just a verdant two weeks in spring. And her writing captures with stark realism a Wyoming that isn't just smiling hotel clerks, and dude-ranch cowboys. And yet there is real beauty hidden throughout this book--beauty that one finds in no other American place.

For example, the spectacular scenery of Catlin's hike in "Testimony of the Donkey": hidden lakes, decades-old signatures on the rocks, a splendid scene, all for one dangerous element. I loved the fairy-tale feel of "The Sagebrush Kid" and the interweaving of various histories of the West into the tales.

I completely skipped the two stories about the Devil, though. And while Proulx's prose is often praised, I tried to read "The Sagebrush Kid" out loud to my wife, and found myself tongue tied and stammering.

Still, the book is a pleasant return to a wonderfully beautiful, haunted place: Wyoming.

View all my reviews

And His Name... Shall be Called... Ishmael

2011-12-17T17:41:00.000-08:00

The Advent Season is the best time to be a Christian, and it's not just because of Christmas presents or the yummy food at Grandma's house.

The Advent Season is a season of promise. Emmanuel is coming! And the promise of "God with Us" is a realization that I treasure year after year after year.

It's just that every year, I find Emmanuel in a new place. It may be in the glow of candlelight or in the words of a Christmas carol. I may find it in a gift or scrawled on the back of a Christmas card. It's always such a surprise. I know I will find "God with Me," and I will be blessed by that revelation.

There is one place I find Emmanuel more than any other, and that is in the Bible. Advent is a time for scripture, and whether it is in the Psalms, the Gospels, or the lyrical prophecies of Isaiah, Emmanuel is often there waiting.

This year I found it in a Bible study I attend at Oasis Church. We've been making our way through Genesis, and the text for study was chapter 16: the birth of Ishmael. What I found there was the Christmas story--yes, perhaps one with Father Abraham instead of St. Nicholas, but a story with a special meaning for gentile Christians (like me) nonetheless.

The chapter begins with the matriarch of the Jewish faith, Sarai. (Abram was a patriarch, indeed, but he fathered many different nations. The strain of the Jewish story in the Old Testament wends back to Sarai/Sarah and the child God promised through her, not through Abram.)

Sarai gives up waiting for a child, and she gives her slave to Abram as a surrogate mother. There is no mention of the enslaved woman's feelings about this arrangement--the prospect of a union with an 85-year-old man could not have felt too enticing. The slave--an exiled Egyptian girl named Hagar who was part of the human bounty of Sarai's brief marriage to Pharoah--becomes pregnant, however, and soon begins to "despise her mistress" (verse 4). The context of the verse implies an "I'm pregnant and you're not" attitude,

but I would posit that Hagar is enslaved by Sarai, forced into a sexual union with Sarai's elderly husband, and impregnated with a child that will legally become Sarai's. I would argue that there are very many reasons for Hagar to "despise her mistress."

What follows is abuse. Sarai mistreats Hagar; Abram abandons her to Sarai's vengeance, "Your servant is in your hands" (verse 6).

What follows is escape. Hagar runs away, and she doesn't stop running until she's on the road back home to Egypt.

What follows is Christmas.

The way to Egypt is perilous for a pregnant young woman to travel alone. Hagar finds a well and waits there for help. The Bible doesn't say it explicitly, but it's safe to say that Hagar prays for help there--begging from the merchants who passed by, and calling out to the God of her elderly protector. (To understand the scene and her need for assistance at the well, consider the assistance her nephew, Jacob, would later give Rachael at a well in Genesis 29: 6-10).

It is at this well that Hagar meets "the angel of the Lord."

The angel encourages Hagar to return to Abram and Sarai, promising not just one child but many descendants.

The angel of the Lord also said to her:
"You are now with child
and you will have a son.
You shall name him Ishmael,
for the Lord has heard you" (Genesis 16.11)

Christmas suddenly seems closer. This seems very close to the directions an angel later gave to Mary:

"You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. For he will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High" (Luke 1.32)

The names are different, but the stories share key elements. The message is delivered by an angel; the promise is for everyone.

Ishmael means "God listens." In Hagar's distress, God listened. And the woman whom God heard was no patriarch or matriarch, but an enslaved, abused, runaway, foreign girl.

I know far less of Mary's background than of Hagar's, but the words of her Magnificat echo back in time to paint the picture of Hagar's redemption at the well which she would later name, Lahai Roi, or "The Living One who Sees Me."

My Soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant" (Luke 1.46-48).

The name Ishmael--"God listens"--seems very close in spirit to the name that Mary gave her child, Immanuel, "God within us."

Even as Advent is a time when I rededicate myself to "God within," the message of Ishmael's name also resounds. God listens. When we are trapped in the desert, God listens. When we are enslaved, God listens. When all hope seems lost "God listens"...Ishmael--"God listens"...Ishmael, Ishmael, Ishmael.

I'm not the only writer to connect Mary with Hagar. Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, included in the Qur'an a description of Jesus' birth much different from the ones found in the gospels.

"So [Mary] conceived [Jesus]
And she retired with him
To a remote place.
And the pains of childbirth
Drove her to the trunk
Of a palm tree:
She cried in her anguish"
"Ah! would that I had
Died before this...!
But a voice cried to her
From beneath the palm tree:
"Grieve not! for thy Lord
Hath provided a rivulet
Beneath thee
And shake towards thyself
The trunk of the palm tree;
It will let fall
Fresh ripe dates upon thee...
At length she brought
The babe to her people,
Carrying him in her arms. (Surah 19. 22-27)

When I read this text, I don't see Mary. I need Joseph in my Christmas narratives, and a cave in Bethlehem is just too much for me to give up for a lonely birth at the base of a date palm.

When I read this text, though, I see Hagar. She is alone. The son she carries isn't hers--it's Sarai's. A return to her mistress may not necessarily be a return to slavery, but it feels just as bad. Yet here in the desert, Ishmael--God listens. And a stream appears (a reference to Hagar's final escape in Genesis 21.19). And sweet, nourishing dates fall all around her as she strains against the tree in her labor.

I freely admit that I read the Qur'an just as I read the Old Testament: not as a believer, per se, but as a Christian seeking to understand the truth of my Savior, Emmanuel. But I must also admit that I am rooting for Hagar and Ishmael as this story unfolds.

God promises, and the birth of Abram's second son, Isaac, would fulfill the promise that Sarai had sought to circumvent by giving her slave to her husband. It was through Isaac's line that David would rise and the Christ child would be born.

But God listens, as Ishmael's name attests, and God blessed Ishmael and Abraham's other sons with another promise of source. At the time Isaac and Ishmael were being born, I had ancestors living. Most likely they roamed the forests of Northern Europe completely unaware of the machinations of Sarai and her slave. The hope of their deliverance--and of mine--comes through Ishmael as well as Isaac.

God listen then (Ishmael), and God Ishmael's today

And that is the special message Advent has given me this year.

(I did not have time to add Paul's commentary from Galatians 4.21-28. Suffice it to say, he takes a different take on the Ishmael story--demeaning him as a representative of the old law, not as a part of the promise that Isaac represented.)

"One Day" takes me back to my own British Romance

2011-12-11T10:26:00.001-08:00

Jenny and I had some time for a movie night at home last night, and after a look around, we decided to indulge our Anglophilia with a look at "One Day," an Anne Hathaway vehicle that came out last August.

The movie follows two friends whose relationship begins on July 15, 1988, the night of their college graduation, and follows them through every July 15 for the next 23years. They engage with other lovers, and they forge new careers, but their friendship remains a constant and pushes them inexorably toward romance.

This blog isn't meant to be a review of the movie, which has its flaws, but it was easy to connect the movie with some experiences that had a huge impact on my life--and it is my own story (and that of my Bride) that the movie brought to life for me.

There are two connections: one basic and one much, much deeper, that the movie raised for me.

I went to college in England for a year, my sophomore undergraduate year, 1990-91. When I left at the of the year, I had built a close friendship with a woman named Jenny George (among many of the close, lifelong friendships I formed that year). Emma and Dexter, the characters in "One Day," are thrown together on the last night of the year. My friendship with Jenny grew over the course of the year, and involved numerous adventures which have been posted on this blog and will continue to present themselves, I'm sure, as the years go by.

One of the great challenges that our friendship faced that year--and in the years that followed--was how it would impact our relationship going forward. At one point during the year, Jenny talked to me about becoming more than friends, but I wasn't ready for a "real" relationship yet. It was the frank honesty of our relationship that allowed me to express that to her--and let us remain friends.

By the time of my sophomore year, when I met Jenny at Newbold College, I had been through many swift romances, and I had had my share of dead-end physical relationships. I needed friendship, I knew, and while I had many close female friends, I knew that doomed, whirlwind, physical relationships were sure ways to kill a friendship. By the time I got to know Jenny, I had drawn a clear line between "Women I was Friends With" and "Women I Wanted to Date." She definitely fell into the former category.

Suffice it to say, it is a challenge to manage the expectations of a close relationship with a member of the opposite sex. A few years later, I "saw the light," as I described in this blog from Valentine's Day, 2007.

In "One Day," it takes Emma and Dexter twenty years to consummate their friendship. And for them, it works out just as well as it did for Jenny and me, who were married four years after we became friends. Had we followed the twenty-year timeline of the movie, we would have been married in the fall of 2010!

I can only imagine the dramatic ways in which our lives would have been different had we followed the "One Day" path--the dead ends, the bad relationships, the adventures and misadventures. I'm so grateful for my friendship with Jenny George; that it was able to blossom into love; and that our love has endured through 17 years of marriage. One day has become one lifetime with person whom I respect and love immensely.

The Seven-Sided Box: the Symbol of the Cube in the Bible

2011-10-01T21:21:00.000-07:00

The Book of Revelation ends with a fascinating image: It is a a "new heaven and a new earth," reborn after the final judgement and the expulsion of sin.

"And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God."

One of the actors in this final set piece, one of seven angels who had held seven bowls which poured out seven plagues in the destruction of the "first earth," emerges from the scene, takes the prophet to the top of a mountain, and gives him a preview of the coming kingdom--the New Jerusalem. And is what is striking about the New Jerusalem is this:

It's a cube.

The near wall is 1,400 miles long (the distance between my house in Tennessee and Gallup, New Mexico, going west). It is another 1,400 miles deep (I calculated this would take me to the middle of Hudson's Bay, Canada, traveling due north). It is also 1,400 miles high (about ten times further away than the International Space Station).

So the Bible ends with a giant, gleaming cube descending to planet Earth.

There's more to that cube that I'll cover later, but I'm fascinated by the fact that the New Jerusalem is a cube...until I consider the rest of the Bible, and realize that the whole story is cube after cube after cube--box after box after box--beginning with Genesis 1 and ending in Revelation 21.

Moreover, the cube ties in neatly with another important element of Biblical symbolism: the Number 7.

There is another cube in the Old Jerusalem, the city where Christ taught and died, and it was a copy of a cube constructed by Solomon in his temple. 2 Chronicles 3 states that Solomon laid out the Most Holy Place of that temple to be 30 feet X 30 feet X 30 feet, a perfect cube, separated from the temple's Holy Place by a curtain. (So important was the cube to Solomon's design, that a series of steps climbed from the high-ceilinged main room of the temple to the higher, cubic Most Holy Place.

Within the Temple cube was another box, the Ark of the Covenant (this was not a cube, but a box, about 2.25' X 2.25' X 4'). Within this box was the law of God.

Solomon's design dominated the Jewish imagination all the way to the time of John the Revelator--and not just Judaism, either. The fire-worshipping Zoroastrians incorporated the cubic room into their temples. (Pictured, right, is the Kaba-ye Zartosht, "The Cube of Zoroaster" in Persepolis, Iran, which has origins in the time of Persian King Darius I in the 5th Century BC.)

The Arabic word for cube, "Kaaba," echoes the name of the most sacred site in the religion of Islam: the curtained black cube in the Masjid al-Haram Mosque in Mecca toward which every Muslim directs prayers. (This cube is larger than Solomon's holy room, roughly 40' X 40' X 40'.)

I will describe more about this second cube later as we make our way backwards to Genesis,. Needless to say, Muslims are very aware of Biblical symbolism (moreso than western Christians), and provide an insight into the deep importance that the cube plays with God.

Of course Solomon didn't invent the cube. He based his design for the temple on that of the tabernacle revealed to Moses from Mount Sinai. The tabernacle (also known as the Tent of Meeting) also had a cube-shaped room, 15' X 15' X 15', exactly half the scale of Solomon's room. At the center of this room was also a box, the same box as the one Solomon placed in his Holy of Holies. Within this box were a few artifacts besides the Ten Commandments: a budding rod (a symbol of Aaron's power) and a bowl of manna were missing when the box's contents were chronicled in Solomon's day (1 Kings 8.9).

Creation, the Cube, and the number Seven
Islamic mythology traces the cube back to Adam, who built a cubic worship space in the lands westward of Eden to the specifications of God himself. Future prophets Noah and Abraham would return to Mecca, the site of the Kaaba, to rebuild the shrine (it is important to note here that the current Kaaba dates back to the early 10th Century).

Indeed the creation story can be seen as the building of a cube. Creation is divided into six days--the six sides of a cube. Imagine the creation story as the sides of a cube. There is a square of light at the bottom. The four sides are (1) land and water, (2) sky & vegetation, (3) sun, moon, and stars, and (4) birds & fishes. The top square of this box is the creation of beasts and humans on the sixth day.

When you see the creation story in the form of this cube, I think it grows stronger as a story--and explains some of the scientific contradictions that arise in more literal readings of Genesis 1. The foundation of the cube is light--as John 1 affirms--and its top is mankind. The middle four days are the walls, leaving the fact that Genesis shows plants on the earth a full day before there is a sun to sustain them, as a description of space, not linear time.

One could rewrite Genesis 1 along the lines of Revelation 21 this way: In the beginning, the Cube of Creation descended into chaos This is how the first heaven and first earth were made.

We have known about the linear week, and I know that I have practiced it all my life. But there is a cubic week in Genesis 1: a complete, six-sided box in which everything is complete.

Imagine creation as a cube. Turn it around in your mind and look at its individual sides. See the light, the water, the sky, the fishes, all moving in concert. It is beautiful, isn't it? It's amazing.

It isn't yet perfect.

Genesis 2 begins with the seventh side of the box.

"By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done" (verses 2-3).

In terms of the box, God needed a seventh side. That seventh side was holiness, and I believe that he put it in the middle of the box--a.k.a. the seventh side. No one waits until the seventh day of the linear week to rest; no, we sprinkle rest throughout the week--it touches all six sides. Nor was holiness intended--I believe--to be a linear idea but a spatial one.

Look back through the Biblical cubes I mentioned. The cubes--the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle and the temple--have boxes in them. And in these boxes is the Law of God. These cubes are filled with holiness.

As always, the prophet Isaiah describes the Seven-Sided Cube far better than I could ever do:

"This is what God the Lord says--
he who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and all that comes out of it,
who gives breath to its people,
and life to those who walk on it;
'I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness...." (Isaiah 42.5-6)

Here we have the sides of the box (heavens, earth) and the box's top--the "breath of its people and life to those who walk on it." But there is also righteousness, holiness, the seventh side that touches upon all others. It isn't just attached to the "man" side of the cube, it touches all sides of the creation.

The New Jerusalem and Me
There is another number in the Bible that has a symbolism quite opposite to the number 7. Revelation states that "it is man's number. His number is 666" (13.18). If the number 7 represents a created cube filled with holiness, it's pretty easy to interpret 666. It means "empty, empty, empty."

I want to close with the first cube--the massive New Jerusalem--because now that I understand the seven-sided box, I want to know this:

What's inside the big cube?

There is no temple in this New Jerusalem (I have written about this wrinkle in a previous blog). This is

"because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp" (21.22b-24).

That's the inside of the box--the seventh side--and it touches on all six sides: the jewel-encrusted foundations, the four golden walls, and the crystal ceiling that glows with the light of the Creator.

There is so much to learn from this paradigm, but I want to close this blog and get your feedback. Here are some questions I hope to answer in the future:

Did Jesus understand the seven-sided cube? What are some of his teachings that can be understood spatially?
There are many references to empty boxes in the Bible--a desire to place God's law in the empty hearts of mankind. Can these be better understood by the seven-sided box?
What are some other cubes mentioned in the Bible? I almost added Noah's Ark to this discussion, but it wasn't a cube--although it was a box. Another nominee might be Joseph's casket as it was carried to Caanan.

9/11 and Faith, My Journey after that Dreadful Day

2011-09-10T23:21:00.000-07:00

CNN posted a story recently on 9/11 and its impact on Americans' faith.It really struck a chord with me, because it took me back over ten of the most decisive years of my life.

CNN's writer, John Blake, found three significant changes in Americans' faith practices since then:

The humiliation of the attacks had altered Americans' self-identification as a "chosen" nation
Interfaith forays were more acceptable, with Muslims making inroads to mainstream culture and cooperating with Christian groups more often.
Atheism had become a forceful, militant idea. It came out of the closet.
I would add a fourth: the unholy marriage between Christian fundamentalism and Zionism that lured the nation into two world wars--and nearly a third in Iran, had not cooler heads prevailed.

For me, 9/11 was a faith touchstone. It didn't seem like such a big deal at the time. I was a practicing Christian then; I am a Christian today. But looking back, I think it raised some questions that I had no hope of finding answers to at the time.

I remember that I had children's story the weekend after the attacks. Like everyone else that day, I was stunned, still unable to put the attacks--and the ongoing investigation--into perspective. As I remember it, I chose John 1.5 for my text: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." At the time, there seemed to be a lot of darkness in my country, but I knew the Light, and I wanted kids to have that hope.

Still, I made a reference to how difficult it was to have faith. I had sung, "He's got the Whole World in His Hands" with Ellie that week before the attacks, and it just seemed contradicted. I was trying to find a place in which God could fit in this fallen world.

I was not helped by the sermon that day: "God is still in control." It felt to me that the pastor wasn't encouraging us to confront the issues that had been raised, but to cling tighter to a slogan that had been used before in other contexts: when the church budget was out of balance, when a member needed help finding a job, when leaders had failed us. Wasn't 9/11 bigger than that?

I'm not sure that September of 2001 was when I began searching further afield for answers to my spiritual questions. I have always been independent when it came to theology. I think I did become more open about it, reading sources in history, archaeology, and literature to confirm the tenets of my faith. I read critiques of the Bible, and consumed books by Muslims and atheists. I even organized an interfaith dialogue at the Highland Church with some Muslim friends I had made at Western Kentucky University (where I was wrapping up my graduate degree, and visiting the Islamic Center on occasion).

The more I looked, the more answers I found. My Christian faith was strengthened, but my connections to the Adventist Church were strained. "God is in control" wasn't going to cut it for me. A national tragedy wasn't a "sign," it was an opportunity for us to become something greater as a nation.

Five years later, spiritually exhausted by uncivil battles over worship styles, Jenny and I visited Bethpage United Methodist Church, and we found a new home in a denomination that shared our focus on Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God. It was a group of Christians who reacted to tragedy with compassion, not "I told you so."

I think that I was looking for this kind of community that Sabbath after 9/11, and probably for many years before that. I wish that my country could have found it. Instead we were misled. The loss of all those innocent people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania was used to justify torture, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, a loss of freedom here at home, and oceans of debt.

I don't want to overblow 9/11. I do appreciate any chance I get to look back and assess the changes that I've made. It wasn't one event that led me to this point on my faith journey, it was many events, all orchestrated by a loving God and witnessed by my incredible family.

Your Education Policies: A View from the Depths

2011-08-22T23:33:00.000-07:00

I've had a really tough time so far this year. A passel of new regulations, passed by a viciously anti-teacher legislature last spring, have tied me up in knots and wasted a lot of my time. I wrote this essay between midnight and 1:30 a.m. just to blow off some steam. It's not like I had time to write during my 11-hour workdays. I'm planning to share it with my legislators and with SCORE, a Trojan-horse organization founded by Republicans in Tennessee to de-fund public education and drive every last well-meaning teacher either out of the state or into private or charter school jobs.

I teach at a school that you represent, Station Camp High School in Gallatin. I’m beginning my third week of the school year, teaching German, Creative Writing and 11th-grade English. I sponsor three clubs at our school (yours and mine and my 9th-grade daughter’s).

I’m burned out. That’s right, and it’s only the third week.

Someone needs to tell what’s going on. Someone needs to describe all the work that has been wasted by the onerous regulations placed on public school teachers and administrators in the 2011 legislative session. Someone needs to get you to see the effects of decisions you made six months ago. I will do my best to try.

This is my eighth year at my high school. During that time I have taught every grade level of English, and every strata of each class except A.P. I have also taught--as I am teaching now--German 1 & 2 and creative writing. After three years here--years in which I was observed regularly, and I carefully worked out lesson plans under the direction of my administrators--I earned tenure back in 2007.

While politicians, movie producers and journalists tried to disparage tenured teachers like me with allegations of ineptitude and stories of mysterious “rubber rooms,” I was proud of my tenure. I knew how hard I had worked to earn it. I also knew the ways it could be used to benefit both me and the students who would study in my classes in subsequent years.

Tenure gave me the freedom to turn my classroom into a learning laboratory. I knew how to teach, plan, and manage a classroom--that’s what I understood my tenure to mean. It meant that I had the freedom to experiment with new styles of learning, to reach out and form community partnerships that might benefit learners in my classroom, to organize learning experiences outside the classroom and collaborate with teachers across subject areas and grade levels. I wouldn’t have gotten tenure in the first place if I hadn’t shown mastery of basic teaching methods over three years. Tenure gave me a solid foundation from which I could reach higher.

Over the past three years, this foundation has produced amazing results both for me and for my students at SCHS. My love of experimentation and my creativity--with the support of my school administration--really began to blossom in new ways. I formed a close bond with TPAC Education which brought teaching artists into my school to help make lessons more meaningful. I learned Google Docs and used a donation of 32 used laptops from Volunteer State Community College to create my school’s first “paperless classroom.” This past summer I won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study American history through song at the University of Pittsburgh, where I developed ways to use folk music to augment my literature classes.

I returned from Pittsburgh four days before the administrative day where we learned about the new evaluation system: that tenure was transitory, that teachers who didn’t perform “above expectations” or “significantly above expectations” for two years in a row would return to probationary status. When I saw the regulations--about 30 minutes of paperwork per 90-minute lesson (and I teach three different lessons a day)--I knew that my days as a tenured teacher were numbered. But that didn’t bother me as much as knowing that the freedom I had worked so hard to gain, build, and share with my students, was also transitory.

You need to know what is going on in the schools you represent. If you’re working for teachers, parents and students, you need to understand the results of your policy actions.

This is how Tennessee Educaton Reform 2.0 has worked for me so far:

I have attached below the lesson-planning form that was adapted by my school’s administration. It includes all the relevant data that will go into my evaluations this year. It took me 30 minutes to produce. The toughest part about the planning form isn’t the questioning or the assessment--I’ve been doing that since I started teaching, it’s how I gained tenure. It’s wasting time referencing the standards. In German 1 there are about 20 to utilize, but in English 11, there are almost 70 state performance indicators (SPI’s). I find myself asking, “This is a logic lesson. Is it 5.2 or 5.4?”

This has tripled the amount of time it takes me to plan lessons. Usually I have lesson plans posted a week in advance of the lessons I teach. This year, I’m struggling to stay one to two days ahead.

My grading has increased markedly--not directly because of the state regulations, but because of an ambitious goal I had set to make my classes paperless. With laptops at every desk, students generate about 30-35% more work for me to grade. This is an exchange that I’m willing to make, because (1) I am investing my time to see kids learning more, and (2) I’m optimistic that eventually technology will let me cut the grading load to what it was before or less. Before, the satisfaction of seeing successful learning and being a part of technological innovation made the extra work worthwhile. Now I feel like I’m doing a lot of work the State of Tennessee doesn’t necessarily want me to do, and instead I should spend more time acting and planning like a non-tenured teacher. You might imagine the frustration I feel there.

I have no time. Last year I graded at home from 9 to 10 five nights a week; this year I am grading/planning from 8:30 to 11, and I have little to show for it. Last year I graded on Sundays only when I had a big batch of essays to complete. The first Sunday of this school year, I spent four hours at my school setting up for the launch of my paperless classroom. Last Sunday, my wife and kids went to the movies without me so I could spend five hours getting my grades ready to post and plotting out lessons for my three classes.

I can’t perform the kinds of leadership roles I want to provide to other, less-experienced teachers. I mentioned earlier how I arranged for teaching artists from TPAC Education to come to our school. Last year I had three colleagues join me in an Arts in Education Unit. This year, we’re all so busy trying to keep our heads above water, we’ve all but given up on the idea, losing precious momentum toward Arts in Education that I had labored to build over two years. I learned some cool new teaching tricks at the NEH Summer Institute that I would love to share through a professional development, only I have no time to draw up a proposal, much less plan a three-hour training.

I can’t develop the technology that I brought into my school last year, and I can’t train other teachers to use these 21st-century teaching tools. I want to train more teachers at my school about Google Docs and utilizing technology in the classroom. This summer the district brought in a “tech guru” from Atlanta as a keynote speaker. I got to have a private meeting with her to share some of the things I was doing with Google Docs in the classroom. While she had a broad knowledge of Google applications--and other forms of software--she hadn’t experimented with it in the classroom setting like I had, and she was very impressed. I don’t get paid four figures a day to visit Tennessee like she did (it would be nice, but let’s face it, I’m just fighting to keep my job in this state, much less tenure). I live here and have committed myself to my county’s education success, not just my own. I can’t do it, though. That’s what I’ve realized in just three weeks.

I’m just speaking for myself. I cannot speak for the administrators whose work loads have doubled with the additional evaluation responsibilities. I cannot speak for the colleagues who were a year away from tenure and now have to wait for three. My kids are all in school now (my youngest is eight), I can’t speak for teachers with young families or those expecting babies, who are now facing this increased workload. You need to talk to them. It is you who need to listen.

I share with SCORE and many others the desire to see Tennessee’s public education system become the best in the South, and I hope that I have demonstrated a willingness to do the hard work that profound change in education requires without explicit, step-by-step direction from the state department of Education.

I just fear that we’re missing out on opportunities for implementing real learning by treating teachers like numbskulls who have to fill out a planning guide and list out standards-based questions on their forms before they can teach a German class how to say “What’s up?” or lead an English 11 class through the turbid waters of Moby Dick.

Last Sunday’s New York Times featured a number of respected thinkers who finished the thought, “If I were president....” James Dyson, the engineer who re-invented the vacuum cleaner, wanted to change education in the right way:

“Standardization and rote learning lead to sub-standard results because they don’t inspire or challenge. My solution: get rid of binary right and wrong answers. Experimentation is learning. Only through making mistakes do we find out what works, what to do differently and how to get better. Box-ticking does not correlate with world winning. Certificates won’t beat global competition. Creativity will.” --Kornbluth, Jesse, “If I Were President,” New York Times, Sunday Review Section, 21 August 2011.

Part of me is willing to accept a lower TVAAS score because I chose to teach my students about thinking and not “box-ticking.” I would rather see a student demonstrate a love for learning than a high score on an end-of-course exam. As a teaching professional, of course I want to grow towards both goals, but as an overworked, maligned public school teacher, I feel hung out to dry.

In your capacity, you attend a meeting, you write a press release, you attend a luncheon or a fundraiser, and you feel like you have done something with your day, you might even feel like you did some good. Where I’m at now, I grade sixty papers and work 90 minutes on planning, and I feel like I have only fallen an hour further behind where I need to be. I haven’t contacted parents, I haven’t arranged extra time to help a student who isn’t yet up to speed, etc.

Tennessee has gone too far towards standardization in its onerous micromanagement of teachers, both tenured and non. Legislators and policy advocates have taken away from teachers and administrators the freedom to experiment with learning, the room to let students try--then fail--then explain and learn. I hope that this letter may apprise you of the situation on the ground and encourage you towards more balanced, more rational policies in the future.

Sincerely,

James Dittes
Station Camp High School

The Haunting at Edward Braddock's Grave

2011-07-16T19:53:00.000-07:00

I am standing at a monument to General Braddock near Fort Necessity in Farmington, Pennsylvania. His face is etched into the panel. More than 250 years cannot erase the arrogance with which he tore a road through the wilderness from the Potomac River over the Alleghenies. I doubt that look was there when a force of French and Indians surprised his army near the banks of the Monongahela, turning them back on each other into mad confusion, just fifty miles from his goal: the forks of the Ohio River at present-day Pittsburgh.

They carried him here, 35 miles away, where Braddock died of his wounds and the only remaining officer, a 23-year-old George Washington, took over, hustled the soldiers about a mile further, and set up a fort to take on the pursuing French & Indians.

I remember the story. I wasn't even in school yet when my dad told it to me. We were walking in the woods at the time, exploring our new home near Amesville, Ohio. He told me how Indians hid in the trees, watched Braddock's army pass, and launched their attack. I pace around the monument. On my way back to the car, I pass this sign: "This is the spot where Major-General Edward Braddock was buried, July 14th 1755."

Washington had buried Braddock in the middle of the road they had built through the thick forest. Indians were known to dig up recent burials to claim scalps. Therefore, Washington's first order as commander was to bury the general and then direct every soldier and pack animal to tread the ground above him. It wasn't until sixty years later, that workers building the National Road (current US 40) unearthed the general's remains, reinterring them further up the hill, underneath the present monument.

These woods are haunted. I can tell that.

I follow the path. It ends at a creek, in woods so think and tangled, I think I can see Braddock's demise hiding in the shadows.

There is the trace of a path off to the right. I can see it. I have a sense for trails. I can see them when others can't, even in the dark of night. I have followed trails--and creeks, and sounds--since I was a boy.

I follow a trail. I see it winding through the ferns. I begin to run. I can't help it. I look down. I can't see my feet.

I see the feet of a boy. Blue Nike tennis shoes. Blue baseball cap. He's carrying a musket. He traded it for two baseball cards from Ross, a boy at school. Even though Mom has forbade toy weapons, he hides it in the woods; he carries it as he looks for trails to follow. He looks down. He doesn't see his feet either. He sees the moccasins of a scout--a scout for General Washington's army, a scout who knows the ways of the Indian, a scout who follows in their paths.

The boy runs a hundred more paces through the woods, and he comes to a huge, fallen tree (pictured). The tree is rotting, covered with moss, melting into the forest floor. The boy climbs onto the log, holds out his arms to walk four or five steps along the log, then he sits down to catch his breath.

This is where I find tears welling in my eyes and pouring down my cheeks. I am overcome with emotion. I feel like I've stepped through a portal, and I have returned. In those two hundred paces through the Allegheny woodland, I have embodied memories that are among my most precious--memories that seemed blotted out somehow, buried decades ago and trod over with the footsteps of experience.

These feelings overwhelm me. I haven't felt things so keenly since the day Jonah was born. Is it sadness? No, it's more like joy, but there is some sadness left there, too. Sadness for things past.

It's as if I AM ten years old, resting on "Jumbo," the landmark that was the center of my woodland adventures in Ohio. I can see the woods for all the wonder they contain. I imagine them filled with Indians--with enemy soldiers--who will flee at a single blast from my musket.

And yet I'm sitting in the same place--on the same moss-covered log--as this 40-year-old man. I don't recognize him. He has a scruffy beard, a bit of a belly. He isn't wearing a baseball hat, and he has sandals on his feet. He isn't anything like me.

I can't stop crying. I rise from the log and follow the trail. It peters out in a creek bottom. The 40-year-old man is walking with me--or in me--step for step. It seems like every other second, thirty years pass and then disappear. It is 1981 and this is Tick Ridge, Ohio; no, it is 2011, and this is Braddock's Haunted Grave, Pennsylvania.

Fifteen paces on the other side of the creek bottom, we find the old road. This one is wider, and even though it is covered with ferns (see pic), it is wide and bordered on both sides by old growth forest. It is the boy and me, united in wonder, in purpose, and in spirit.

A few steps further, and the boy suddenly leaves me. There is a snap about thirty feet in front of me, and a deer leaps off into the woods. It pauses to study the 40-year-old man now sixty feet away. It is a young buck, with fuzz still covering the nubs of its new antlers. It holds me in a stare, huge eyes wondering, 'Where did this creature come from?'

I whisper, "Hello there, young buck." Looking back, I wish I had said, "Goodbye."

I take out my cell phone to find my location on GPS. It is 2011 after all, I guess. I look back up at the buck. It turns and bounds away. I make my way back to the highway and walk along it to my car, still parked a stone's throw away from Braddock's Grave.

As I write this, hours later. The emotions are still raw. I have Kleenex next to me, and I hope I can get it together by the time my roommate gets back to our apartment. I still haven't figured out what it all means.

I do know this. Today I have experienced a memory that I will treasure and revisit for at least thirty years to come.

A Musical Autobiography

2011-06-27T21:05:00.000-07:00

Note: I'm at the University of Pittsburgh for the summer, studying at a summer institute called "Voices Across Time: American History through Music." I'm writing this as a draft of my first project, to provide a "musical autobiography" of myself, using an experience I had through music.

I have always been steeped in music. I can't remember a time in my life where music wasn't important to me. My father is an accomplished pianist and organist who today earns his living playing for churches. My mother grew up playing the violin and planned--through the end of her freshman year of college--to be a professional musician. By the time I came into my parents' lives, you could say that music was part of my destiny.

I began taking piano lessons in first grade, and I continued--summer and school year--all through elementary school. I was not an exceptional pianist, but by the time I finished eighth grade, I could play well. It was the summer after eighth grade, that I faced an important decision about my future in music.

I was bored. I practiced my exercises and the classical pieces assigned to me, but I didn't have a love for the piano. I was thinking very seriously about quitting. I was about to start high school. I felt like moving on.

I remember sitting at the piano in my living room, muttering. (I have since learned that muttering is about as natural to 14-year-olds as breathing, but it seemed really important to me at the time.) I put away my Beethoven book and pulled out a book of songs from the movie, "Snow White." It didn't take me long to learn the songs. As I was playing, "Some Day My Prince will Come," something happened.

I had a vision.

In my vision, I was playing the piano. There was a girl there, sitting on the bench next to me as I played. And she liked what I was playing!

It was a powerful vision, I must say. The girl, she sidled closer to me, so that our arms touched--from shoulder to elbow, no less. I can't remember what other fantasies might have moved my 14-year-old mind, but it probably also involved squinching my lips together at the end of the song and seeing hers--squinched up too--waiting to meet mine.

I should add that at this time in my life, there was nothing more confusing to me than teenaged girls. In reality, had one sat next to me, I probably would have been unable to play anything--not even "Chopsticks." But that shouldn't take away from the vision. I realized something about my music. I could benefit from this, I thought, this might be just the thing that will attract a girl!

So I stuck with the piano. Not only did I keep up with my lessons, I began to learn--for the first time--how to play by ear, how to pick out songs that I knew and arrange them to fit my purposes. I continued lessons through the tenth grade, by which time I was able to arrange songs, perform them at church, and even write some songs of my own.

Six years after I devoted myself to my vision of music, I found myself in the small town of Minehead, England. I had hitchhiked there with a group of friends from college. It was a rainy, blustery day--the kind quite commonly found in England during the late fall. After a night of camping in the elements, my friends and I sought refuge through the unlocked door of a church, a 15th-century Anglican structure called St. Michael's Church.

There was no one in the church that day, but we entered anyway, to find warmth more than anything. At the front of the church I found a piano, and I sat down to play some of the hymns I had learned. I had a few arrangements that really meant a lot to me, and the songs added to the reverence of this darkened, empty sanctuary that had echoed with the songs of worship for centuries.

And you want to know something really cool?

There was this girl there. She sat on the piano bench right next to me.

The song wasn't, "Some Day My Prince will Come" (it was a church after all). It was a hymn, "Softly and Tenderly."

As I played, this girl, she sang along, and she asked me to harmonize. For about two hours we played hymns and listened to our friend, Gavin, read from the huge Bible at the front of the church. When we left, the sun was out. The day was warm. Mist rose from the cobblestone streets below the church. We took some pictures and moved on to other adventures.

Last week my wife Jenny, our three kids, and I drove to Bardstown, Kentucky to watch a production of "The Stephen Foster Story." I've been married for seventeen years now, and I've been a father for fourteen.

On the way home, Jenny kept coming back to the relationship between Foster and Jane McDowell, the woman who inspired "I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair" and other songs. Their relationship is at the center of the play, and it had been a rocky one. Foster had struggled to earn a living even though his songs were very popular. In the end Foster's music--the songs he had written for Jane--had been a glue stronger than fortune. They had wed, despite her parents' misgivings.

The music had been the bond, Jenny said. Jane couldn't have been with anyone else after those beautiful songs.

She looked over at me. "Do you remember that day in Minehead?" she asked. "Do you remember the church--the song you played on the piano?"

"Of course I do," I replied. "'Softly and Tenderly.' I really liked that arrangement."

"That song was such a bond," she said. "It is what made me begin to fall in love with you."

I smiled. It made me remember the vision I had in my living room at age 14. It had come true, far beyond the most fanciful hopes I could have mustered at the time.

Real. Simple. Worship. Thoughts on Psalm 95

2011-03-13T06:53:00.000-07:00

Psalms still have a hold on me.

I thought I have have gotten them out of my system with a furious 10,000 words at the end of 2010.

I spent my meditation time last year in Solomon's Temple. When the Psalms were read, I heard them echo through the temple courts. I watched the procession of worshipers on feast days; I joined in their songs. I delighted in this book as my guide to elemental worship.

Elemental. That's where Psalm 95 begins. It begs the question: what is worship at its most basic--at its simplest?

Think of the different elements in a modern, Christian worship service:

Welcome/announcements
Singing/Praise
Prayer/Testimony
Offering
Special Music/multimedia feature
Liturgy/Scripture
Sermon

Which of these were evident in the Temple? Which have been added over time? Psalm 95 answers. It is a concise, 11-verse act of worship. It is a template that is still worth following today.

(Why is today the first time in my life where the obvious connections between the words "Temple" and "template" became evident?)

Praise

"Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord," the psalm begins, "let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation." Worship begins with praise, with "thanksgiving...music and song" (verse 2).

The psalm reveals the reasons for praise, too. It is God's creative power that drives us, the formation of mountain peaks and the sea's deepest depths. It reminds me so much of the hymn that goes, "I sing the mighty power of God that made the mountains rise, that spread the flowing seas abroad and built the lofty skies."

So often in my own worship, I find God's creative power at the center of praise--both for those things he has done for me and through me. My kids, for example, are products of His creative power, not mine. My energies and talents have little explanation other than the Creator who engendered them in me.

Prayer

The second act of worship is prayer. "Come, let us bow down in worship" (6). The theme of the psalm's praise continues as the people "kneel before the Lord our Maker."

Yet God comes down from the mountain top at this point of worship, too, dwelling in the meadows among us, who are "the people of his pasture, the flock under his care" (7). God's creative power meets his warm embrace as worship moves to prayer from praise.

I have to admit that Prayer is the portion of worship that I have struggled with the longest. I grew up in a faith tradition where prayer was self-generated, where the best prayers spoken expressions. I found prayers in other traditions that were repeated. Nowadays, I find my best prayers to be those that are unspoken: that seek to strip away needless thoughts and listen to God's voice speak to me. Prayer is definitely the part of worship in which I feel least confident.

Scripture

Psalm 95 ends with a sermon--or more precisely, a lesson from scripture. One of the features of temple-era worship was the lack of both scriptures and literate people who could interpret them. Accounts that I have read show that the editing of the Jewish scriptures probably began under Solomon. The psalms and other wisdom literature were under centuries-long development, and about 1/3rd of the Old Testament (Isaiah through Malachi, as well as Esther-Nehemiah) had yet to be written.

The lesson comes from Meribah , the site where the "people of his pasture" grew restless with the lack of water and threatened Moses with rebellion (Exodus 17).

At first reading, this seems like an intrusion into a very lyrical meditation on worship. Why God? Haven't we praised you as Creator? Haven't we submitted our cares to you in prayer?

As I reflect upon this psalm, I find that it closes with remembrance of what worship is not. "I said, 'They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known my ways.'" There is only one way to worship, and that is with God. If one's heart is elsewhere, or one does not know the way of praise and prayer, then the fullness of worship is not possible.

(This is where many people of faith get bogged down. For example, some may thing that praise "with God" requires an organ to play or the absence of drums. Others may argue that prayer "with God" invokes the Spirit through angelic utterances. I posit that "with God" implies a reverence and desire that come from putting self below God.)

The psalm ends on a somber tone. "So I declared an oath in my anger, 'They shall never enter my rest'" (11). The psalmist reminds the people that their forefathers received a 40-year sentence for their failure to worship at Meribah and Massa. (A later generation of Israelites would receive a 70-year exile for the same reasons.)

What I find fascinating by this last line is the hope that it offers. "My rest" is, after all, the be-all that God seems to have withdrawn at Meribah. "My rest" is the perfect synonym for worship. When worshipers are at praise or at prayer, they are at rest--or more specifically, at God's rest. Sabbath is, then, also a synonym for worship, and we shut ourselves out from worship, from rest, from Sabbath when we fail to put worship in its proper place.

Lessons for Today

I love the simple worship template found in Psalm 95. Praise. Prayer. Lesson. When worship is focused like this, it is easier to shut out the extraneous things. Leave announcements and offerings at the church door. Enter to worship.

And within worship, I believe that individual efforts need to be channeled through these three elements. The best worship is done collaboratively with worshipers engaged, not entertained. And remember that engagement involves not just repeating hymns or responses, but action: the movement of standing together, coming to the altar, taking part in communion, kneeling in prayer.

The Artist's Journey

2011-02-07T19:09:00.000-08:00

I'm a Google guy now.

I spend my snow days studying manuals on Google Apps in Education. I am now up to three different Google accounts--one for personal and two for teaching.

When I learned about Google Art Project, and when I got to peer close enough to a Van Gogh to see the brush strokes at what seemed to be an inch away from my nose, I was sold.

This afternoon, as snow blanketed the lawn outside my house, I took a tour of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. GAP offers two ways to tour a museum. Through "Explore the Museum" one can walk through the galleries, a la Google Streetview, and focus in on the paintings on the walls.

I prefer the more conventional "View Artwork" that allows the visitor to scroll from painting to painting. That's the way I visited the Alte Nationalgalerie today, and when I realized the depth of paintings they had on German Romanticism, I just had to start a "collection" (view the link to see the pictures I selected for yourself).

Because of the focus of my collection, I left out some Monet and Renoir as well as sculptures that I enjoyed.

One of my favorite "discoveries" was Moritz von Schwind's "The Rose, or The Artist's Journey" (above). Painted in 1847, it develops the Romantic love of both storytelling and love of the medieval. It was the clever title which drew me into the painting.

The painting is about inspiration--it beckons the viewer into the Imaginative Life. Indeed there are many artists in the painting, climbing the narrow path to the castle, hailed by trumpets and banners.

There are women--the hope for love. They peer, and they preen for the guests, gossiping and flirting. And there is one musician--a clarinet player--who hasn't caught the pleasure of the castle, but instead has looked down...where he finds...inspiration.

It's a rose, a small pink rose. It isn't the first detail of the painting that catches the eye--we actually catch the red jacket of the clarinetist and follow the reds of the players up the path toward the castle. The pink won't catch the eye until the second or third time through the story--when we've given up on the haughty woman in the pink dress.

But once the pink rose catches the viewer's eye--a second or two after the clarinetist's discovery--the setting ends and the story begins. We return to his eyes: a look of surprise, a reward for contemplation and absent-mindedness. We look above the eyes. A bouquet of pink roses rests on the edge of the balcony, next to a blonde beauty who happens to be looking down at her bait.

For once in the painting, we see her first. She's a handmaid, the only one of the attendants not busy with the pink princess. The viewer ends the story in the place where love stories should end: looking back and forth between the girl and the boy, noticing their matching blond hair, wondering how they might meet at one of the performances, wondering about...well, whether happily ever after might exist.

The painting is "The Artist's Journey," and it really is. It is the ideal journey that is every artist's fantasy, incorporating story, song and romance in away that engages the viewer and carries them along on the trip.

On Turning Faustus

2011-01-28T19:23:00.001-08:00

Birthdays are wonderful times for reflection--and none more so than the decades. I've been trying to prepare myself for "40" for weeks now. But as the days have ticked down to my 40th January 28th on planet Earth--to be followed, hopefully, by my 40th January 29 and 30--I've been thinking more about Faustus than 40.

Here's why. (Pardon my self-indulgence. I promise to keep it under wraps for another ten years.)

Faust is a German legend about a man with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. It is original tellings, Faust was a brilliant but doomed wizard, the draw of the story was the magic and demon, Mephistophiles, Satan's right-hand man.

The Faustus story benefited from two retellings in particular. At the height of the English Renaissance, Christopher Marlowe wrote the play, "The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus." His main character was a Renaissance Man who had mastered law, medicine and logic--a man who found magic to be the only study that still interested his teeming mind.

At the dawn of European Romanticism, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe penned Germany's greatest play, "Faust." Again, knowledge was the goal, magic was the means: only this time the growth of The Enlightenment was the writer's canvas.

I find myself, therefore, entering a new age (pardon the pun), thinking more of Faustus than 40.

I can trace it back to a dream I had in 1990, just one month before I turned twenty. I was traveling Europe at the time on a Eurail pass, sleeping on trains, in youth hostels, at the homes of long-lost relatives.

I dreamed I was hitchhiking--a skill I had been taught by none other than Jenny George, a.k.a. "future bride." The person who picked me up wasn't Jenny, it was another girl--a girl I had loved in academy. As we drove, we talked, and as we talked I flirted, knowing somewhat disconsolately how badly our relationship had ended.

I realized that she had grown quiet, staring ahead at the road. I gave up flirting, and asked her the question I had asked her three or four times a day over the last month of our relationship: "What's wrong?"

"You're different," she said. "I mean, you were different before...when you were at home...but now you have been around the world. I really don't know what to think of you anymore--no one does."

I turned away and looked away out the window. I groaned. As I remember, I was groaning as I awoke a few seconds later. While I do not remember whether I awoke on a train or in a bed, I have never forgotten that dream. It informed the next twenty years of my life (so far).

When she had rejected me the first time, I was very much a creature of my culture: I was white, religious, Southern. In other words, I was a Republican--a George W. Bush voter in waiting. Fortunately my curiosity was stronger than my chauvinism, and I flew to England after one year in college.

When she rejected me the second time--in the dream--I couldn't have understood the changes that had begun in England. They wouldn't be apparent until I had returned to the bastion of small-mindedness that was my American college. The seed was there; I think that's why I had the dream.

I think of the way that seed grew throughout my twenties. I returned to the United States to find a much smaller group of friends willing to accept my socialism, my antipathy toward borders, my boundless desire for adventure, but there were enough--and there was Jenny George, the woman--the mate--who shared every dream, every adventure, every spiritual longing. Thank God that Jenny knew what to think of me.

As I neared 30, the dreams petered out. We were stranded in Albania and shut out of Pakistan, returning to Tennessee in January of 2000 to follow Jenny's call into rural medical practice in Westmoreland. When I turned 30 in 2001, I was jobless, staying home with Ellie and newborn Owen. I was hungry for knowledge, for power. I think that's when Faustus stepped in.

I know of no Mephistophiles, and I want to assure my reader that I have signed no blood oath, there is no 24-year contract for my soul that ends with me descending into hell.

I hungered for knowledge. I would walk with Ellie to the Westmoreland library and read everything I could get my hands on: religion, physics, history, engineering, war, etc. I wrote manuscripts. I went to graduate school, getting my Master's in Public Administration. I became someone who threw himself into researching any project to the hilt: whether it was a road trip, a new business venture, or an inspiring text in scripture. (Sadly, I never found a way to profit from these impulses toward expertise.)

For example, in recent years I have become literally addicted to the "webinar," an online course--usually free--that instructs educators or illustrates new technologies. Last week--during a snow break, no less--I decided to get certified in Google Apps for Education. I am any teacher's best student--I'll listen to a lecture, research the heck out of it, and return to the instructor with ideas how to implement the ideas even further!

Yet the hunger for knowledge only takes me back to that dream of twenty years ago. Learning doesn't unite people, it divides them. The questions that we ask when we reunite with friends aren't "What have you learned?" or "Have you changed?" It is quite the opposite. When people ask you a question, and you can respond with five to eight thousand words, it doesn't endear you to them. Knowledge is a threat to a relationship; ignorance is--after all--bliss.

Should I care? I confess that when I meet indifference, I'm compelled to reach further, read even more, research my way out of a problem. I'm not out to impress anyone, so I can't really feel rejected. I'm only hoping to learn more and more and--why thank you--even more.

"I don't know what to think of you anymore." I can hear the words and see the frustrated look on the girl's face even today, more than twenty years after they spoke into my dream.

The words haunt me, bittersweet like beauty that breaks the heart. I want her to care--I crave the acceptance that high school friends offered in exchange for conformity, in exchange for thinking, acting, celebrating and worshiping in a defined, conservative, Southern space. I want that protecting shell.

I'm 40. I'm Faustus. I didn't sell my soul--I sold my shell so that my spirit and my mind could break free. And that fact brings me closer--both to Heaven and to Hell--that I ever could have dreamed.

A New-Old Take on the name, "Immanuel"

2010-12-18T07:26:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite books/podcasts is "Freakonomics." The authors, Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner have the perfect tagline: "The hidden side of everything."

One of my favorite books to study is the Bible. Yet no matter how many times I read it, I am constantly coming across the "hidden side" to stories that I have read or referenced all my life--facts that hide in plain site right there in the text.

Read a few verses before or after a text. Check one of the cross-references listed in the study Bible. Try to do both, and you you will be taken deep inside the culture; your eyes will be opened to the "hidden side."

For example, one of Christmas's most cherished quotes was first delivered beside a water pipe. No angels sang, no shepherds watched. A king was there, but he was none too happy with the Christmas message.

The king was Ahaz, father of Hezekiah, a king who divided his loyalties between Yahweh and King Tilgath-Pilesar of Assyria. The prophet, as we all know well was Isaiah, the proto-Christian voice of pre- and post-exilic Israel.

If you read biblical encounters of prophets and kings, you figure out the prophetic modus operandi pretty quickly. Prophetic visits aren't announced or arranged. The best encounters--Moses with Pharaoh, Elijah with Ahab, Nathan with David--occur when prophets just 'show up.'

And that's what Isaiah did one day in 735 B.C., surprising Ahaz as he inspected the pools of Jerusalem. Ahaz wasn't preparing for a message from God, he was preparing for war. The kingdoms of Israel (Ephraim) and Damascus (Aram) had united against Judah. Ahaz had done two things to secure his throne (neither of which involved prayer): he had requested aid from Assyria, the superpower, and he had fortified his defenses. The aqueducts, which brought water into Jerusalem's pools and fountains, would be among the first defenses to be attacked during a siege.

Driven by divine order, Isaiah took his son, "Remnant will Return" (you have to feel for offspring of prophets in the Bible--modern-day celebrities having no corner on bizarre baby names). Isaiah met Ahaz at one of the pools.

His message was benign: "[This invasion] will not take place, it will not happen," he told King Ahaz (Isaiah 7.7). Yet Ahaz didn't respond: no praise, no thanks, no offering...no worship.

Maybe he didn't hear Isaiah and his son. "Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz," the story continues, "Ask the Lord your God for a sign, whether in the deepest depths or in the highest heights" (verses 10-11).

I imagine that Isaiah was pretty brusque at this stage. Ahaz had just been given a prophecy that would certainly seem to be "glad tidings of great joy." Peace in Judah had been confirmed by God.

Ahaz didn't want a sign. "I will not ask; I will not put the Lord to the test," I have things under control--thanks but no thanks.

This is pretty surprising, considering Ahaz's superstitions. Later his son, Hezekiah, would ask for a sign--the sun retreating down a sun dial. But Ahaz was in every way superstitious and pagan. For example he

carved Hezekiah's sun dial into the Temple steps, much to the dismay of God-fearers like Isaiah
erected two golden horses at the east-facing entrance to the temple, modeled on those harnessed by the sun god every morning
built a pagan altar inside the Temple, modeled on one he had seen on a royal visit to Assyria

To put it succinctly, he had most certainly put the Lord's mercy to the test.

Isaiah erupted--but his eruption ties in with the Christmas story. In the face of this vacillating, idolatrous king of Judah, Isaiah threw the Christ child.

Perhaps if this king didn't "get it" (and how many kings--or presidents--or representatives--ever really do), then a good king would come from the most unlikely of places.

"Will you try the patience of my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel" (7.14)

Before there was a Joseph or a Mary, before angels appeared to shepherds or a star lighted the way for wise men, there was a king, checking his water supply, who ignored some pretty good news from a very great prophet.

It's still pretty good news today.

Getting Real about Persona

2010-12-10T18:57:00.000-08:00

"I wish I were my persona." Billy Collins

The words really took me aback. I was in the auditorium at Nashville's Hume-Fogg Magnet School, where Collins had accepted an award from the Nashville Public Library. After about an hour reading his poems, he took questions. The first was about persona.

Collins has long been my favorite living American poet, and I have taught his poetry in my high school classes. My favorite is "We Are the Dead," a meditation on a Heaven where every religion meets its apogee, and every belief confronts its eternal application.

In all of his poems, he displays a wry persona: a person who is a viewer, not a doer.

For example, another favorite Collins poem is entitled, "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes." The title alone shows Collins's enlightened irreverence--as if any self-respecting English major would dare to entertain such a thought!

The complexity of women's undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything--
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that Reason is a plank,
that Life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

I loved that poem before I had met Collins. I caught the many references to different Dickinson poems. After listening to him read and talk for an hour, I was even convinced that Collins is just as funny in person as he is in his poems.

And then he had to tell me--he told the whole room actually--"I wish I were my persona." The thought just blew my mind. It really got me thinking, and it has taken a month for me to get my thoughts into place for writing it down.

As a writer, I have to admit that I've often struggled with my persona. Writing has always come easy to me, but I have to admit that--other than religious essays and sermons--the other types of writing, short stories, poetry, have been hard to come by. I struggle to master the basic forms of character and plot, yet I come out with stuff that isn't memorable--or worthy of publishing.

That's not to say that I don't know anything about persona. I have a persona named "The Lover" who lives with Jenny George here in my house in Dittessee. This persona can't stop complimenting her, he speaks in a variety of foreign accents. He spontaneously breaks into a song that begins with the line, "I'm in love with a woman..." He engages charming sons in daily battles for Jenny's affections.

"The Lover" isn't me. He is a persona that I'm able to turn on when I'm turned on by my bride. When the kids aren't around, or we're talking about something important, the "real" JD engages with Jenny George. Sometimes, Jenny gets sick of "The Lover" and tells me to knock it off.

When I look at other teachers at my school, I see many who enthusiastically embrace a teaching persona. Mike, a vice principal at my school, roams the halls like a bulldog, glaring at kids who linger. "What do you think you're doing?" he will bark, or "Where are you supposed to be?"

Yet here's the thing about Mike. He's one of the most compassionate, caring administrators I have ever worked with. He genuinely loves the kids at my school, and he makes sacrifices to help them succeed. He has the "hallway" persona down pat, but he has the real Mike, also.

I'm jealous of Mike. I've never mastered the discipline game. I teach straight--as "James Dittes," and I have to put up with a lot of disrespect and silliness that a bulldog-type persona wouldn't see.

I have come close to a teaching persona--and I may just yet adopt one. Last summer, I was encouraged by a friend to set up a Twitter account to promote my magazine sales site, Mags4Kids. On a whim, I chose the Twitter handle, "Father_Ahab." One of the highlights of the semester--for my American Literature students and for me--is the week we spend reading Moby Dick and sailing with Ahab into the jaws of doom. During that week, I get to talk like a pirate (when I read Ahab's lines), I act a little crazy, and the kids really get into it. Then I move into Thoreau and Emerson and quickly shed the persona.

For a few weeks, I had so much fun thinking about Father_Ahab. He was a dad, like me, and he was obsessed with goals--again, like me. I scanned the book, looking for quotes that I could turn into Twitter posts. For example, "Toward thee I roll...Chattanooga, Tennessee," or "Call me sleepy, too many late nights reading Moby Dick!"

While I had fun with the feed, and I added a lot of followers in the first few weeks, it made no sense to my friends. One suggested that I change it to Mags4Kids, and I did. I posted a few items about kids' magazines, then I gave up. I just couldn't think of anything to write. Without a persona, I was wordless.

The more I think about this, the more I wonder if this might be the problem behind my failure to really gain traction as a writer. I need a persona. I mean, just think about the way that Samuel Clemons was able to fill the persona of Mark Twain--the hair, the suit, the sense of wit. He never said, "I wish I were my persona." Maybe that's because Clemons eventually became his.

I think of my favorite author, John Steinbeck, how he was able to embody his outrage and channel it into great literature. Children's books are full of personae: Lemony Snicket, Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, to name a few.

What I need, more than a story to tell, is a persona through whom to tell it. I have a cool pen name that I developed for a manuscript I wrote several years ago. It's Titus James. It's a cool name, a reversal of my first name and the Roman origin of my last name.

Perhaps what I've learned from Billy Collins and from the teachers around me, is that I need to invest some time to develop Titus--get to know him, write through his persona. Either that, or I need to reinvest Father Ahab the Road Warrior or some other persona that embodies and expresses all the ideas that are just ready to burst out of me!

I waited patiently for the Lord: A Meditation on Psalm 40

2010-11-25T09:15:00.000-08:00

Destiny is an old man's game.

Trust me. I've spent years trying to teach teens about Fate, about ancient beliefs that our lives were out of our control. I felt like I had to teach this--it is essential to understanding works like The Iliad and The Odyssey. Yet I was teaching it to teenagers. Considering the audience, you can imagine that I would have been more successful peddling acne creams in an old-folks home.

I guess that's both the most fascinating and yet also most demoralizing aspect of being a teenager: that age's rejection of anything resembling destiny. On the one had, the teen years usually feature a struggle for control of one's life. This requires a rejection of destiny and a desire to pursue one's own path.

On the other hand, looking back, I realize how many choices I made as a teenager--both bad and good--set my life on the course it has followed.

If I sound like an old man who is writing this...well, I am. As of this writing, I am just three months shy of turning 40. I don't think that's why I chose Psalm 40. I don't think that it's because Psalm 40 inspired a rock song of the same title by my favorite group, U2. I think it's about destiny--the psalm that is.

I didn't choose Psalm 40; it chose me.

I have spent the last few months reading the psalms in Solomon's Temple. I don't own a time machine--just a Bible, an imagination, and a real desire to get to "the heart of worship," i.e. a vision of worship as it might have appeared in Solomon's day, the era during which most of the psalms were written.

And while I have been able, thus far, to consider many aspects of the temple service--the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the rhythm of the songs, the roles and the speakers in the songs, and the role that the temple and its surroundings played in worship--there has been one aspect that has been missing: the order of service.

Over the years I have served on many church worship committees. Because so many of the parts of a service--the offering, the hymns, the sermon--are so traditional, committees often seek re-ordering the service to enhance worship. We place the announcements in the middle of the set of hymns, for example, or we move the offering to the end of the service. Psalm 40 is personal reflection on one act of worship. Hidden therein is a full worship service--and links to two of the Old Testament's most fully realized worship experiences.

The Pilgrimage

Psalm 40 begins with waiting--a theme that will carry throughout the Psalm.

"I waited patiently for the Lord;
he turned to me and heard my cry" (verse 1).

Worship isn't the place where we wait for God. That can happen anywhere. It is the place where he turns--where he hears--and bends toward us. It is not a proposal. It is an engagement.

The psalm continues with the words of pilgrimage. As I described in an earlier blog, the way to worship is as important as the celebration in the temple courts. Worshipers have risen from the "slimy pit" of suffering, the "mud and mire" of despair. Our feet have a firm place to stand on the rock of Mount Zion, in the temple proper (verse 2).

A new song graces our lips as we enter his courts with thanksgiving and praise (verse 3, Psalm 100:4) We look around at the temple courts, packed with people--the music blending with the sounds of animals--and we cannot help but think:

"Many will see and fear
and put their trust in the Lord" (verse 3).

Pilgrimage is a theme of many Old Testament worship services. If I could go back in time and attend just one worship service, it would be singing praises with Miriam by the Red Sea (Exodus 16.19-21), following the pilgrimage from Egypt to Freedom and full of the images of a "muddy pit." Who wouldn't love to be present to hear the praises Jacob uttered as he raised his pillow at Bethel or witness the sacrifice of Abraham and his redeemed son at the top of Mount Moriah?

But my focus in this series is temple worship, and as Psalm 40 leads me into the order of service as it would have appeared in the temple, I want to focus on two services: the dedication of the temple, found in 2 Chronicles 5 and (for details) the dedication of the tabernacle as described in Leviticus 9. The temple dedication--and Solomon's speech there--is the Old Testament's most glorious worship service.

It began with pilgrimage--a journey of the nation's leaders and a very special box:

When all the work Solomon had done for the temple of the Lord was finished, he brought in the things his father David had dedicated--the silver and gold and all the furnishings--and he placed them in the treasuries of God's temple.
Then Solomon summoned to Jerusalem the elders of Israel, all the heads of the tribes and the chiefs of the Israelite families, to bring up the ark of the Lord's covenant from Zion, the City of David. And all the men of Israel came together to the king at the time of the festival in the seventh month.
When all the elders of Israel had arrived, the Levites took up the ark, and they brought up the ark and the Tent of Meeting and all the sacred furnishings in it. The priests, who were Levites, carried them up; and King Solomon and the entire assembly of Israel...were before the ark, sacrificing so many sheep and cattle that they could not be recorded or counted (2 Chronicles 5.1-6)

I imagine this pilgrimage, as it choked the streets of the city with songs of praise and the cries of animals. Before the ark even reached the temple, the blood of sacrifice ran down the streets. Few could contain their excitement

Many could see. Many feared. Many trusted.

Verse four begins, "Blessed is the man." The Levites are gathered, the singers ready, the worship leader stands above the entrance to the inner courtyard and calls out:

"Blessed is the man
who makes the Lord his trust,
who does not look to the proud,
to those who turn aside to false gods" (4).

The choir echoed the invocation in the next verse of the psalm:

Many, O Lord my God,
are the wonders you have done.
The things you planned for us
no one can recount to you;
were I to speak and tell of them,
they would be too many to declare" (5)

The choir for the temple dedication included the families of Asaph (author of twelve psalms), Heman (Psalm 88) and Jeduthun (psalms 39, 62 and 77). "[They] stood on the east side of the altar, dressed in fine linen and playing cymbals, harps and lyres" (2 Chronicles 5.12). An additional 120 trumpeters backed up the choir, which sang, "He is good; his love endures forever" as "the glory of the Lord filled the temple of God" (verses 13-14).

God had turned; he had heard and filled the worship place with glory.

The Sacrifice

Psalm 40 continues with a meditation on the sacrifice. The speaker understands its role in the service, but he seeks a deeper meaning.

Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,
but my ears you have pierced;
burnt offerings and sin offerings
you did not require (6).

There is a lot to this simple verse, which summarizes the three types of worship sacrifice that were initiated by Moses:

Fellowship Offering. The fellowship offering wasn't connected to sin but to joy and gratitude. At the dedication of the tabernacle in Leviticus 9, Aaron and his sons sacrificed an ox, a ram and sheaves of grain dipped in olive oil. They smeared the blood of the sacrifices along the sides of the altar, and they roasted the choice parts of meat over the fire until the fat had melted away (verses 16-21). At the dedication of the temple, the spontaneous sacrifices that preceded the dedication service (2 Ch 5.6) probably filled this role.
Sin Offering. Separate offerings for priests (a bull calf) and the people (a male goat), this sacrificed took the blood from the victims, touched portions on each of the four horns of the altar, and poured the rest around the base of the altar. Only the fat of the victims was burned in the altar fire (Lev. 9.2, 9-10). Solomon's sin offering was 22,000 bulls and 120,000 sheep and goats (2 Ch 7.5). Considering the volume of Solomon's sins...ahem...no, this sacrifice covered the total population of priests and residents in Israel.
Burnt Offering. The burnt offering was an ongoing fire of sacrifice, meant to be celebrated daily. The blood of the victims was poured on the sides of the altar, the head and guts were burned completely (Lev. 9.12-14). God had said of this offering, "The fire on the altar must be kept burning; it must not go out. Every morning the priest is to ad firewood and arrange the burnt offering on the fire and burn the fat of the fellowship offerings on it" (Lev 6.12) Solomon's burnt offering would be consumed at the climax of his dedicatory prayer as "fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the Lord filled the temple" (2Ch 7.1).

So what could the Psalmist mean that God would not desire such sacrifice? The 6th through 9th chapters of Leviticus reveal a God who is quite concerned with sacrifice down to the finest detail--down to the destruction of Nadab and Abihu for performing the sacrifice incorrectly.

I think that he understands that the attitude of sacrifice is what God desires, not the blood of the victims itself. The sin offering represented a plea for forgiveness, the fellowship offering stood for a posture of praise, the burnt offering was the wishes and the prayers directed to God throughout the day. As Paul would later write to the Thessalonians, "Pray continually" (1Th 5.17). This was the burnt offering that God required of committed Christians.

Entering the Temple

The psalm moves from the altar into the temple in verses 7 and 8.

Then I said, 'Here I am, I have come--
it is written about me in the scroll.
I desire to do your will, O my God;
your law is within my heart'

My favorite verse of the psalm, this time in the temple achieves two things.

One, I find it surprising that a psalm that began with waiting--"I waited patiently for the Lord"--now reveals that God had waited for man. "It is written about me in the scroll," would imply that God's destiny for the speaker was written long before, only awaiting revelation to spring into action. Before we could breathe, much less seek God in our sorrow, he had written of us in the scroll.

Second, the psalmist desire's God's will. This mirrors the use of the word, "desire," in verse 6 which stated, "Sacrifice and offering you did not desire." God does not desire sacrifice; we desire to do his will. I would summarize it like this: "God does not desire sacrifice; he desires our desire to do his will."

Following the thank offerings and praise of the temple's dedication, the Ark of the Covenant was carried into its place in the Most Holy Place and set between two huge statues of cherubim (these angel statues were in addition to those carved above the gilded box, Ex. 25.21). "The cherubim spread their wings over the place of the ark and covered the ark and its carrying poles" (2 Ch. 5.8). A priestly auditor inspected the contents of the box and found "two tablets that Moses had placed in it at Horeb, where the Lord made a covenant with the Israelites after they came out of Egypt" (verse 10).

Psalm 40 can be adapted to describe this scene:

"I have come--it is written about me on the tablets.
We desire to do your will, O Lord, your law is within our temple"

It seems strange, doesn't it, almost out of place? The blood of sacrificial victims, the huge cherubim statues, the temple itself are not themselves essential to worship. Our desire--submitted full to God's will--yields worship.

Blessing the People

A sermon closes the public portion of worship in Psalm 40, which follows a worship outline of six steps:

pilgrimage or entrance
invocation
sacrifice
reading of the law (entering the temple with the ark or incense)
sermon, and
personal dedication

The speaker has a message to share with others in "the assembly:"

"I proclaim righteousness in the great assembly;
I do not seal my lips,
as you know, O Lord.
I do not hide your righteousness in my heart;
I speak of your faithfulness and salvation.
I do not conceal your love and your truth
from the great assembly" (verses 9-10).

The speaker disappears into this message--it's not about him, it is about God. He praises "your righteousness" and "your salvation." He reveals "your love and your truth" to the members of his congregation.

After God's glory had filled the temple, accepting the sacrifices, the praises and the deposit of the law, the dedication of the temple continued with a public blessing. "While the whole assembly of Israel was standing there, the king turned around and blessed them" (2 Ch 6.3).

Solomon proclaimed that "the God of Israel...has fulfilled what he promised with his mouth to my father David" (verse 4). He listed the steps that had led to the building of the temple. Sadly, the closing of his blessing lacked the God focus of the psalmist and appears rather arrogant. Note how many times he refers to himself and how often he refers to God:

"The Lord has kept the promise he made. I have succeeded David my father and now I sit on the throne of Israel, just as the Lord promised, and I have bult the temple for the Name of the Lord, the God of Israel. There I have placed the ark, in which is the covenant of the Lord that he made with the people of Israel" (verses 10 & 11).

The Prayer of Personal Dedication

Following his declaration in front of the full assembly, the speaker who closes Psalm 40.11-17 seems quite different from the confident, inspired public speaker. While all is well with God, it is not well with him.

1. He is overcome with sin. He fears his hold on God's mercy, he acknowledges sins "without number...they are more than the hairs of my head" (verse 12). This is not a public acknowledgement. It is a private plea, meant for God's ears alone.

2. He is under threat of attack. He follows a plea for mercy with a petition for safety. Some enemies "seek to take my life," many more "desire my ruin," and still others "say to me, 'Aha! Aha!" (verses 14-15). These are the thoughts, I'm sure, of any political leader--as David was. They are also the fears that every person shares.

3. He is waiting...again. The psalm closes with the words, "O my God, do not delay" (verse 17). It is a return to the mood that opened worship, "I waited patiently for the Lord" (verse 1).

What could all of this mean? I think it shows that true worship is both uplifting and humbling. That may seem like a contradiction, but the psalms are very clear that God alone is lifted up. It is never man (see Psalm 8).

Worship is like looking through a telescope: the further into the heavens one looks, the smaller the world begins to look. God's righteousness makes ours seem feeble. His peace makes ours seem fragile. We wait...we worship...and we wait to worship again.

Solomon closed his service with a prayer of dedication. It was not a public address, per se. "He knelt down before the whole assembly of Israel and spread out his hands toward heaven" (2Ch 6.13). A scribe wrote down every word. While the prayer fills most of the chapter, verses 14-42, it follows the same structure as the prayer in Psalm 40:

Sin. "Will God really dwell on earth with men?" Solomon famously asked (v. 18). He wants forgiveness for the people, beyond the thousands of sacrifices. "Hear the supplications of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray toward this place. Hear from heaven, your dwelling place; and when you hear, forgive" (v. 21).
Security. The need for stability and security takes up the bulk of Solomon's prayer. He prays that God will judge disputes between citizens (verses 22-23), avert attacks from foreign enemies (verses 24-25, 32-39), and prevent famine and pestilence (verses 26-31).
Waiting. The temple is already beaming with the glory of God, so it seems ironic that Solomon would ask, "Now arise, O Lord God, and come to your resting place, you and the ark of your might" (verse 41). It is the form of prayer that speaks here--the same form that inspired Psalm 40 a generation earlier. Solomon's prayer closes with a plea, "O Lord God, do not reject your anointed one. Remember the great love promised to David your servant" (42). It echoes the plea, "I am poor and needy" that closes Psalm 40.

Worship: The Aftermath

Psalm 40 closes with supplication, but 2 Chronicles continues with the amazing events that followed Solomon's prayer of dedication.

The "amen" or ending of Solomon's prayer is scarcely out of his mouth when fire from heaven consumes the sacrifices and glory pours out of the temple (as it had in 2Ch 5.13).

The people sing more praises. The courtyard and the outer courts throng with the song, "He is good; his love endures forever" (2Ch 7.3).

There are even more sacrifices. The chronicler records astonishing numbers of sacrificial victims: 22,000 cattle, 120,000 sheep and goats (verse 5). If the earlier sacrifices "could not be recorded or counted" this day's sacrifice--and the feasting that followed it, no doubt--was truly amazing (see 2Ch 5.6 for earlier sacrifices).

The celebration went on for weeks. Eight days after the dedication of the altar, Solomon inaugurates another festival (probably the Feast of Tabernacles, Lv 23.36, a Thanksgiving or All Saints Day), and the celebration continues for another week. Finally Solomon sent the people home. They were "joyful and glad in heart for the good things the Lord had done" (2Ch 7.10).

Solomon received a special visit from God, a personal assurance that "I have heard your prayer and have chosen this place for myself as a temple for sacrifices" (2Ch 7.12). But God's appearance is full of destiny, the kingdom is not eternally secure: its stability rests on choices that Solomon and his descendants will make.

The worship of the psalmist emerges from Psalm 40 in a vibrant way. It reflects the details of the single-greatest worship event described in the Old Testament. It is a guide to worship today.

Better is One Day in Your Courts: A Meditation on Psalm 84

2010-11-04T19:01:00.000-07:00

There is a right way to worship.

I can't count the number of discussions I've had over the years regarding this way to worship. Yet, looking back, I realize that most disagreements about worship dealt with items within the worship service--hymns, scripture readings, sermons, prayers.

There is another way to worship--a right way, a true way--and it takes place en route to worship. After all, the psalmist writes

"Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise;" Psalm 100.4

Worship is something that begins outside the sanctuary. It is carried into the holy place and fulfilled there.

(Incidentally, I look back on other theological questions I have struggled with, and I realize now that many dealt with a misunderstanding of the word, "way." When Christ states, "I am the way," is he claiming to be the way/method or the way/road?)

In Psalm 84, like the psalms of ascents later in the book, the way to worship is a road--one paved with celebration and one that ends in worship.

It is fun to look back on times that I worshiped and try to remember how I got there. For many years here in Portland, the kids and I walked to church most Sabbaths on a path I had carved through the woods. When I was a kid, the way to worship followed the winding, hilly roads of southern Ohio.

One way to worship comes to mind when I read Psalm 84. In June of 1996 I spent a weekend with relatives in Diedelsheim, Germany (a village so small it is now a vorort of the town of Bretten, about 25 miles outside of Karlsruhe). On Sunday morning, the bells of the village's Lutheran church summoned me to worship, much as they had summoned my ancestors who had lived in the village from 1589 to 1901 (when my great-grandfather emigrated to America).

It's funny. I remember very little about the service that day, but I can recall nearly every step down Albert-Schweitzer-Strasse to Steinzeugstrasse to the church.

It was the way to worship--a worship I had never known. Or maybe I had. It was a way to worship that generations of Ditteses had known, after all. (Pictured at right, the caption, translated, reads, "Church with old Dittes House, today Guhl." The Dittes House is in the foreground. Perhaps the walk was even shorter--the bells louder--when my ancestors roamed these streets!)

Psalm 84 celebrates the way to worship.

How lovely is your dwelling place,
O Lord Almighty!
My soul yearns, even faints,
or the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh cry out
for the living God (verses 1-2).

The vigor of this psalm overwhelms the reader. It seems like I am already in worship. Maybe I am, but "the courts of the Lord" are still some ways off. "My soul yearns [and] faints" for them. I haven't entered yet.

Temple worship began outside the temple, often a long way off. Summoned by trumpets, worshipers filled the streets of Jerusalem, dressed in their brightest colors as they danced to the Temple Mount. Pilgrims hurried through the valleys on either side of the city, their journey having begun before the sunrise.

The way to worship was a melange of sight and sound, too. Chariots of the king and his nobles clattered along the pavement, and heralds made way. Animals lowed as they were herded through narrow streets, destined for sacrifice.

One of the best visual images of this way to worship was captured by Athenian sculptors in the frieze around the Parthenon known today as the Elgin Marbles.* The scenes presented there show the procession of worshipers who celebrate the Panathenaic festival.

One of the great senses that one gets from viewing the Elgin Marbles is the joy of the worshipers. Boys grin and gesture as they rise toward the Acropolis. Cows struggle and buck as they are led to slaughter. Women parade in their finest clothes. This is a vivid scene from Athens. It hearkens to Jerusalem in the moments that led to worship--the moments described in Psalm 84.

A Search for Home

"Even the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may have her young--
a place near your altar,
O Lord Almighty, my King and my God.
Blessed are those who dwell in your house;
they are ever praising you" (verses 3-4).

I love this break in the meditation on God's dwelling place. A sparrow nests there. The temple is a place of worship, but it isn't pristine. It is a holy place, yet the humblest of creatures also has a dwelling place there, perhaps close enough to the altar to sing before kings!

When this stanza closes with the words, "blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you," the songs I hear are bird songs, not (yet) the hymns of priests and Levites.

The Pilgrimage

The next section of the psalm is a pilgrimage allegory. See if you can catch the double meaning before I explain it below:

"Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
who have set their hearts on pilgrimage.
As they pass through the Valley of Baca,
they make it a place of springs;
the autumn rains also cover it with pools.
They grow stronger, ever stronger,
till each appears before God and Zion" (verses 5-7).

This is a psalm of the way to the temple. These verses fill my imagination with dreams of pilgrimage: climbing from the Jordan Valley, cresting the Mount of Olives, and hurrying through the Kidron Valley, always looking up toward the temple, listening for the sounds of trumpets.

The arid valley suddenly turns green as springs burst from the ground. The "autumn rains" are soothing and gentle (there is no winter in the Holy Land, and these rains would be the equivalent of the soft rains of January and February I remember from Arizona). This imagery brings to mind the Passover celebration, wedged as it is at the end of winter/autumn and just before the full rush of spring.

I thought I knew the valleys around Jerusalem, the Kidron Valley to the east and the Hinnom to the south. These verses took me aback, trying to find a valley called "Baca" or weeping. That's when the double-meaning really struck me. This wasn't a literal pilgrimage from Jericho to Jerusalem; it was a metaphorical pilgrimage through the "valley of the shadow of death."

As believers pass through a valley of weeping, "[their tears] make it a place of springs." How deep the suffering must be! This isn't a place of sadness, but despair--so much despair that the cool autumn rains are an afterthought which "also" fill the pools.

This valley of weeping is only a part of the journey for believers, who "go from strength to strength" (I interpret this line as "grow stronger and stronger" above) until they reach the temple courts in Zion, also known as the presence of God.

The Prayer

The pilgrimage is at an end. The psalm ends with a prayer and a dedication.

"Hear my prayer, O Lord God Almighty;
listen to me, O God of Jacob
Look upon our king, O God;
look with favor on your anointed one.
Better is one day in your courts
than a thousand elsewhere;
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than dwell in the tens of the wicked.
For the Lord God is a sun and shield;
the Lord bestows favor and honor;
no good thing does he withhold
from those whose walk is blameless.
O Lord Almighty,
blessed is the man who trusts in you" (verses 8-12).

This prayer takes me to the temple courts--even to the inner courtyard that surrounded the temple building. The king is here. He joins the sparrow--he joins me--in worship. I think, 'I could dwell in this place forever, just like God does.'

I've had the privilege of visiting many beautiful places in my lifetime--places where I would be happy just living in a tent or trailer, waking up to the beautiful view. You could give me a cave and a sleeping bag anywhere on the Gower Peninsula of Wales, and I would wake every day happy. A heater and a yurt would give me year-round pleasure in northern Wyoming. The shade of a Ponderosa is all the shelter I would need along the Arizona-New Mexico border.

As I think back to those beautiful places, I realize that I spent very little actual time in any one of them. A weekend camping trip, perhaps, or a glorious moment of sunset. Even so, they inspired a thousand moments of reflection, wonder and peace. "One day in your courts" is indeed a culmination of pilgrimage (both physical and spiritual), but it is also the moment of worship--of wonder--from which we gain inspiration over a lifetime.

What if there could be more? More wonder, more worship, day after day, leading to months, years, a lifetime? This is the feeling of the singer of Psalm 84. A doorkeeper isn't a great job. You sit around most of the day; you say, 'watch your step,' over and over again. Yet even this lowly job is superior to the luxuries of the wicked. (When the psalm mentions "the tents of the wicked," it isn't talking about "roughing it." These tents--of foreign nobles, of generals at war--were often as luxurious as palaces, with carpets, fine draperies and golden flatware.)

Besides, who needs warmth or shelter when "the Lord God is a sun and shield"?

There is one right way to worship. Psalm 84 shows the way.

It begins with a longing. It prevails through sorrow and weeping. It grows stronger as it climbs toward Mount Zion. It ends in a resting place where God himself is our warmth, our shield, our dwelling place.

* The Parthenon was built atop the acropolis in Athens about 150 years after the destruction of the first temple, so I'm not saying the images are contemporary in any way, only the way of worship through the streets of the city and the spirit therein.

More than Watchmen Wait for Morning: a Meditation on Psalm 130

2010-10-13T20:34:00.000-07:00

A psalm is word and rhythm and praise.

Think about that...then repeat--

a psalm is word and rhythm and praise.

Can you hear it? The rhythm rumbles the bones. It resonates.

a psalm is word and rhythm and praise--

Do you see the way the rhythm of that line makes "word" and "praise" ride the crests of the waves. The words just jump out and declare "I'm here"? When the rhythm is right, you can even feel it.

A psalm is word and rhythm and praise, and understanding that rhythm not only helps to mine the meaning of the psalms, it also helps to imagine how they were sung during temple worship, the ceremonies celebrated in Judea during the 377-year reign of the House of David.

In previous posts, I have tried to imagine the public spectacle of the psalms: their music, the way they sounded in the temple courts, the parts played by the choir, the musicians, the speakers and--most of all--the people.

In the fifteen "songs of ascents" (Psalms 120-134), a different kind of performance emerges, one that could be repeated--and danced--in the temple courts, most certainly, but also one that could be shared between two believers or at a small festival gathering.

One story goes that the "songs of ascents" were sung at the steps leading to the temple gates--others have them sung at the steps into the Holy Place. I like this scenario because it compliments the idea that these psalms were chanted and repeated, chanted and repeated. The leader climbed a step and chanted a line; then the assembly joined him on the step and repeated the line. Step by step, worshipers chanted the song until they had entered the temple.

As I listened to this psalm in my Bible study, I realized that I couldn't hear parts anymore--I heard rhythm, and I also heard repetition. I felt grateful for the NIV translators whose hard work preserved so much of the rhythm of the words--and I also felt empowered to tweak the rhythm once I had the gist.

I want to present the Psalm below, then, as a chant, not as straight text. I hear each line presented by a leader and repeated by an assembly. As the psalm develops, so does a natural rhythm. For me, it develops in 4/4 time, and that's the way I will present the psalm below.

Grab a tambourine or a cymbal, then!

OUT of the DEPTHS i CRY to you, LORD--
Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord
O LORD [beat] HEAR my
VOICE [three beats]
O Lord hear my
Voice
Can you feel the rhythm of the lines?

Moreover, I love the way the psalm begins. A song of ascents that begins in the "depths"? Of course it does! Where else could such a psalm start? My imagination races to think of ascents in the Holy Land: the incline leading from Jericho & the Dead Sea to the hills of Jerusalem; the walk upwards through the city to the Temple Mount; the climb up the steps of Solomon's Porch to the temple gates, or the steps that led from the courtyard to the temple entrance.

With each step I feel the beat--one, two, three four, "Out of the depths, I cry to you, Lord."

let your EARS be atTENtive to CRIES of MERcy
Let your ears be attentive to cries of mercy
if YOU, LORD, [beat] kept a REcord of
SINS [three beats]
If you, Lord, kept a record of
Sins
O.LORD [beat] WHO could
STAND? [3 beats]
O Lord who could stand?
But with YOU there IS forGIVEness
But with you there is forgiveness
THERE.FORE [beat] YOU are
FEARED [three bearts]
Therefore you are feared.

A plea for mercy emerges--"cries" is the third beat of the line--and the plea swells with the repetition. The rhythm slows down the words, and we spend a line (four beats) on the word, "sins." The speaker is humble, thoughtful, vulnerable. The words have slowed, but the beat will pick up in the 2nd half of the psalm

I WAIT for the LORD, my SOUL waits YET
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits yet
And in HIS.WORD i PUT my HOPE
And in his word I put my hope
My SOUL.WAITS for the LORD [beat]
My soul waits for the Lord
MORE than WATCHmen WAIT for MORNing
More than watchmen wait for morning
MORE than WATCHmen WAIT for MORNing
More than watchmen wait for morning

At this point, the key line of the psalm could be repeated forever, in my opinion. Waiting for the Lord is a theme of many psalms (40, 27, 89, 119, 62, to name a few). But the psalmist moves from "I wait for the Lord" to "my soul waits" so quickly that many readers may miss the transition.

I understand waiting, and I know darkness, yet I am so easily distracted. My soul understands waiting and darkness, and there is this idea that it doesn't give up, even if I do.

As an assembly we are almost to the top step, ready to enter the temple for worship. Dawn breaks, and the watchman lets out a shout. We can look back over the city, over the valley, toward the hills warming with glowing sunlight. The worship leader advances:

o ISraEL, place HOPE in the LORD
O Israel, place hope in the Lord
i SING the LORD'S unFAILing LOVE
I sing the Lord's unfailing love
in HIM is FULL reDEMPtion
in him is full redemption
the LORD himSELF reDEEMS us
the Lord himself redeems us
from ALL.OUR.SINS
from all our sins

In this last stanza, I have made changes to the NIV translation, mainly to preserve the rhythm, which slows from four beats to three in the last three lines and ends with the stark words: all. our. sins. It's a strange mix of emotions that I feel when I close this song

The chant began in the depths and climbed to a place where watchmen see dawn, where sinners find forgiveness. It climbed through calls for mercy. It ended with redemption from all our sins.

And as the rhythm flowed...and the chants repeated...the songs ascended, and the worship raised higher, higher, heavenward.

Praise the Lord, O my Soul. Thoughts on Psalm 103

2010-10-06T21:54:00.000-07:00

How does one lead worship?

In most churches today, worship is led by a screen that hangs down at the front of the church. One pastor of a small church in Lafayette admitted to me recently that "if you don't have a screen, you have a shrinking church." In decades past, worship was read from a hymn book or psalter and led by a speaker in the service.

In my study of temple-based worship from the era that stretched from Solomon to Josiah, I have tried to find a replacement for the screen and the psalter. I have investigated the sights and the sounds of worship, yet I must acknowledge that the vast majority of the population of Judah was illiterate at this time. No doubt the literate class, the Levites and priests, held primary roles in temple worship.

So how then did worship, well, "work" in this environment? Worshipers arrived in the temple courts expecting to worship, thousands of them on feast days, including pilgrims from the four corners of Judah and beyond. How could a worship leader coordinate the efforts of Levites and laity alike to present passionate, focused praise to God?

Having organized my fair share of worship services, I can attest to the challenge here. I guess that's what makes the psalms so amazing: they are worshipful, they are focused on praise, they connect the speaker with God in ways that are still powerful 3,000 years after they were written.

As I have studied Psalms over the past month, I have tried to put myself into the middle of temple-worship. In a recent blog I examined the role of the temple surroundings---the building, its courtyard, and the outer courts--in worship. As I have focus on the production of the worship service, I have found that four elements served to direct worship for all participants: Levites, musicians and laity.

1. Tradition. There is a reason why the vast majority of the psalms were written in the two generations over which the First Temple was built. David, Asaph (David's music director) and Solomon are credited with the authorship of a majority of the psalms. Many more of the psalms that weren't written at this time, carry on the traditions of the original psalmists. As generation followed generation over the 377 years of worship in the First Temple (Solomon's), the words of the psalms became ingrained.
2. Repetition. Each psalm uses repetition in praise of God. If we break down each psalm, we can find a simple line that would have been repeated by the common worshipers in the courts. With no screen or hymnbook, these lines would have been given at the gates of the temple or announced by the music director prior to worship.
3. Concentration. The Levites, whose role it was to amplify the words of the speaker, really had to listen to pick up on the cues of the speaker. The crowd in the courts needed a sense of the rhythm of the psalms--they needed to get their lines right, and they didn't want to miss a beat of the worship performance. I worship because I need spiritual and moral direction for my life. As a worshiper in Jerusalem, I would have needed direction for my worship.
4. Music. This is the wild card of the psalms--something we can never really recapture. Accounts of worship and psalms demonstrate that worship was LOUD, with trumpets, cymbals and lutes used. It is fun to read the psalms and look for breaks where musical interludes would fit. Psalm 103 gives a few such opportunities.

The Introit of the Psalm

Psalm 103 begins with the praise line: the line shouted from the courts, joined by the singers and worship leader: "Praise the Lord, O my soul." Six times throughout the psalm, the phrase, "Praise the Lord" (in Hebrew, "Hallelujah") is repeated. This is our link to the role of the laity. I love that the psalm begins with the people!

The choir joins the people with the words, "O my soul," and they continue alone with the lines, "all my inmost being, praise his holy name" (verse 1) and a similar response in verse 2.

I can hear music with these first two verses: a trumpet introit, perhaps, or cymbals keeping time to this remarkable rhythm of the words.

Verses 3-5 provide reasons why God is worthy of praise: "He forgives all our sings...redeems our lives from the pit...[and] satisfies our desires with good things." There is a call and response aspect to these verses, suggesting two voices in the performance. Consider verse 5:

Who satisfies your desires with good things

so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's

Can you hear the distinct voices built into the line? In my imagination choirs on either side of the courtyard proclaim the words to each other. The speaker is on hand, however, preparing for his sermon. It is possible that the speaker and the choir would be involved with this exchange.

Verse 6 is the climax of praise: "The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed." This is the reason to praise God, He is a doer of justice and a worker of righteousness. The praise is loud. Where does it come from?

I want the shout to come from the people, although this line goes well beyond the stock, memorized phrase, "Praise the Lord," that they would have repeated in this performance. Imagine the shout! I can hear a cheer break out with this exhortation.

It is more likely that the choir shouted it--although I must admit that I would have joined in from the courts with all my heart (and I doubt anyone in the courtyard would have minded).

After verse 6, the music blares an affirmation of praise. This isn't written in the psalm, of course, but there is a natural break here just asking to be filled with music.

The Message

The sermon begins in verse 7. God is a God of justice, and here's the proof. He guided Israel through the desert, He seeks ways to redeem us. I love the final line of the sermon. The speaker proclaims:

"He does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities (verse 10)"

What I love about this Psalm is the intensity of the praise. The psalmist (David) has just given us an exquisite description of God's grace. Can it get better than this? It will, we aren't even to the midpoint of the psalm. I want to interrupt with "Praise the Lord," but I would be jumping the gun.

The choir joins the speaker in verses 11 through 13 in a call and response. I imagine that the speaker exhorts and the choir responds in each verse:

[S] "For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
[C] so great is his love for those who fear him;
[S] as far as the east is from the west,
[C] so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
[S] As a father has compassion on his children,
[C] so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;

I would add here a geographic element to verse 12. The western end of the temple complex was the Most Holy Place. From the Most Holy Place, one would walk due east through the Holy Place, through the courtyard to a gate that opened into the courts. At the western end of the courts were Solomon's Porch, a grand staircase that entered the temple complex from the Kidron Valley below. "As far as the east is from the west," would have echoed through temple courts that featured dramatic differences: the height of the temple mount versus the valley floor; the common, dirty entranceway versus the sanctuary.

There is more call and response in verses 14 through 16, but I imagine these come from choristers on the north and south ends of the temple. Where has the speaker gone? He's waiting for the high point of the psalm. Of course the structure matches 11 through 13. Let's carry it on:

[S or C1] "for he knows how we are formed,
[C2] he remembers that we are dust.
[S/C1] As for man, his days are like grass,
[C2] he flourishes like a flower of the field;
[S/C1] the wind blows over it and it is gone,
[C2] and its place remembers it no more.

One thing that amazes me about this call and response is the dynamic aspect it adds to worship. I will admit that I "amen" regularly throughout a service. I don't make a big deal about it--or do it loudly. However, these responses do more than affirm the voice of the speaker, they affirm it and take it a step beyond!

The worshipers aren't just listening, they are talking back. They aren't affirming the speaker's voice, they are expanding it. God isn't just using the speaker in this worship, He is speaking through the choir; He is ministering to the minister.

Verses 17 & 18 are a solo. The call and response style has ended. The words have a musical quality. The speaker (or the singer) calls out:

But from everlasting to everlasting
the Lord's love is with those who fear him,
and his righteousness with their children's children--
with those who keep his covenant
and remember to obey his precepts.

The people join in. Verse 19 caps the build-up. The choir and speaker have shown what God has done. The choir answers the singer:

The Lord has established his throne in heaven,
and his kingdom rules over all.

The Conclusion

There is time for a final musical interlude. The psalm will end with praise. The drums boom, the trumpets dance, the cymbals clash. The people in the courts prepare for the summation.

Verses 20-22 combine all levels of speakers in a final paean. There is the memorized line for the people, "Praise the Lord/Hallelujah." There is the speaker and the director. There is the choir. (And for those with exceptional imaginations, there is much music, too.)

This is the way I hear the conclusion performed:

[People] "Praise the Lord,"
[Speaker] you his angels,
[Choir] you mighty ones who do his bidding, who obey his word.
[P] Praise the Lord,
[S] all his heavenly hosts,
[C] you his servants who do his will.
[P] Praise the Lord,
[S] all his works
[C] everywhere in his dominion.
[All] Praise the Lord, O my soul" (verses 20-22).

This is an amazing psalm--praise at its finest. What I like most about it is the way that it lets the reader hear the sounds of temple worship. The participants' roles are clear. We begin with the refrain, chanted or sung by the people. We see the way the speaker delivers the message--and the way the choir strengthens the words of the speaker. It is even easy to hear the music play between sections of the psalm or in accompaniment with the singers.

I want to move on through more psalms. There are still questions to answer. I'm hoping to unlock three or four more psalms before moving onward in my study.

One Welcome Dream

2010-10-06T21:53:00.001-07:00

I had a dream last night, and I just had to tell someone about it.

What better person than both readers of 'Point Pleasant'?

The dream was about my grandpa. I just cannot describe how much I miss him, gone now for 3 1/2 years. Just thinking about him fondly seems like a privilege today, and waking up to thoughts of him this morning just turned my week around completely.

First, a little bit about dreams.

I know now that sleep is a pretty important time for the brain: it's when everything gets filed, and memories are sorted out and arranged within the various parts of the brain. It's like "defragmenting" a computer, and it's some pretty cool stuff that goes on in the brain, all while we sleep.

I also know enough about dreams and literature to understand archetypes and themes. One typical dream archetype is the 'unrealized known.' Within the dream, this is something that has existed in prior dreams but seems to always surprise the rational part of the subconscious.

For example, the college dream where I had to take a final exam for a class I hadn't attended all semester. The class was unrealized to my conscious mind, which had been using sleep to file away all the studying I had been doing, however it was a known entity to my subconscious.

One archetype that has popped up in recent years has been what I will call "the two-acre plot." It's a grassy, fenced field somewhere in the Portland area. (It's about the size of the old vacant lot that stretched between Grandma & Grandpa's driveway and Ms. Louder's house.) A few years ago, I dreamed about a horse that we'd been given. This grassy, fenced field suddenly came up--it wasn't mine, it belonged to the Ditteses--and we left the old horse there, grazing near an old barn that took up one corner of the two-acre plot.

Last night, my dream took me to the two-acre plot. As my rational sense insisted that this couldn't be real--no Dittes had paid property taxes on this land--I entered the barn and began to dig around in the corner.

I do a lot of digging around with Dittes stuff. After I moved into Grandma & Grandpa's house, I found all kinds of priceless artifacts. In the study I found the letters Grandpa had sent to Grandma from his posts overseas during World War II. In a closet I found an old .22 pistol. In the attic I found an old painting by Ronnie McDowell, one of the first he painted of old Richland Station after he got back from Vietnam--and one that I donated to the history room at the library two years ago.

In the barn at the corner of the two-acre plot, I found a box with a bunch of rolled envelopes. inside. I opened the brown paper around one of the envelopes, and a small piece of paper fell into my hands.

It was a blank check.

It was a blank check with only two names on it.

Next to "pay to the order" I read the name, "J.D." The date and the payment were blank, but on the signature line I read, "A.G. Dittes."

Grandpa! I turned the check over. Written on the other side was a message, "You can use this when you need it."

I'm not sure about the rest of the dream. I left the box in the barn, and I think I made a visit to the dream version of Farmer's Bank, but before I could make a withdrawal, Jonah climbed into our bed and woke me up.

I awoke with a real sense of peace and contentment. I've wasted too much time worrying about money of late. Watching Jenny face the challenges of raising the public and private funds to keep her clinic running has probably gotten to me--I think that's what my brain was sorting out last night. My mind is too full of things I want but cannot afford right now.

That's why the blank check meant so much to me. It wasn't about how much money would repaint the house or pay for a summer road trip; it was about the limitless gifts that Grandpa had given me and the priceless impact he had on my life.

So much of what I have is the result of a blank check I got from Grandpa. I'll name a few:

the house I live in was purchased by him 60 years ago and sold to me (at a generous discount) in hopes that my children would grow up here in the same way his children and grandchildren had done.
a work ethic like no other
great taste in women and the strength to choose a bride who was intelligent, beautiful and spiritually discerning, just as he chose when he married Grandma
a mind that reaches to the stars and playfully considers their mysteries
lessons in humor as the glue that can connect me to those I work for--and with

Priceless. It's funny, I think back to the box in my dream now, and I wonder about the other envelopes. I didn't examine them in my dream, but I imagine now that they were addressed to my cousins, aunts, uncles, father, children and nephews. I'm sure the all contained blank checks.

I'm pretty sure that the two-acre plot will pop up a time or two in future dreams, but I doubt I'll get another look at that blank check or recognize Grandpa's signature.

If I had the chance to actually hold it in my hand again, though, I know what I would write in the payment box.

I'd write "Thanks."

I couldn't ask for--or even imagine--a dime more than the sum of all that he's given me. I remember. How could I want more?

A Hart that Pants for Worship: A Meditation on Psalm 42

2010-09-25T08:52:00.000-07:00

The primary sense of worship is sound.

Don't get me wrong, I have been in churches that dazzled my eyes with stained-glass windows, engaging backdrops, or brightly costumed characters. I have smelled incense and tasted the warm, bitter ordinances of communion. I have felt the prayer rail and the wrinkled leather binding of my Bible.

Worship is truly a sensory experience, but sound is the sense that takes my spirit into God's presence.

I have spent the last five months of private study in the temple of Jerusalem. (And yes, there are many years' more worth of studies to pursue.) Recently, I was led into the Psalms, longing to experience true temple-worship through their insights. I had several weeks of study built up, a list of facts--a table, even (if you have read my histories of the Judaic kings, you know what I'm referring to).

But it wasn't until I was in church last weekend, that I could "hear" the Psalmic temple-worship and finally begin to feel this understanding ennobling my spirit and enlightening me.

We read Psalm 42 as the responsive reading. Psalm 42: it's one of the most popular psalms, and I'm sure I've read it dozens of times. It reminds me of the song we used to sing at Moor Close vespers at Newbold College, "As the deer pants for living water, so my soul longs after you."

But this reading transported me back in time. For a moment, I was standing in the temple courts. Solomon's Temple towered over me, and the bronze pillars, Jakin and Boaz shone. I could hear the sounds of worship, and I naturally took my part.

Worship in the First-Temple Period

It is best to begin with a look a diagram of the temple and its courts.

The temple building was surrounded on three sides by a courtyard. While the temple building was a place for a few priests, the courtyard was much busier, with a giant altar and a giant pool or "sea" as well as many movable altars used during busy times of festival. The Levites had access to the courtyard, along with Jewish men wealthy enough to sacrifice animals.

Outside the inner courtyard was a vast area known in Jesus' day as the "courts." It featured terraces, pools, other offering places (for modest offerings like grain and doves), and there was a colonnade along the outer rim of the courtyard where sellers sold religious wares and teachers set up shop. Women could enter this courtyard, and even--in a narrow, clearly defined section--so could gentiles. These outer courts--by my estimate--could have held over 10,000 worshipers (standing room only) on the busiest festival days. That doesn't include the animals which would have been there for sacrifice and/or sale.

To get the full effect of worship as it would have been celebrated in any given psalm, one must keep these features in mind: the temple, the courtyard, and the courts.

What was worship like in the temple? It was loud, very loud. There are many psalms that record the call to worship from trumpets and cymbals that echoed throughout the City of David. The best source for my imagination is 2 Chronicles 5, which describes the dedication service of the First Temple.

The priests then withdrew from the Holy Place. All the priests who were there had consecrated themselves, regardless of their divisions. All the Levites who were musicians--Asaph, Heman, Jeduthun and their sons and relatives--stood on the east side of the altar, dressed in fine linen and playing cymbals, harps and lyres. They were accompanied by 120 priests sounding trumpets. The trumpeters and singers joined in unison, as with one voice, to give praise and thanks to the Lord.
Accompanied by trumpets, cymbals and other instruments, they raised their voices in praise to the Lord and sang:

"He is good; his love endures forever."

Then the temple of the Lord was filled with a cloud, and the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the temple of God (verses 11-14).

When I read this, I imagine the three places of worship: the temple building, filled with light as priests stumble out covering their eyes; the courtyard, filled with trumpeters, singers, Levites and members of the king's court; and the courts, packed with people from throughout Israel who had come to worship, to experience God's awesome power.

Psalm 42: The Performance

There are three characters in this worship experience--characters we would probably recognize from worship services today: the speaker, the choir and the people.

The speaker shares the lesson with the choir and the people. He speaks in the first person, sharing his own personal struggles.
The choir amplifies the speaker's message, often building upon observations made by the speaker.
The people have been given one verse to chant in response. They will wait for direction from the "director of music," whom I imagine stands atop the gate between the courtyard (where the singers and musicians are) and the courts (where the people are).

You will notice that there are two "sermons" or "testimonies" in the psalm, presented by the speaker.

The speaker begins:

"As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, O God" (1)

(Note the rhythm of the line, even in English translation, you can't miss it. I would love to hear it in Hebrew.)

The choir responds, building on the speaker's words

"My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?" (2)

(This is the most beautiful verse in the psalm to me. I want to hear it repeated again and again. I imagine that music follows this response. If I were one of the singers, I would want to repeat it three times.

It's like a call to worship. People in the courts are taking their places at this time, and as they hear "When can I go and meet with God?" followed by trumpets, they grow very still.)

Sermon 1: the speaker

"My tears have been my food day and night,
while men say to me all day long, "Where is your God?"
These things I remember as I pour out my soul:
how I used to go with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God,
with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng" (3-4)
(While this sermon is a meditation on a specific trial of faith, I can't help but see the i

mage in verse three: the worship leader, dancing through the streets, just after the trumpets and cymbals have called from the temple, leading a "multitude" who are dancing and singing all the way to worship.

And what would that singing look like? The famous Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon bring to life a similar worship procession from ancient Athens, capturing the excitement of man and beast, the well-dressed worship-goers, the various offerings. Granted the Elgin Marbles feature a time 600 years after Solomon, but they capture a key facet of ancient worship: the arrival to the temple was every bit as meaningful as the worship around it.

But now the speaker is down-hearted, lost in his struggle with faith. He calls upon memories of worship to sustain him, just as we can call on worship to sustain us today.)

The choir responds:

"Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why are you so disturbed within me?

And the people chime in with their prepared chant:

"Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my savior and my God" (5b)

(I wonder how this chant would have been taught to the people in the courts. I think it might have been a password that was whispered through the streets, which a worshiper uttered to gain admittance to the temple courts. Perhaps Levites filtered throughout the crowd, instructing the people. Perhaps it was part of a local psalter: a given week would be the "put your hope in God" celebration, and worshipers would be prepped ahead of time.)

The first sermon finished, there is a natural break in the psalm for music, for noise, for clapping, for praise.

The speaker continues:

"My soul is downcast within me;
therefore I will remember you" (6a)

The choir rejoinders:

"from the land of the Jordan,
the heights of Hermon--from Mount Mizar" (6b)

(The response amplifies the memory of the speaker, giving setting to the splendid promises of the psalm. From the temple courts, people could look out across the Kidron Valley and see geographical features in the distance.

The 'land of the Jordan' lay east and below the temple complex, Mount Hermon towered to the north. I'm sure that this stanza took on even greater significance when it was sung in exile as Jews remembered their homeland.)

The speaker returns:

"Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your waterfalls;" (7a)

(I love the word, "roar," is it is used here. Again I hear the sound of worship, the chants outside the temple would have sounded like the roaring of a crowd in a sports stadium today. "Deep calls to deep" echoes the call, song and response of the worshipers in the courtyard and the temple courts.)

The choir answers:

"All your waves and breakers
have swept over me" (7b)

Sermon 2: the speaker calls,

"By day the Lord directs his love,
at night his song is with me--
a prayer to the God of my life.
I say to God my Rock,
"Why have you forgotten me?
Why must I go about mourning,
oppressed by the enemy?"
My bones suffer mortal agony
as my foes taunt me,
saying to me all day long,
"Where is your God?" (8-10)

(One thing that strikes me about this second sermon is how much of a confession it seems. The speaker is troubled, and he wonders if he has been forgotten by God. It is the people who announce, "Put your hope in God," not the speaker.

It is almost the complete opposite of the way many Christians and ministers wage worship today. The people are considered feckless, faithless, we look to our pastors for answers and encouragement. In the temple worship of Psalm 42, the speaker took on the role of teacher: asking questions, developing problems that the people, through worship, will answer.

It's an interesting angle on worship, one that might prove fruitful in the modern day.)

With the 2nd Sermon finished, the choir and the people move into the closing song:

The choir:

"Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?" (11a)

The people:

"Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God." (11b)

(Music plays from the inner courtyard. The people dismiss. I can imagine that they continue the chant as they exit the courts and move into the street.)

What a sonic vision this is. I still have some questions, that further study may reveal:

How long was the worship service described in Psalm 42? One can read it in a matter of a few minutes, after all.
Was the psalm the full worship service, or was there more to it? Presumably there would have been sacrifices. There was plenty to do in the temple courts once the chants and songs had subsided, such as the smaller groups of teachers/students that the young Jesus found.
What was worship music like? My church in Bethpage uses the lyre (guitar) and cymbal (drums) every Sunday. Is that more "biblical" than a place that uses a keyboard or pipe organ?

A Moby Dick Breakthrough

2010-09-25T08:02:00.001-07:00

I just finished "Whaling Week" with my 11th-graders. We voyaged with Moby Dick for two days, sang whaling songs, and engaged with three years' worth of resources I have collected on this amazing work of literature.

By my estimates, these students are now part of a select group: I would venture that fewer than 10% of American literature classes in land-locked Tennessee even attempt this work, much less spend a week on it.

I always end the week with a fun activity--a harpoon-throwing contest. "You have just read from Moby Dick," I told my standard-level juniors, "and you get it. Not even the kids in AP English can say that." We went out to the football field, where, in the end zone of the football stadium we would throw a rake handle (a.k.a. harpoon) at a plastic box (a.k.a. whale).

One student, Dee, was the last to leave the room. Dee is a challenge to teach. I have a lot of these 4th-block kids turned on to learning at this point of the semester. Quite a few come in asking "what are we doing today?" or "this is Slavery Week, right?" (When kids ask questions like these, they are ready to learn anything.)

Dee usually asks, "We're not doing anything today, are we?" He is usually the last to take out pen and paper. He just doesn't seem to care; he just doesn't seem to 'get it.'

I handed Dee the "harpoon" as we left. "I'm really tired," he told me. He had gotten his driver's license this week, maybe that explained it.

"It's OK, we're going to do something fun now," I answered. Then he said something that shocked me.

"With my last breath...."

I caught the reference immediately, "With my last breath, I stab at thee, though damned whale!" They are the last words of Captain Ahab. We had read them the day before. And Dee had been listening.

Later, on the football field, Dee threw a pretty straight harpoon, but he didn't win the competition. The boys blamed the wind at first for their bad aim. Then cheerleaders started practicing their dance routine at midfield. The boys couldn't have been more distracted!

(I asked them what would be harder, throwing a harpoon from a whaleboat bobbing on the ocean waves, or throwing a harpoon on a level football field with cheerleaders practicing nearby. We had trouble reaching consensus on that one.)

Another student, Matt, won the competition. I touched him on the shoulder three times with my model harpoon, and with every touch we shouted, "O Captain, my Captain!"

It was a great end to whaling week, but Dee's memory was probably the highlight for me.

Evolving Faith: a Reflection and a Book Review

2010-09-19T17:06:00.000-07:00

I grew up fundamentalist in the South.

That's a simple sentence that tells a lot more about me that I would like to admit. It implies the type of education I received, the way I spent much of my time as a youth, my hopes, my fears, even the age I lost my virginity.

It is also a simple sentence that appalls me. It implies many things that I'm not: intolerant, obese, gun-owning and Republican. Sure, I grew up fundamentalist in the South, but I didn't have to stay that way.

This weekend Jenny and I listened to Rachel Held Evans's memoir Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions. We loved it because it described a faith journey similar to ours, but also because Evans is such a vibrant writer, a woman who is able to condense tough ideas into clever phrases like, "If someone says that they follow the gospels to the letter, they're either lying or homeless."

Evans's biography reads so much like mine: her father was a preacher (check) who sent her to Christian schools (check) and on to a Christian college (check) where she majored in writing (check) and began to ask questions that would challenge the pillars of fundamentalism she had grown up with (check).

But Evans's story differs from mine in many ways, too. I find in it many of the same questions, many thoughtful answers, and insights into a culture both different from and similar to the Seventh-day Adventist culture of my youth.

Evans grew up trying to "prove" her faith in a society that was hell-bent on rejecting it. Even in high school, she was obsessed with Christian apologetics and soul-winning. I really related to the intellectual hunger that drives a lot of young fundamentalists into this branch of Christianity.

Most happy fundamentalists see "Truth" as a tank that reads "full." They load up on doctrines and master the proof texts for these doctrines. Then they have two options: (a) fill others up with texts and doctrines, or (b) man the barricades and take down anyone who might challenge the texts or question whether the tank is big enough. After all, the Truth that fills a one-gallon jug looks awfully small in a 100-gallon drum.

Evans's world needed a bigger drum once she saw the recorded execution of an Afghan woman in the weeks leading up to war in late 2001. She had grown up with the understanding that only Christians--the "right kind of Christians" at that--were saved. Everyone else would go to hell. She couldn't understand how a woman so victimized by injustice in this life could also be sentenced to eternal suffering because she was Muslim; she didn't know Christ. This leads Evans to use the phrase "genetic lottery" to describe why she was a Christian (born in the South, Christian parents) and others were not.

Her experience in a hell-believing church was quite a contrast to mine. Adventists are so heaven-focused that they rarely talk about hell (there is no eternally burning hell in their understanding, but an eternal separation from God). Still, I grew up wondering, "Am I going to heaven? Is that person going to heaven?" I have to say that I'm glad I didn't grow up with these horrors.

I always assumed that I grew up in the most strict, Bible-focused church in Christendom. There was the whole worship on Saturday thing, including no "worldly" activities from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. I was vegetarian. I didn't drink caffeine. I had to sneak to the next county if I wanted to watch a movie like Star Wars. And I was lucky. I got to read novels. I could eat cheese and drink milk, unlike some of my more restricted fundamentalist friends.

But now I look at kids who grew up Missionary Baptist, Church of Christ, or other fundamentalist denominations/non-denominations, and I think, wow, I got off lucky. I didn't have politics shoved down my throat from the pulpit (until the Clinton Administration, Adventist services were thankfully apolitical). I wasn't forced to imagine hell in all its fury. I wasn't spoon-fed backwards views about women. I am so grateful for that.

Evans finds solace in two surprising thoughts:

First, she spent a summer rooting her faith in the gospels. She returned to Jesus, and she made him the center of her resurgent faith. Battles over evolution, climate change, Republican vs. Democrat, culture wars, etc. may yield short-term gains for some Christians, but they take us further and further from the Author and Finisher of our Faith. Christians are called to act like Christ, not act like Levites, Corinthians or Pharisees.
Second, she seizes on the idea of 'evolving faith.' It's obvious that Christianity has evolved over time, adjusting to times of oppression, then rule; war then peace. Christians who have adapted to revelations in science and polity have survived; Christians who have refused to adapt have disappeared. Compared to other religions that were focused primarily on race or ruling families, Christianity has also endured.

Five years ago Jenny and I found a faith home in a mainline denomination. It was a huge change for us at the time, but looking back, it was the step we needed to grow in faith and put Christ's teachings at the center of our lives. There is very little to miss about fundamentalism--other than the wonderful friends we have who remain in that denomination.

I don't know that I have 'evolved' in the way that Evans describes. I was always a Christian, not a denominationalist. I see the sea change in my church attendance as an affirmation, not an evolution, of the faith into which both Jenny and I had grown. The idea of 'evolving' in faith brings me to one word that seemed to hang over this book, but one which Evans never mentioned: post modernism.

I want to close with a note about Evans's home town, Dayton, Tennessee. Dayton's claim to fame is the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, the high water mark of 20th-century Christian fundamentalism. In a trial outside the courthouse there, lawyer Clarence Darrow of the American Civil Liberties Union eviscerated the testimony of William Jennings Bryan, who had tried to defend literalistic interpretations of the Bible and prosecute John T. Scopes for teaching evolution.

I traveled to Dayton with my dad in 2000 to write an article on the 75th Anniversary of the Scopes Trial for Adventist Review. Dayton is an amazing place--especially for anyone who has a background in the culture wars. It is a battlefield, and a visit there raises many of the same questions and allegiances that a visit to Gettysburg or Normandy might do. I remember touring the museum in the bottom of the courthouse and visiting the campus of Bryan College (where Evans would have been a freshman at that time).

Although I spent a mere two days in the town, the questions that Dayton and Scopes raised about the fundamentals of my own faith really stayed with me. I diligently researched both sides of the evolution issue, and my hard word paid off with a cover story for the Review. I can understand what living on this battlefield has done for someone like Evans. "Monkey Town" looms over her book--and it looms over the beliefs of ever Christian fundamentalist today.

Judah's Kings and Mama's Boys

2010-08-27T18:43:00.000-07:00

I owe everything to Mom.

I can say that. Lots of men say that. Abraham Lincoln said it best: "All that I am or could ever hope to be, I owe to my angel mother."

Like most men, I'm prone to credit my successes to Mom--"Hi Mom!"--and blame my limitations on my dad. But as I spent weeks poring over the Old Testament history of the First Temple, the blame for periods of idolatry and temple desecration just didn't seem to fit the blame-it-on-papa scenario.

The history of first-temple Judah lurches from periods of religious revival to gross idolatry, and there seems to be no explanation. For example, how can Judah go from the reign of Jehosophat, the hymn-singing warrior king, to idolatrous Jehoram? What can explain Hezekiah's son, Manasseh, who brought male prostitutes into the Temple and sacrificed his own son in the fire?

On the other hand, Abijah, the son of the committed pagan, Rehoboam, taunted his foes with the words, "God is with us; he is our leader. His priests with their trumpets will sound the battle cry against you" (2Ch 13.12). The grandson of Manasseh was Josiah, whose dedication to reform and the Temple outstripped even his ancestor David (2Ch 35.18). There seems to be no explanation, but there is.

I didn't figure it out till my 3rd time through 2nd Chronicles. I was checking my facts, looking for details, when I read, "Rehoboam appointed Abijah son of Maacah to be the chief prince among his brothers, in order to make him king" (2Ch 11.22). It suddenly dawned on me: almost every king's mother was listed.

In the stories of the royal mothers was a hidden history of Judah: a list of scandal, heroism and hedonism that brought the theological twists and turns of this short-lived nation into light. Things finally made sense. It wasn't hard at all to realize why Rehoboam could be evil and his son godly.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, "The Mom's the thing to prick the conscience of the King."

Throughout the 377-year history of Judah, a good rule of thumb went like this: if the mother was foreign, the king would worship idols; if the mother was Jewish (Levite in particular), then the king would lead revival.

Let's set this up with a table.

King	King’s Mother	Mother’s Family
Solomon (m)	Bathsheba	Eliam the Gilonite (2S 11.3), a city in Judah
Rehoboam (p)	Naamah	Ammonite (1K 14.21)
Abijah (g)	Maacah	Absolom (son of David) (1K 15.2). Later she was deposed by Asa for building an Ahserah pole (2Ch 15.16)
Asa (g)	One of Abijah’s 14 wives
Jehosophat (g)	Azubah	d.o. Shilhi (2Ch 20.31) Shilhim a town in the south of Judah
Jehoram (p)		Of the House of Ahab (2Ch 18.1)
Ahaziah (p)	Athaliah	Ahab and Jezebel (2K 8.26)
Joash	Jehosheba	d.o. Jehoram, wife of Jehoida, priest (2Ch 20.11)
Amaziah (m)	Jehoaddin	Of Jerusalem (sounds like Jehoaddin) (2Ch 25.1)
Azariah (g)	Jecoliah	Of Jerusalem (2Ch 26.3)
Jotham (g)	Jerusha	d.o. Zadok (priestly name) (2Ch 27.1)
Ahaz (p)
Hezekiah (g)	Abijah	d.o. Zechariah, the priest murdered by Joash (2Ch 29.1)
Manasseh (p)	Hephzibah	“my delight is in her” (2K 21.1)
Amon (p)	Meshullemeth	d.o. Haruz from Jothbah (2K 21.19) Jotbah is a desert place through which the Israelites wandered. Was she Bedouin?
Josiah (g)	Jedidah	d.o. Adaniah from Bozkath, a town in Judah (2K 22.1)
Jehoahaz (p)	Hamutal	d.o. Jeremiah from Zibnah, a town in Judah, one of the first conquered by Joshua (2K 23.31)
Jehoiakim (p)	Zebidah	d.o. Pedaich from Rumah, a town near Shechem (2K 23.36)
Jehoiachin (p)	Nehushta	d.o Elnathan from Jerusalem (2K 24.8). Elnathan plays several roles in Jeremiah: traveling to Egypt to persecute the prophet, Uriah (Je 12.22-23), and begging Jehoiakim not to burn Baruch’s scroll (Je 36.24-26)
Zedekiah (p)	Hamutal	d.o. Jeremiah from Zibnah (see above)

I don't have time--or a looming Ph.D.--to grant justice to all the women mentioned here, but I want to highlight a few stories that bring focus to Judah's mercurial devotion to Yahweh.

Solomon. There is much mentioned about Bathsheba throughout the Bible (including the New Testament). She was originally married to a foreign, Hittite man, Uriah. She was at the center of the Bible's most salacious sex scandal. She was a skilled political player, guiding her son through three claimants to David's throne. All of these would be mirrored in the long, successful career of her son, Solomon. He came by his love of foreigners honestly. His father had no foreign wives, Solomon had hundreds--and he honored the gods of each wife. Solomon left a mixed legacy as a religious leader, ultimately crippled by a voluminous appetite for sex/marriage/heterodoxy, yet he was never cowed by politics.

Rehoboam. His mother is nameless--as are all of Solomon's other 700 wives, including the daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt (the only one mentioned specifically). All that we know of Rehoboam's mother is that she was an Ammonite princess, whose idol Solomon erected and no doubt worshiped at least once. Rehoboam's rule would be the first descent into paganism. The glorious Temple left by his father would be looted in year five of his rule.

Abijah. How could Abijah have restored the kingdom to the God Party with a father like Rehoboam? His mother was Jewish, that may explain it. She was Macaah, the cousin of Rehoboam, the daughter of Solomon's first rival, Absolom. Her Jewish heritage may explain the kingdom's dramatic return to the God Party, but I should note that she was later punished by her grandson, Asa, for erecting an Asherah pole in Jerusalem. Alas.

Jehoram. Throughout the reigns of Asa and Jehosophat, the God Party dominated the court, but Jehoram's reign saw widespread idolatry. The answer lies north of the border. Under King Omri, Israel had leaped ahead economically. Jehosophat--the hymn-singer, lover of God--married into this dominant Israelite family. The mother of Jehoram isn't mentioned, but the Chronicler shows that she was probably a sister of King Ahab (2Ch 18.1), hence the turn to paganism.

Joash. The Pagan Party ruled through Jehoram and his son, Ahaziah, who married Athaliah, daughter of Ahab and Jezebel. After Ahaziah's death, Athaliah would become the only queen to sit on the Throne of David, serving six years. She went so far as to murder her grandchildren, but Joash survived. His aunt, Jehosheba, had married into the priestly class, and his uncle, Jehoida would train him, leading the revival that took place once this boy king had displaced his hated grandmother. No mention is made of Joash's mother.

I want to point out one scandal that marred the reign of Joash. Toward the end of his reign, the revival waned, paganism crept back into the court, and the Temple services weren't practiced. Zechariah (not related to the prophet), whose father, Jehoida, had been so instrumental in preserving Joash's life and putting him on the throne, prophesied against the king:

Then the Spirit of God came upon Zechariah son of Jehoiada the priest. He stood before the people and said, “This is what God says: ‘Why do you disobey the LORD’s commands? You will not prosper. Because you have forsaken the LORD, he has forsaken you.’”
But they plotted against him, and by order of the king they stoned him to death in the courtyard of the LORD’s temple. King Joash did not remember the kindness Zechariah’s father Jehoiada had shown him but killed his son, who said as he lay dying, “May the LORD see this and call you to account.” (2Ch 24.20-22)

This episode isn't mentioned much. We are inclined to see Joash as the "good," boy king who cleaned the Temple of his grandmother's depredations. His life ended very differently, once the influence of the priests, through Jehoida, had waned.

The three kings that followed Joash--Amaziah, Azariah/Uzziahand Jotham--all had mothers who were simply "of Jerusalem" (see table). All happened to be God-followers.

Ahaz. There is no mention of the mother of Ahaz, Jotham's son, who plunged the Kingdom of Judah into an orgy of idolatry. He owed his throne to the Assyrian ruler, Tilgath-Pileser, so I'll blame that monarch for Ahaz's embrace of idolatry, rather than a mother.

His religious innovations included

building an altar in the Temple that was an exact replica of a pagan altar he had seen in Damascus
erecting bronze horses at the entrance to the Temple to welcome the sun
removing the bronze cattle that had supported the giant "sea" or basin that Solomon had built in the Temple courts
erecting a series of steps at the Temple entrance that would mark the progress of the sun--an homage to the sun god, and a device that would lead to a bittersweet healing for his son

Incidentally, as I was researching Ahaz, I came across this confrontation between this wicked king and the prophet Isaiah:

[Isaiah:]If you do not stand firm in your faith,
you will not stand at all.’”
Again the LORD spoke to Ahaz, “Ask the LORD your God for a sign, whether in the deepest depths or in the highest heights.”
But Ahaz said, “I will not ask; I will not put the LORD to the test.”
Then Isaiah said, “Hear now, you house of David! Is it not enough to try the patience of men? Will you try the patience of my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. (Isaiah 7.9-14)

Most of the scriptures from Isaiah that Christians read at Christmas actually refer back to the hope that Judah had of a savior from this wicked, son-sacrificing king ("unto us a child is born" was also written in hopes of ending Ahaz's reign). His son would be...

Hezekiah. His mother was Abijah, a living link to Joash's treachery. She was the daughter of Zechariah, and her link to the priestly class indicates how Hezekiah could have quickly turned things around. She carried the flame of revival, probably strengthened by her father's murder.

Hezekiah married a woman with the prettiest name in the Old Testament: Hephzibah--"my delight is in her." Aside from the pretty name, nothing is known about her, no father, no home town (as is listed for others).

Her son, Manasseh, would surpass Ahaz in paganism and debauchery. Manassah, in turn, would marry Meshullemeth--one of the OT's ugliest names. She came from the desert town of Jotbah, outside the traditional borders of Judah. It makes me wonder if she was Bedouin. Her son, Amon, would also be pagan.

Josiah. The last good king of Judah was a very good king, indeed--surpassing even David and Solomon in his devotion to the God Party. His mother, Jedidah, came from a Judean town, which increases the likelihood that she was a God worshiper.

After Josiah's tragic death in 609 BC, things slipped away quickly. His son, Jehoash, son of the Judean mother, Hamutal, was quickly deposed by Pharaoh Neco. The remaining kings: sons and nephews of Josiah from mothers mentioned in the table above, owed their power to foreign kings, not to God or pagans--all of them would be pagan. Within 25 years, the kingdom was devoured by Babylon.

Moms Matter

I wouldn't call my research conclusive. I'll use a statistical term and call "relevant" the connection between royal marriages and the religious vigor of the Kingdom of Judah.

On the one hand, Solomon's voracious appetite for foreign marriage, Jehosophat's link to the Omri/Ahab family, and power politics brought about periods of idolatry and hedonism in Judah.

On the other hand, marriages within the kingdom--particularly the links to the priestly class that empowered Joash and Hezekiah--brought about revival.

It's time these hidden heroines and femmes fatale got recognized.

It was Always Solomon's Temple, Sometimes God's

2010-08-14T10:42:00.000-07:00

From 963 to 586 BC--377 years--a temple crowned the hill above Jerusalem.

Its bronze pillars, named Jakin and Boaz, gleamed in the rising sun. Its courtyard swarmed with the activity of sacrifice and religious vigor. At least three times a year, the king left his wood-paneled palace next door, strode across the courtyard, and offered sacrifices before the high, bronzed doors.

It was sight renowned in Judea, an edifice meant to draw the attention of heaven itself.

In his prayer of dedication, the builder-king Solomon had asked, "May [God's] eyes be open toward this temple day and night, this place of which you said you would put your Name there" (2 Chronicles 6.20)

Yet God's eyes would be averted over time. His name would be desecrated in the Holy and Most Holy Places many times over the following 377 years. This temple would be ravaged by foreign troops (including Israelites from the ten northern tribes, as well as Egyptians, Edomites, Bedouin and Babylonians). Its treasuries would be emptied often to buy off aggressors from Syria, Egypt and Babylon. More disturbingly, it's courts and its holy places would sometimes host idols of Baal and Asherah.

A careful study of 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles begs the question: was this a Temple of God or a Temple of Baal?

I just had to find out, so I spent two weeks pouring over these biblical sources, tracing the lines of the Jewish kings, searching for information about the Temple. The further I studied, the more the story of the Temple came to life, and hidden battles for control--of Judea, of Israel, of God--emerged.

First, I want to post a history of the Judean kings from Solomon to Zedekiah. This covers the time from which the first temple was built to its destruction by the Babylonian army. I wanted to know the political affiliation of the kings (God Party or Pagan Party) and explain any additional notes I learned. I have purposely left out any kings who ruled for two years or less like Abijah, Aram, and Jehoash.

King (Dates)	Party (reference)	Notes
Solomon (963-930)	Mixed (see 1K 9.25 and 1K 114-6)	Built hundreds of temples to accommodate his wives (1K11.8)
Rehoboam (930-910)	Pagan (1K 14.22-23)	Pharaoh Shishak invaded in 925, the first foreign ruler to pillage the Temple (1K 14.24-26)
Asa (910-869)	God (1K 15.9-10)	Paid off Ben-Hadad with money from the temple treasury to avert a Syrian invasion (1K 15.18-19)
Jehosophat (869-848)	God (1K 22.43)
Jehoram (848-841)	Pagan (2K 8.18)	Arabs invaded and looted the palace (no mention of the temple) (2Ch 21.16-18)
Ahaziah and Athaliah (841-835)	Pagan (2K 8.27)	Married the daughter of Jezebel, killed during a visit to his in-laws in Israel as part of a coup (2Ch 22.7-9). First recorded sacrifices to Baal offered at the temple during his reign.
Joash (835-796)	God (2K 12.2)	Raised a lot of money for the temple but kept poor accounts (2K 12.13-16), and used much of it to avert Syrian invasion (2K 16.8). Tolerated foreign gods.
Amaziah (796-767)	Mixed (2K 14.3, 2Ch 25.14)	Israel looted the temple during his reign (2K 14.14), worshipped idols captured from Edom (2Ch 25.14)
Azariah/Uzziah (767-740)	God (2K 15.2)	Cursed with leprosy when he tried to burn incense in temple, a role restricted to priests (2Ch 16.16-20)
Jothan (740-735)	God (2K 16.34)
Ahaz (735-715)	Pagan (2Ch 28.1-2)	Put an alter of Baal in front of the Temple (2K 16.10-14), he himself removed the temple furnishings and locked the doors (2Ch 28.24-25)
Hezekiah (715-686)	God (2K 18.3)	Restored Passover celebration and used Temple as a place to pray (2Ch 30.1; 2K 19.3), emptied Temple treasury to avert invasion by Sennacherib (2K 18.15-16)
Manasseh (686-642)	Pagan (2K 21.9)	Set up shrines in the Temple to Asherah (2K 21.3) “and all the starry hosts” (2Ch 33.3-4)
Josiah (642-609)	God (2K 22.2)	Removed idols from temple as well as dormitories for Temple prostitutes and other articles from father’s reign (2K 23.7-11), rebuilt Temple doors (2Ch 29.3)
Jehoikim (609-598)	Pagan (2Ch 36.5)	First looting of the temple by Nebuchadnezzar (2Ch 36.6-7), the second looting takes placed ruging the three-month reign of his son, Jehoiachin
Zedekiah (598-586)	Pagan (2Ch 36.12)	Rebels against both Nebuchadnezzar and Jeremiah, leading to total destruction of the temple and palace complex (2Ch 36.17-19)

In that list of kings one finds a struggle between the God Party and the Pagan Party, as it swayed kings and brought houses to wealth or ruin. If we split up the Temple's lifespan between service to God, service to idols, and the mixed affections of Solomon and Azariah, we end up with this:

Worship of God: 195 years
Worship of idols: 120 years
Mixed Worship: 62 years

When I think of how much emphasis that Jews place upon the Temple--or the lily-white understanding of its history that Christians acquire from the Old Testament--I'm shocked by the reality of the first temple's history. Of the 377 years it looked out over Jerusalem, it served the interests of the God Party just over half the time.

When the Temple Was God's

Solomon set up the traditions of the Temple and assigned duties that would extend down through the kings that followed. We find in 2 Chronicles 8 a description of the services he ordained.

(This may have been a result of a moral crisis brought about by Solomon's marriage of Pharaoh's daughter in verse 11. Initially Solomon is careful to keep her away from the Temple, in a palace separate from his father's--in the long run, he would build temples for her gods as well as the gods of many, many other foreign wives.)

Solomon inaugurated a tradition--passed down from his father, David--where he presided over sacrifices on "Sabbaths, New Moons and the three annual feasts--the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Tabernacles" (verse 14). He also set Levites in charge of the Temple services, leading out in praise, guarding the gates, and overseeing the treasury.

After a generation of paganism, led by Solomon's son, Rehoboam, Asa would reconsecrate the Temple and the people of his kingdom, close to the 70th anniversary of the Dedication of the Temple (2Ch 15.10-15). Asa's son, Jehosophat, carried on with the God Party. Preparing for battle with Moab and Ammon, he gathered the people before the Temple, begging God's leading (2 Chronicles 20.1-21). God responded by granting a prophecy to one of the Levites, Jahaziel, giving away the secret plans of the enemy. The people left the temple courts for the battlefield...and they were singing. Asa and Jehosophat would lead a 58-year renaissance for the God Party that would be disrupted economically, spiritually and militarily by those arch villains of the Old Testament: Ahab and Jezebel.

The next renewal would be led by the boy-king, Joash--a grandson of both Jehosophat and Ahab. He would inaugurate a 100-year reign of the God Party, albeit a time when idolatry would be condoned. An initial wave of fundraising by Joash brought some repairs, but also was diverted by corruption and an outright bribe to prevent a Syrian invasion. The Temple would bring the final king to a miserable end, when Uzziah tried to burn incense, only to be cursed with leprosy for appropriating a Levitical duty. One more mark of Joash's reforms was the way the priests were empowered, beginning with Uncle Jehoida, who had protected the prince from his murderous grandmother, Athaliah.

There would be two more renewals in the final 150 years of the Temple's history. Hezekiah would celebrate Passover (2 Chronicles 30) and carefully retrace Solomon's footsteps by establishing regular sacrifices and duties for the Levites (compare 2 Chronicles 31.2-19 with 2 Chronicles 8). Josiah, Hezekiah's grandson, would undo the terrible desecration enacted by his father, Manasseh, and successfully use Temple funds to rebuild and restore it. At the time of Josiah's untimely death, the Passover and Temple rites were so refined that the chronicler admitted they "had not been observed like this in Israel since the days of the prophet Samuel" (2 Chronicles 35.18).

The chronicler described Hezekiah's reign with an accolade that I wish would have described all of Judah's kings:

"In everything that he undertook in the service of God's temple and in obedience to the law and the commands, he sought his God and worked wholeheartedly. And so he prospered" (2Ch 31.21).

When the Message was Mixed

Two kings didn't know whom to serve. They did great things for God that were matched by appalling choices. I place both of them in the Mixed Party.

After setting up the Temple rituals and assigning roles to the Levites in 2 Chronicles 8, Solomon set off in search of treasures from Ophir, met the Queen of Sheba, and left the Temple behind him. As he added more wives to the harem, he added more idols to his devotions. "He followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molech the detestable god of the Ammonites. So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord; he did not follow the Lord completely, as David his father had done" (2K 11.5-6) [See the image of Ashtoreth at right].

The second mixed monarch was Amaziah, son of Joash. The writer of Kings notes, "He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, but not as his father David had done" (2K 14.3). He just wasn't "as right" as David? Amaziah would win a terrific victory over the Edomites, but he would follow that victory by worshiping idols he had captured (2Ch 25.14). Following his victory over Edom, he challenged the kingdom of Israel, only to be defeated, captured in battle, and pillaged as the army of Israel broke into Jerusalem and looted the Temple (2K 14.14). Amaziah claimed membership in the God Party, but his actions betrayed him.

When the Temple Belonged to Idols

Rehoboam, the son of one of Solomon's foreign wives, was the first to wholly endorse the Pagan Party. Idols appeared in high places and male prostitutes enlivened pagan ceremonies. Of course the greatest offense against the Temple was an invasion by Pharaoh Shishak, who stripped the Temple and the Palace of the Forests of Lebanon just five years after the death of Solomon (1K 14.25). (It will take another blog to trace the sins of Judah's kings to their mothers--and believe me, it's coming.)

The second era of Pagan Party rule coincided with the rise of the Omrides in Israel--the rule of kings Omri through his grandson, Ahab, a time when Israel reached its heights of prosperity and cultural dominance. Jehoram married a daughter of Ahab and Jezebel named Athaliah. During Jehoram's reign, Bedouins would raid Jerusalem and sack the Temple. His son, Ahaziah ruled for a short time, leaving Athaliah, the daughter of Jezebel, in control. Her sons offered the first recorded sacrifices to Baal inside the Temple (2Ch 24.7) This era ended with the interference of a priest, Jehoida, the rise of Joash, and the renewal of the God Party (I have written about the dominance of the priestly class already).

Three more eras of Pagan Party rule followed the 100-year reign of Joash-Amaziah-Uzziah. Each coincided with the cultural dominance of first Assyria, then Egypt.

Ahaz ruled in Jerusalem at the time Assyria extinguished the northern kingdom of Israel (721). His conversion to the Pagan Party had a lot to do with placating the Assyrians. He himself looted the temple and sent the gold to Tilgath-Pileser, begging him to invade Aram (Damascus) and Israel. On a visit to Damascus, Ahaz saw an altar, which he sketched. On his return to Jerusalem, he ordered that a copy be built in front of the Temple, moving Solomon's great altar in order to complete the new project. He gutted the Temple, trying to convert it to the worship of Assyrian gods:

"King Ahaz took away the side panels and removed the basins from the movable stands. He removed the Sea from the bronze bulls that supported it and set it on a stone base. He took away the Sabbath canopy that had been built at the temple and removed the royal entryway outside the temple of the Lord, in deference to the king of Assyria" (2K 16.15-16)

When Hezekiah took power and began renewal, it took 2 1/2 weeks to clean out all of the pagan artifacts that Ahaz had installed in the Temple (2Ch 29.16-17).

A second Assyrian peon was Manasseh, the most notorious Pagan to rule in Judah. "He built altars in the temple of the Lord, of which the Lord had said, 'In Jerusalem I will put my name'" (2K 21.4). These included an Asherah pole (for fertility rites) and an altar of Baal. In the courts around the Temple, "he built altars to all the starry hosts" (verse 5). He even sacrificed his children in the fire.

The tragic death of Josiah would begin the final era of the Pagan Party. At this point Judah was a geopolitical football, punted back and forth between empires in Egypt and Babylon. Josiah's son, Jehoash, may have been in the God Party, but Pharaoh Neco deposed him shortly after his victory over Josiah, and replaced him with the hopelessly pagan, Jehoiakim. Jehoash would end his days in exile--later joined by Jeremiah after the fall of Jerusalem. The final two kings, Jehoiachin and Zedekiah tried paganism, but failed to placate Babylon, which destroyed the Temple in 586.

Like an Object in the Rear-View Mirror

While the spiritual significance of the Temple that Solomon built never wavered for members of the God Party, it was also the political centerpiece of a tug-of-war between factions within the ruling elite of Judah. On the one side stood the God Party: descendants of David, prophets, the priestly class. On the other side stood the Pagan Party: descendants of foreign wives, proponents of alliances with Israel, Assyria and Egypt.

The Temple was looted five times by foreign kings, one time by Ahaz. Its treasures rose and were lost with the fortunes of the kingdom. Just consider its greatest treasure, for example--the Ark of the Covenant. There are six different possible forces that could have taken it away.

Yet the idea of the Temple--a place in Jerusalem where God's holy name would dwell--endured for a thousand years, from the time of Solomon through the time of Christ. I have a few more temple-related threads in the Old Testament that I want to clear up--the Temple in the Psalms, the role of mothers in the party affiliations of the Kings of Judah, and the Temple in the Prophets--before I move on to the second temple of Ezra and the third temple of Herod. It is both the Temple Idea and the reality of what the Temple actually achieved that I want to explore further.

2010-07-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up.

This quote gives me some relief for the two books I'm listening to on my phone.

I'm listening to The Irresistible Revolution: Life as an Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne: a call to reject the world and insights into Claiborne's life as a "new monastic." He worked with Mother Theresa in India and returned to inner-city Philadelphia to set up a Christian commune for work with the poor.

Also on my Android is A Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism by Robert Murphy: a vapid expostulation on capitalism that insists that (a) deficits don't matter, (b) the environment would be better protected by industry, and (c) the minimum wage increases unemployment.

Vive la differance!

The Temple: Icon or Idol?

2010-07-24T14:29:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite stories in the Bible takes place at the beginning of Solomon's reign. God appears to him in a dream, offering the fabled choice of "one wish."

Solomon, Temple-builder, says: "Give me wisdom and knowledge, that I may lead this people, for who is able to govern this great people of yours?" (2 Chronicles 1.10).

I love that story! God responds, "Wisdom and knowledge will be given you. And I will also give you wealth, riches and honor, such as no king who was before you ever had and none after you will have" (verse 12). It's like the rule on the Price is Right, when someone guesses the correct price of the Showcase Showdown and wins both showcases.

What I hadn't realized until I began this series was the location of the dream. It isn't in Jerusalem or upon Mount Moriah, the site of the Temple. Solomon actually interacts with God near the old Tent of Meeting, the Tabernacle ordained by God through Moses, where Solomon had traveled to worship at the altar. The gilded box was in Jerusalem, the tent and the altar were in Gibeon--and that's where Solomon met God the first time.

Worship is about meeting with God. The ultimate worship experience comes when God speaks back--when He inspires me in return. In his charmed life, Solomon would worship twice. The initial experience happened not in a temple but near a tent, not in Jerusalem but in Gibeon.

The Legend

But it is easy to get lost in the stories of Solomon, who is among the most fabled ancient rulers of the Near East. In story, he is as legendary as Midas of Phrygia or Croesus of Lydia, but the chronicler provides us with enough details to look beyond the myth and provide Bible readers with a glimpse of the truly back-breaking cost of the Temple that Solomon erected.

Here is a sampling of the legends that grew up around Solomon. It is written that God gave Solomon many forms of wisdom, including the ability to interpret the speech of animals. He only realized this when he heard an ant telling its friends, "Get out of the way before Solomon steps on us!"

He could also summon angels--known as jinn, the word from which we get the term "genie"--to do his bidding. As he built the temple, he could summon winds, molten brass bubbled up from the rocks, and the angels followed his orders. "[The angels] worked for him as he desired, making high rooms, images, basins as large as reservoirs, and cauldrons," the legends state.

(And if these stories seem far-fetched, my dear reader, they actually come from the Koran, Surah 26 and Surah 34.)

The Bible Story

Solomon's story is told through the eyes of two authors in the books of 1 Kings (chapters 1-10) and 2 Chronicles (1-9). Therein I find no mention of genies or communication with insects but a fascinating view of the economic and political environment that supported Solomon's building spree.

The Chronicler reveals that Solomon the Dreamer left the Tent of Meeting, and in his next act as king he...acquired 1400 chariots and 12,000 horses (2 Chronicles 1.14). Moreover, he "made silver and gold as common in Jerusalem as stones, and cedar as plentiful as sycamore-fig trees" (15).

What? Wasn't Solomon supposed to build the Temple because he wasn't a warrior like his father, David? Why the arms build-up? This doesn't mesh with the fables or the ideal of the pious king seeking after wisdom.

The answer is found in Verse 17: Solomon was actually an arms dealer, using his geopolitical situation to import weapons from Egypt and sell them to the Hittites (modern Turkey) and Arameans (Syria). All this wheeling and dealing among the superpowers of the day was lucrative indeed, and Solomon's close ties to Egypt are among the most significant, unwritten aspects to his long reign.

The import/export business wasn't enough to fund Solomon's expensive tastes. He sent to Hiram of Tyre for skilled workers and supplies to augment the ones already set aside by David. We find in 2 Chronicles 2 the outlines of the contract in a letter from Hiram, King of Tyre:

Now let my lord send his servants the wheat and barley and the olive oil and wine he promised, and we will cut all the logs from Lebanon that you need and will float them in rafts by sea down to Joppa. You can then take them up to Jerusalem (verses 15-16).

Of course labor on a seven-year building project like the Temple would have cost even more than the materials, no matter how precious. Solomon solved this by enslaving the Canaanites who remained within the borders of his kingdom--153,600 in all--to complete the building (verses 17-18).

This fact adds new ironies to the Temple Story. The hands that cut the stones and set the blocks of the Temple were not Jewish hands but Jebusite (the original residents of Jerusalem); the voices that cried out under oppression were not Jewish but Perizzite or Amorite. The nation that God had called out of Egypt--where it was enslaved to construct temples to foreign gods--had now enslaved foreign peoples to build a temple for its God. The moral decay of Israel--indeed of Solomon himself--began long before the first Psalm could be chanted within the Temple courts.

A Splendid Temple

But oh what a Temple it was! It's possible to ignore the squalor, the slavery, the shady arms deals, when we think about that wonderful structure. The chronicler takes us through the temple--even into the Most Holy Place--for a first-hand look at the extravagant decorations. The walls were inlaid with images of palm trees and winged cherubim--and those images were coated with gold (a tablet from Solomon's era--right). In the Most Holy Place, two giant cherubim shaded the sacred ark and its modest figures, stationed on the box at the time of the Exodus. It is written that 600 talents (23 tons) of solid gold were used in the Most Holy Place alone (2 Chronicles 3.8)

Perhaps the online application, Wordle, allows us to enjoy the words of the chronicler in 2 Chronicles 3 and 4. The size of words is based upon the number of times they are used in the passage. Words like "gold" and "temple" loom large, and the word, "cubits," alludes to the precise measurements given by the chronicler.

And when the Temple was done, there was worship. A throng of musicians stood on the eastern side of the altar, praising God with cymbals, harps, lyres and trumpets. Singers rejoiced: "He is good; his love endures forever" (2 Chronicles 5.12-13). And God responded to this worship with utter brilliance:

"The the temple of the Lord was filled with a cloud, and the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the temple of God" (13-14).

Solomon's Prayer

Solomon the Wise began his prayer with a rhetorical question.

"But will God really dwell on earth with men? The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!" (2 Chronicles 6.18)

This is such a profound question that touches on so many theological points, that it would take books to mention them all. I will just point out two:

I could rewrite the question using a name popular with Christians: "But will God really Emmanuel?" The idea of God dwelling with man went back to the Garden of Eden, and it wouldn't be resolved until the Incarnation.
(Since mine is an anti-temple rant, I could point out here that John writes, "The Word came down and Tabernacled/tented with us." I have an idea why the most anti-temple writer of the New Testament would use this phrase, but it is interesting to point out here.)
Solomon is also pointing to a definition of God--boundless, omnipotent, One--that won't really get fleshed out until the prophets just prior to and following the Exile. Basically, he's Ezekiel here.
(What is your take on the second question, "How much less this temple I have built!"? Is this arrogance or humility? It seems to have a measure of both.)

Solomon looks into the future to see a Temple that will be the center of Jewish worship: one toward which both believers and nonbelievers will pray when they seek God's favor; a place where people will go to have their prayers heard; a place where sinners will find forgiveness (verses 20-23, 32-33).

But his is a national vision as well: the Temple is the place where wars will be won (34-35), famines will be ended (26-31), and rains will return (26-27). Solomon dreams--he dreams that he has built a Capitol from which God will govern human hearts. It will take a greater dreamer--Jesus Christ--to demonstrate that the individual human heart itself is the capitol God most desires.

God Answers Solomon

After Solomon's dedication, there was more song, more praise, and more fire. No one could bear to be inside the Temple, but this time the fire "consumed the burnt offerings and the sacrifices, and the glory of the Lord filled the temple" (2 Chronicles 7.1). The celebration continued for a total of two weeks.

A few nights later, God appeared to Solomon a second time. Solomon had raised the stakes with this building; God raised them back. God had heard, but he would be watching. His words to Solomon would seem to have two warnings for every blessing:

As for you, if you walk before me as David your father did, and do all I command, and observe my decrees and laws, I will establish your royal throne, as I covenanted with David your father when I said, 'You shall never fail to have a man to rule over Israel.'

'But if you turn away and forsake the decrees and commands I have given you and go off to serve other gods and worship them, then I will uproot Israel from my land, which I have given them, and will reject this temple I have consecrated for my Name. I will make it a byword and an object of ridicule among all peoples. And though this temple is now so imposing, all who pass by will be appalled and say, 'Why has the Lord done such a thing to this land and to this temple?' People will answer, 'Because they have forsaken the Lord, the God of their fathers, who brought them out of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, worshiping and serving them--that is why he brought all this disaster on them.' (verses 17-22).

This doesn't sound optimistic to me. It is as if God already knows the future, sees the idolatry. Or maybe that's just the chronicler--who will go on to describe the sad history that would follow.

An Aerial View of Jerusalem

Let's step back from the Most Holy Place to look at the City of David as it was in Solomon's day. Solomon's building project had doubled the size of the walled city, and the temple complex covered a wind-blown threshing floor that had been outside the gates of the city that David conquered.

As I look at the Temple in my minds eye, the first thing I notice are the two, bronze pillars that stood on each side of the main door. Each had its own name: one was Jakin (he establishes) and Boaz (in him is strength). They didn't support a roof; they just stood there, but how they must have shone as the rising sun rested upon them!

The temple occupied the highest ground in the city, but it was not the largest building by far. Solomon build three adjoining palaces: The Palace of the Forest of Lebanon, surrounded by wooden pillars, was almost twice as big as the Temple and held Solomon's armory and Hall of Justice. It also took twice as long to build. While the outer walls of this palace featured enough cedar trunks to resemble a hillside forest in Lebanon, the inner walls were lined with elaborate golden shields. Solomon ordered 200 large shields covered with gold (about seven pounds each), and 300 smaller shields which featured a mere four pounds of gold. (With today's gold prices, each of these large shields would be worth $114,000!)

Beyond the temple and armory, 1 Kings implies that there were two more huge, 5,000-square-foot palaces. The temple complex seems so choked with royal palaces that some historians have gone so far to speculate that the the Temple was a royal worship place rather than a national one.

Government Debt, Moral Decay

Solomon kept building. By the time the temple & palace complexes were finished, Solomon had begun building an astonishing harem of foreign wifes, each of which demanded a temple for her own god. The Mount of Olives became the site for this new wave of building, and it featured temples to Chemosh of Moab, Molech of Ammon and various other gods (1 Kings 11.7-8).

In some ways, Solomon didn't have a choice. He had become a regional leader. At the time he took power, Israel was a small kingdom, based in the hills around the Jordan River. Solomon pushed the kingdom westward, toward the Mediterranean Coast, by building up the cities of Joppa and Beth Horan, acquiring the town of Gezer from the Egyptian Pharaoh.

He also moved southward. His most significant conquest was Ezion Geber, which lay at the tip of the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea. His control of Joppa and Ezion Geber meant that all the land routes to Egypt passed through his dominions. The tariff revenue must have been incredible, for Egypt was a superpower, and this made Solomon's arms dealing even more valuable. With these trade routes under his control, the Queen of Sheba's visit takes on new meaning, and one can understand why cedar, gold and silver would have been common in Jerusalem.

Egypt responded in various ways. Pharaoh gave a daughter to Solomon and with her the city of Gezer (which had been captured from the Philistines--perhaps in a joint campaign with Israel). But the Bible shows that Pharaoh's daughter began a cultural conquest of Solomon that would gain her a palace of her own and a temple for her gods on the Mount of Olives.

But Egypt also hedged its bets. It became a safe place of exile for Solomon's enemies, who included Jeroboam (future ruler of the northern ten tribes) and Hadad the Edomite (1 Kings 11.18-19, 40). This doesn't seem like the behavior of a strong ally.

More fascinating is Solomon's relations with Hiram, king of Tyre, the source of the cedar and skilled workmen that built the temples and palaces. Solomon seems to act as a vassal king to Hiram, not as an equal.

The reason was probably debt.

First Kings describes an interesting exchange that took place midway through Solomon's rule:

At the end of twenty years, during which Solomon built these two buildings--the temple of the Lord and the royal palace--King Solomon gave twenty towns in Galilee to Hiram, king of Tyre, because Hiram had supplied him with all the cedar and pine and gold he wanted. But when Hiram went from Tyre to see the towns that Solomon had given him, he was not pleased with them. "What kind of towns are these you have given me, my brother?" he asked. And he called them the Land of Cabul (good-for-nothing), a name they have to this day" (1 Kings 9.10-14).

In Jerusalem, "Nothing was made of silver, because silver was considered of little value in Solomon's days," but in the hinterlands, the appalling level of public debt was beginning to peel away cities from Solomon's empire (1 Kings 10.21).

Hiram would also have his own hand in the economy of Israel. His sailors and captains would man the ships Solomon built at Ezion Geber to trade in the Red Sea, and one wonders how many of the 420 talents of gold these ships brought from Ophir to Solomon eventually ended up at Hiram's palace in Tyre (see 1 Kings 9.28).

Was the Temple the Center?

While the Bible writers treat the Temple as the focal point of Solomon's ambitious building plan, it is easy to see the seeds of destruction sown in its building and ornate decoration. The Bible demonstrates that this was hardly Solomon's greatest project (in terms of size or luxury) nor was it his only temple.

Moreover, the steps that Solomon took to fund the project--through tariffs, taxes, and slavery--left the kingdom in deep debt, left the populace at the edge of revolution, left Israel with little moral vigor to pursue worship in the way Solomon's father had envisioned.

As Solomon's 40-year reign ended, the seeds had grown into a forest of danger for his successors. Within five years of his death, his kingdom would be divided and his fabulous temple would be stripped of nearly every ounce of inlaid gold.

But that is for a future time and a future post.

The Temple: Who Needed It?

2010-07-17T21:10:00.000-07:00

If you read the Bible beginning to end, you will find a verse near the end of the final book of Revelation that will surprise you.

John the Revelator, given a prophetic glimpse of the World Made New, makes an astonishing observation:

"I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple" (Revelation 21.22).

I have read this verse scores of times without really "getting it." It is fanciful--inspirational even--the thought of worshiping out in the open with the Lamb of God, my Savior.

Now, I begin to suspect that it is far more than that.

It's ironic.

I mean, have you read the Bible? It's obsessed with the Temple--or rather, a series of temples built sequentially in Jerusalem. The Temple is a place, an idea that unites Abraham with Isaac, Moses with David, Solomon with Ezra, Ezekiel with Jesus, and Paul with destiny.

Yet twenty verses before the end of his Revelation, John speaks out of prophetic ecstasy, peers into the center of the New Jerusalem, and he does not see a temple.

John Lennon, one of the most outspoken 20th-century atheists, sang,

"Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try.... Nothing to kill or die for, no religion too."

If you are a Christian believer who is annoyed by that lyric, then you have some inkling of how Jews might feel about someone who writes, "Imagine there's no temple, it's easy if you try."

Granted, Revelation was written 30 to 40 years after the final Jerusalem Temple had been obliterated by Titus's army, so most of John's readers would have only known a world without a temple. Still, the prophecy would have had a huge impact on a worldwide church that was still equal parts Jew and Gentile.

But why?

Had not God said through Zechariah, "I will return to Zion and dwell in Jerusalem...and the mountain of the Lord Almighty will be called the Holy Mountain"? (Zechariah 8.3). Anyone who reads the Old Testament begins to believe that The Temple is really the point of the whole thing--'the belly button of the world' as Jewish tradition believed. It was the central point of worship, the focal point of the Jewish nation. Who did John think he was?

As the sheer irony of John's statement began to sink in, it really took me back into scripture. All of the stories of the temple had reached a peak for me now--a place where I could see that there was no need for a temple. The Temple is vestigial. That's what John seemed to be saying to me, and I had to hunt through the Bible to find out how it got to be that way.

In order to really understand the Temple, it is important to identify the multiple perspectives in play. The Bible writers--mostly from the priestly class that rose up after the Temple had been built--stressed the religious nature of society and the role of God in history. Outside the Bible writers, one can also see glimpses of empires like Egypt and Phoenicia (Philistia, Tyre and Sidon are outposts of this superpower that was based in Carthage). Kingdoms like Judah and Israel rise and fall. Empires like Assyria and Babylon wander in and out of the narrative. Everyone sees the Temple at the center.

Everyone, it seems, but God.

The Temple Idea

The Temple wasn't God's idea. If you read through the five books of the Torah, books in which the minutest details of Jewish culture are spelled out, there is no mention of a Temple. Moses ordered a tent to be built, and inside this tent he placed a modest-sized, gilded box or "ark." There was s no Temple--not even a recognized need for one. Presumably, after efforts to utilize the golden box in conquest were unsuccessful, it was forgotten for a generation, left not in a tent but in the house of Abinidab.

The rescue of the golden box and the idea for the Temple come from the same man: David. The first six chapters of 2 Samuel are a flurry of nation-building, as David crushes remaining opposition from the House of Saul, defeats the Philistines, conquers Jerusalem and consolidates the kingdom under his command.

In the context of events, the House of God would seem to be David's final conquest. Israel's dominion over Jerusalem is barely a year old, David isn't done fighting, just taking "a rest from all his enemies around him" (2 Sam 7.1), when he makes a wily declaration:

"Here I am, living in a palace of cedar, while the ark of God remains in a tent" (2 Samuel 7.2)

Who could argue with this? The prophet Nathan can't--at least not at first. We don't see conquest here; we fall for David's piety, his humility, his concern for God's gilt box.

God takes exception. God doesn't seem pleased. "Did I ever say to any...I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, 'Why have you not built me a house of cedar?'" (verse 7). There is only one Creator, God points out, and He creates spaces for His people--both physical and spiritual. To God, David's plan is like a child declaring to its mother: "I'll make a womb where you can be safe and warm and fed."

"The Lord declares to you that the Lord himself will establish a house for you," the message continues, again emphasizing that David's "house of cedar" may not be the ultimate house God has in mind. The promise extends, however, to David's son: "He is the one who will build a house for my Name" (verse 13).

God rejects David's proposal of conquest. Later, David will claim that the rejection was based on his reputation as a warrior (1 Chronicles 28.3), but that isn't supported by the actual text. David had conquered everything that stood between his shepherd's staff and the king's scepter. He would not control the box as well. That would remain under God.

Taxation and Oppression

David seizes on one element of the promise: he prepares to build the temple anyway, letting his (unborn) heir take the credit. Again, this can be seen as yet another canny political move. Battles over succession and legitimacy were endemic in royal houses. David's heir would achieve on the drafting board what David had claimed on the battlefield: legitimacy, primacy, and fame.

Without laying a single stone, David designs the temple portico (verse 11), sets up a schedule for the temple workers (13), "he designated the weight of gold for all the gold articles to be used in various kinds of service, and the weight of silver for all the silver articles" (14). He foresees two golden cherubim, spreading their wings across the gilt box to lend it glory (!).

And he does this in a spasm of spiritual ecstasy: later he will tell Solomon, "All this I have in writing from the hand of the Lord upon me, and he gave me understanding in all the details of the plan" (19).

But there is one problem--it's a problem that faces every king and president sooner or later--where will the gold and silver come from?

The people. The people always pay.

Again, one can look back at God's "no thank you" and see the reason why. God was happy in a tent, why would he need a house? A wooden box, inlaid with gold was enough for His Covenant, was there a need for more? Taxation...taxation without consecration quickly leads to a corrupt church and compromised forms of worship.

David offers his fortune: three thousand talents of gold, with thousands more of silver, bronze and iron. "The task is great," he proclaims, "because this palatial structure is not for man but for the Lord God" (1 Chronicles 29.1). The people respond with five thousand talents of gold. This is a tax that will extend for a generation, long after the completion of the Temple, until the kingdom is divided by the oppressive taxing regime.

Because I am full of irony (thanks to John), I note that "the people rejoiced at the willing response of their leaders.... David the king also rejoiced greatly" (9), but there is no mention of how God responded.

Imagine there's no Temple. It's easy if you try. No sanded cedars. No golden cherubim guarding the Most Holy Place. No courts, no altars.

It is important to pause here because of the picture we see without the Temple. Israel is at its height of conquest. David rules in Jerusalem, fully allied with God and devoted to Him. The people are religious, eager to glorify God and willing to give all they have.

It will never fully be this way again in Jerusalem's future...at least not until the New Jerusalem found in Revelation 21.

But that is for a future time, and I will delve into Solomon later.

A Soldier's Memorial

2010-05-30T18:03:00.001-07:00

I spent the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend cleaning up my study. This is something I do just once ever three or four years (or roughly twice as often as my 2nd-least-favorite chore, cleaning the garage).

As I was organizing the files, I came across this picture.

I have a number of military men in my family tree. My family research is thick with the military files of my Grandpa Dittes, who was an Army MD in Australia & New Zealand during World War II. I have the flag that draped my Grandpa Mooney's casket when he died in 1981, recognizing his service in the Navy during World War I.

I also have this postcard--a link to an army man about whom I know very little.

The postcard is addressed: Familie Gotthold Dittes, Delikatessen Geschaeft, Broklyn (sic) New York, Amerika. It's amazing, the spare address. My great-grandfather, Gotthold Dittes, indeed owned a grocery story in a German section of Brooklyn. His wife, Anna Katherine Funk Dittes, was a cook who ran the deli.

It is signed, "Schwager und Brueder," leaving me with no certain first name. I know his last name, of course. The man in this picture is my great-great uncle. His last name, like my great-grandmother's, was Funk. He was one of 10,000 young men from the city of Ulm to sign up for the imperial German Army during the opening years of the Great War.

I read the card closer. It is difficult because of Fraktur, the German form of cursive that makes some of the letters quite difficult to make out. I'll try my best.

"Muensingen, 6/6 1915." Muensingen was the site of the Duke Albrecht Barracks, a training site for soldiers ready to ship off to the Front. During a break from training, my great-great uncle had gone to a photo studio to have this card made. Observe his well-groomed mustache--I doubt it looked so nice once he made it to the trenches. His uniform is crisply pressed, his bolt-action rifle looks ready. Does he look fierce? Not to me, he doesn't.

I can make out little else from his note. He wants my great-grandparents to see his picture as a soldier "bild als Soldat." I find the word, "family." My German isn't good enough to read the whole note, much less peer between the lines at his thoughts.

In 1915, the war still seemed winnable for all sides. There had been heavy casualties, but the bloodbath of 1916 was still in the future. Here in the States, my grandparents were still speaking German in their deli and in their home. Gotthold had arrived just ten years earlier, Anna had come in 1901. My grandpa was just three years old.

Perhaps it's because it's Memorial Day, but I wonder how the war went for my great-great uncle. My cousin, Frank, has told me that my great-grandmother exchanged letters with family throughout the war--or at least until the United States entered the war against Germany (I'm sure familial communications were hampered by this fact). He has told me that Anna's three brothers served in the German Army and that all three survived.

While Memorial Day is an American celebration, this picture brings me to another conclusion. It makes me think of the soldiers on all sides of a given conflict. Their shared concerns for families and loved ones behind the lines.

It makes me glad to have grown up in a family with a unique perspective on the two greatest conflicts of the 20th Century--whose deep ties bridged the gaps erected by emperors, generals and dictators.

Slice of Life: The Jackpot

2010-04-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

Owen, Jonah and I cleaned the car today.

I'm embarrassed in how seldom I clean or wash my car. It's not a high priority for me. Perhaps the best way to describe how dirty the car needs to be, is to say this: once the trash pile reaches the bottom of the windows, it's time to pick up.

When I cleaned, I went all out. The boys pulled out everything, sorting the junk from the lunch boxes, water bottles and pencils. I got out the vacuum cleaner, determined to get everything really clean.

In a moment of inspiration, I decided to remove the back seat. "Take a look at this," I said to the boys, who were trying to sneak away from the job for the 4th time.

There is something awesome about the back seat of the car. It's the same as the inside of a couch or chair, I think. There is a treasure trove of great stuff that has fallen back there over the years. Pens, coins, toys, cards--the every day flotsam and jetsom of life make their way back there. They aren't the kinds of things that a person will miss, but when they are found, it's kind of like...

"Jackpot!" Owen said as I removed the back seat. I looked down on a grotesque scene of smashed Skittles candies, lint, and scraps of candy wrapper. I noticed some coins sparkling out of this mess. There could easily be a dollar or two scattered back here, I thought.

Owen moved quickly through the back of the car, picking things out of the seat. "This is awesome!" he said. "Look at all these Legos."

I looked over. He was carefully looking through the junk, picking up Lego pieces, leaving the rest to me. He found the head of his Anakin Skywalker mini figure. He found a piece to a Bionicle that had been missing for a year, he said. "And here is the piece to my MX4Ti," he added. I hate when they speak Lego, don't you?

Later Jonah and I counted the change that I had collected after Owen had rescued the Legos. It added up to $3.75. Not quite the jackpot that Owen had found, but welcome nonetheless.

There's No Omega in Faith, No Alpha Either

2010-04-23T20:30:00.000-07:00

I was in Sabbath School at my sister's church a few weeks ago, and I found myself on familiar ground for those of us who regularly attend Bible studies: second-guessing characters in the Bible and--in a small way--second-guessing God.

The topic was Hagar and Abraham: his tragic choice to follow his wife's directions and lie with her servant. Why did he do it? Would that he would have known the consequences. The strife of the present-day Middle East, between descendants of Isaac and descendants of Ishmael, came to light.

It was a challenging, thought-provoking discussion, and at the end, I was struck by a single, enlightening text: "I am the Alpha and the Omega...who was and is and is to come, the Almighty" (Revelation 1.8).

Right then and there I caught a God's-eye view of Hagar and Ishmael, and it gave me a God's-eye view of my own life, my legacy, and the essence of my faith.

Let me begin with a story.

The Danube River flows between two German cities that lie on the border of the states of Baden and Bavaria: Ulm and Neu Ulm. In 1876, the only way between these cities was by river ferry.

I do not know of the exact date, but family lore states that on one fateful day, a river ferry sank. Riding on that ferry was a young man named Karl Funk, and he survived the sinking, saving--in the process--a young woman named Anna-Katherine. I know their names, because they can be found on the birth certificate of my great grandmother, who was born in Ulm in 1881.

I love this story for three reasons: it has a trace of romance, it seems miraculous, and it resulted directly in me. You see, if that ferry had made it safely across the Danube that day, Karl and Anna-Katherine might have gone their separate ways without meeting. If one or the other had perished, then James Albert Dittes would most definitely not exist, nor would any of my kids...or their kids to come.

Karl saved Anna-Katherine that day, yes, but he also saved me.

I guess that makes it easy for me to take a God's-eye view of the events of that day. When God looked down on this sinking ferry, he saw these two young people among the passengers. But because God is outside of time and space, it is easy for me to understand that He also saw me and Owen. In fact, it is not hard for me to believe at all that God saw me and knew that I would worship one day in Savannah, Georgia, and figure all this out!

"I am the Alpha and the Omega...the Almighty."

This is mind-blowing stuff. But when I apply it to Abraham and Hagar, I understand how God could find faith so easy while Abraham couldn't. When God looked at Sarah, he didn't see an old woman; he saw Isaac--and through him, David and Solomon, Jeremiah and Amos, Jesus and Paul, and all those who would one day worship in Jesus' name.

And as Abraham lay with Hagar, God didn't think, "This ruins everything." Instead he could see through Ishmael to generation after generation of descendants--ALL of whom He loved. I struggle to ascertain the consequences of my decisions at a distance of weeks or months. God sees me act--for good or evil--and projects it to "the third and fourth generation" (for the record, I am four generations removed from the Danube Miracle). This is a truly amazing perspective. This is Alpha and Omega--a beginning unimaginably far before my beginning, an end eternally beyond my end.

For much of my life, I was a fundamentalist Christian. "God said it--that settles it" was a good way to describe my worldview. When the proverb stated, "He shall direct thy paths," I literally expected God to tell me every place to go and every thing to do when I got there.

In 2003, after the disastrous end of not just a job but an entire career path, I sought for solace in the Book of Job. The God I found there was not the hand-holding dispensationalist I had grown up with. Instead He was Alpha. He was Omega.

At the end of the Book of Job, a storm rises. Out of the storm, God speaks to Job. He doesn't offer comfort. Instead his words sound like rebuke. "Where were you?" he asks angrily. "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation...? Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!" (Job 38.4-5).

Job cannot speak. God cannot say it more clearly: "I am the Alpha; I am the Beginning. Everything you do--for good or for evil--comes somewhere along the continuum after me. You may be Beta, you may be Theta. You cannot see far enough ahead or behind to really understand."

Job's reply is a statement of faith in the Alpha God: "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know" (42.3). It takes faith to believe in a Creator God, to place in His hand the origins of my life, my consciousness, my planet, my universe.

It is through Christ that we understand the Omega. I believe this is why John puts these key words of faith in his mouth in Revelation 1.

You see, in my limited view, Omega is the end of my life. My senses, my thoughts, my experiences comprehend only the Alpha of birth and the Omega of death. But when I give these to God, in exchange for his God's-eye view, the distances widen. Maybe the Alpha isn't my birth date, but the day Karl rescued Anna-Katherine out of the Danube River. Or maybe it stretches long before them to some other miracle in which God saw me.

Therefore the Omega also stretches on. On this earth it extends to my descendants, whom I will never see or know, but whom I can love, just as I love Karl and Anna-Katherine. It extends into eternity, this Omega, to judgement and to resurrection and then still further on. My act of faith is not in speculating upon these things but in relying fully in the Omega to have themprepared for me.

As a Christian, I believe that the only person to experience the human-life Omega and return was Jesus Christ himself. Yet if Jesus really did go through this, why didn't He talk about it between Easter and Ascension? He could have said, "This is what it's like" or "You won't believe what I've seen." Instead there is no Omega. There is only the direction to "go into all the world."

The disciples weren't the Omega; Christ was. They weren't even the Psi--the 2nd-to-last letter--even though many of them might have believed it at the time. Christ didn't have to reveal Omega. He was Omega, and I can be utterly faithful that he is my Omega without needing to know the measurements of heaven, the boundaries of death, or the depths of consciousness.

Coming from a fundamentalist background, I have seen plenty of controversies among believers. What strikes me is how many of those controversies have their origins in the Alpha and Omega sectors: Creationism vs. Evolution, Original Sin, Heaven & Hell, the Afterlife, Judgment, etc. When it comes down to Beta through Psi theology, Christians have very little to debate within the Body of Christ. True Christian faith, I believe, leaves to God the Alpha and Omega, and leads the Christian to find his/her place on the continuum of God's faithfulness to humanity.

Growing from this background, I can also understand the text, "he shall direct thy paths," in meaningful new ways. I have grown to believe that God does not direct my every step. I have given up trying to seek his guidance for specific, day-to-day experiences.

Faith in Alpha and Omega is direction enough. I choose to behave in every role--as father, husband, teacher, and friend--as someone who was destined to do this, someone who was created for the very purpose of doing this very thing excellently. I also find that my belief in the Omega helps me to make decisions with the long view in mind.

Let me close with one other fun illustration. I really believe that Alpha and Omega can be understood in the context of love, as well as faith.

Even after sixteen years of marriage, Jenny and I are not completely in agreement on the Alpha of our love for each other. Jenny has very definite memories of her first interactions with me. Those are not the same as mine. We agree that she had feelings earlier than I did, but the exact beginning of our love affair is up for debate. In fact, when we do talk about it, we often end up arguing or teasing each other. Even our versions of my proposal in Eden Park, Cincinnati, Ohio, in September 1993 are different!

The fact is that we have never debated this Alpha to the nth degree because we are very much in love. There are things that our love must do for each other today. For Ellie, our love has no reasonable existence before she came along in 1997--the same goes for Owen and Jonah. What was the point?

Would you like to know how much we speculate on the Omega of our relationship? I'm sure you know. We assume it will end in one spouse's death at some time in the future, and we take precautions with a will and life insurance. It is not a priority in our relationship, however, we are loving in the present.

I think our shared faith in God helps us to focus our relationship and expel unknowns--rather, to leave those unknowns in the knowing hand of the Almighty.

I think that true faith is contained in these two words: Alpha, Omega. When we can turn over to God our origins and our legacies, we can find true peace.

What Forrest Sees that Some Don't See

2010-04-05T20:59:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I had some time to write about the history found at Tennessee's state capitol, namely the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a man who fought against the United States and preferred to see Republicans hung.

I didn't have time to point out the greatest irony of Forrest's statue. It is the fact that it looks unwaveringly upon this bronze relief, commemorating Tennessee's ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. The primary figures in this relief are of African origin, freed slaves, now legislators and citizens under the newly ratified rights. There is no Nathan Bedford Forrest shown here.

Let's review for a moment these key amendments, which established rights for former slaves and finally brought the Constitution into line with the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and reiterated in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

The 13th Amendment abolishes slavery throughout the United States.

The 14th Amendment establishes the rights of all men, regardless of race or prior state of servitude to vote or be counted in a census, correcting a clause originally written in the Constitution that identified slaves as being 3/5ths of a person for the purpose of citizenship and census. It also bars folks like Forrest, who had served under America's enemies, from holding federal office.

The 15th Amendment states that "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

These amendments marked a fundamental change in American governance--a change bought with the blood and sacrifice of tens of thousands of Union soldiers. Yet they are at the key of misunderstandings that plague Southern states like Tennessee to this day. A large number of Americans remain willfully ignorant of their meaning--or at least fail to apply that knowledge in political discourse today.

Nathan Bedford Forrest would understand. He would know that the legislatures that ratified these amendments in Tennessee and throughout the South were made up of Republican imposters--transplanted Northern "carpetbaggers," freed slaves, and craven Southern "scalawag" sympathizers to the Union cause. He would recognize that Southern states were forced to ratify these amendments as a condition for returning to the Union and removing occupying federal soldiers.

But as Forrest's Klu Klux Klan riders stormed through the South, restoring the dominance of the conservative Democrats, these three key amendments became ever more entrenched as law. Many key provisions--voting rights for African Americans, for example--would be delayed in the South for another 90 years, but they would come. Inexorably, they would come.

One of the key provisions of the 14th Amendment states:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Can you hear the ghost of Thomas Jefferson in those lines? When the United States had been just an idea, written on paper as a declaration to the King of England, Jefferson had written that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator to certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

When the time had come to ratify the Constitution twelve years later, these sentiments were left on the cutting room floor. The states were not unified. There was much opposition. Compromises needed to be made.

Certain citizens needed to remain "alienable," namely enslaved persons whose unrequited toil and hardships drove the economy of southern states. To live in the "Land of the Free," especially in the proximity of enslaved people, one needed "alienable rights," too. In fact, to make sure that the federal government didn't overstretch its bounds, the founders inserted the 10th Amendment into the Bill of Rights, stating that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

I have heard a lot about the 10th Amendment in recent weeks, especially in the wake of the historic Health Care Reform passed by Congress just three weeks ago. As Nathan Bedford Forrest's political heirs came to terms with their outrage over this expansion of federal power, many advocated the 10th Amendment as their bulwark against this legislation. Indeed it is the basis of a possible suit by a group of state attorneys general to block the implementation of the bill.

Yes, it's totally bogus.

Read the 14th Amendment again--the one that fixed the Constitution and banished forever the "peculiar institutions" preserved by the 10th Amendment. It gives the federal government huge leverage over the states to enforce laws--particularly those relating to the "privileges or immunities of citizens." Where did the federal government get this power? On the battlefields of Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia, that's where.

Jenny and I have been watching the PBS Documentary, "Eyes on the Prize," this week. It's a gripping look at the civil rights movement that established the 14th Amendment as the law of the land. It's mind boggling--to us--to see the opposition that such simple acts as seeing a 1st-grader walk to school or enrolling in the University of Mississippi could have been met with riots and outrage.

Yet when I see President Eisenhower sending the 101st Airborne to Central High School in Little Rock, or when President Kennedy sends US Marshals to Oxford, Mississippi, I am seeing the 14th Amendment in action. Those who opposed integration in the 1950s and 60s--just as those who oppose health care or national standards for education today--belong to a pre-14th mindset. They have not come to terms with a federal government that has claimed these rights for 140 years.

Now this is not to say that there is no place for conservatism in American politics. President Eisenhower was a conservative who acted more out of a concern for the breakdown in law and order in Little Rock than any liberal utopianism. There needs to be accountability in government and good management--and true conservatives are well equipped to bring this.

But it is to say that when inequalities exist, We the People can and will step in to stop them. America's health care system is broken, it is a problem too big for individual states to solve. On the horizon, climate change is too big a problem to attach piecemeal, state by state. A poor education system isn't just Tennessee's problem or Indiana's problem, it is a national problem, and the 14th Amendment gives We the People the right to step in and make it right.

That's what I see, anyway. And that's what Nathan Bedford Forrest sees in Tennessee's capitol, whether he likes it...or not.

The Tennessee State Capitol: Nathan Bedford Forrest

2010-03-29T20:27:00.000-07:00

[I tried to post this as a photo & comments to Facebook last Friday. It didn't work out quite right. I'm going to re-post this as a blog post. Sorry if you've read it before.]

I'm in the state capitol today at a student conference, and I want to share some observations about my state.

This statue in the Capitol gallery is of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a man who fought AGAINST the United States. Moreover, he was a founder of the Klu Klux Klan.

So why does his statute occupy a priviledged place in the Capitol? It is an example of the South's complicated relationship with America's history, with the country's present, and with the future.

Forrest was one of the Confederacy's most effective raiders. Never defeated in battle, his motto was "get there first with the most." At war's end, he became a potent Southern leader at a time when Northern opportunists were raiding the Southern economy for quick profit and political gain (like Lincoln,these transplanted "carpetbaggers" were Republicans, which is why, from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 to the 1990s, Republicans were considered with abhorrence by conservative Southern whites.

Forrest's days as the first "Grand Wizard " of the KKK were short but effective. In modern parlance, he claimed that the KKK was a "fair and balanced" alternative to the Republican "Loyal Leagues." As one Alabama newspaper put it, "The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan." One editorial cartoon of the period showed a KKK lynching: its victims were white, and written on one victim's carpet bag was the word, "Ohio."

Today we think of Forrest's KKK in strictly racial terms. In the 20th century, their burning crosses and white-capped members sought to intimidate Southern blacks into compliance with segregation.

But I know of no attacks that Forrest carried out against freed slaves. His target was Republicans. He hounded them out of their judgeships, targeted Northern-owned industries, and eventually returned the South to the dominance of the political, Democratic, conservative class that had ruled from the time of Andrew Jackson to the end of the Civil War. Forrest was a SOUTHERN patriot, even if he wasn't an AMERICAN one.

Eventually things got out of control. The armed "night riders" under the sheets weren't always acting for political reasons. Shortly after a federal grand jury declared the Klan a "terrorist organization"in 1870, Forrest disbanded the organization completely, claiming that it had been "perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace."

The closing years of Forrest's life wouldn't seem to reflect the actions of a notorious racist. The New York Times, in its obituary of Forrest, October 30, 1877, noted that his last public appearance was before a 4th-of-July celebration of African-Americans near Forrest's home in Memphis:

"[In] his last notable public appearance .... he appeared before the colored people at their celebration, was publicly presented with a bouquet by them as a mark of peace and reconciliation, and made a friendly speech in reply. In this he once more took occasion to defend himself and his war record, and to declare that he was a hearty friend of the colored race. "

This brings to light two ironies of Tennessee's Capitol today.

One: both legislative chambers in Tennessee's Capitol are controlled by Republicans! If Forrest were to return from the grave and learn this, there would be hell to pay. Folks would get hanged. The Capitol might even be burned.

The second irony can be found on the wall that Forrest's statue looks at. It's time for lunch, but I'll develop this more a little later.

The 21st-Century Dad: A Tip

2010-02-28T20:29:00.001-08:00

Four weeks ago, I saw something on Owen's report card I'm not used to seeing: a B.

It was math, a subject Owen has usually owned. After making sure to celebrate all of his well-earned A's with a trip to the bookstore, I asked about the B.

It was his tests. His times tables. He was getting the questions right, but he wasn't up to speed on the timed tests.

I followed his homework and noticed the same problem occurring over and over: 70s and 80s on the quizzes. Everything else had 100s.

I had to do something, so I did what any 21st-century dad would do: I downloaded a new app for my cell phone.

Last Christmas Jenny surprised me with a Motorola Droid. Wow! It had the touchscreen and the MP3 capabilities of the iPhone, but this one ran on Verizon's network! I've had so much fun with that thing in the past two months. I have apps to view the night sky, listen to Pandora, play word games.

For Owen, I downloaded an app called "Flash Cards." It spits out math problems, and he has to answer them quickly. There is a journal that keeps track of his times and the number he gets wrong. He began to play it once or twice on the way to and from school.

Last week, he brought home a math test: 100%! Yes!!

Now that's what I call high-quality 21st-century fathering.

A Resurrection for Christianity: Surprised by Hope

2010-02-26T19:30:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure where it's harder to be a Christian--in a godless land, where the Believer attracts martyrdom or in a God-full land like mine, where Belief is so easily drowned out in a cacophony of sales pitches. I'm so fortunate that I have, in N.T. Wright, a sojourner who has the intellectual muscle to break down so much of the fake noise in his book, Surprised by Hope.

If you didn't read this book last Easter (when it came out), you owe it to yourself to digest Wright's ideas before Easter rolls around again. It strikes to the heart of what Christianity has always been about, and dismisses a lot of fakery in the process.

I don't think that Wright was "rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church," as the subtitle implies. Instead of new thought, he is focused on re-establishing a Resurrection-centered theology and renewing the mission of the Church that naturally stems from this.

Wright sees Christianity pulled by two poles: the Liberal side is ready to dismiss the literal Resurrection and discount the miracles of Jesus, relying instead on the moral and ethical advantages of faith. On the other hand, fundamentalists have stirred up an orgy of speculation on Rapture and Second Coming--a line of theology that justifies reactionary political stances (on the environment, on justice) and subverts Resurrection. What about Death? Is it nothingness? Is it a fantasy world where Christians take time from floating on clouds to view life back on earth?

These are big questions--ones about which few Christians, even after nearly 2000 of systematic theology struggle to find agreement. Wright answers them authoritatively, using New Testament scriptures to support his case.

Wright is most concerned with Christians who adopt the Platonist view of life: a dualistic view that sees earthly things as evil and spiritual things as good. He traces this heretical line of reasoning to the Gnostics of the 3rd Century. He points out, however, that God saw Creation as "good," and that his goal in sending Christ was to sort things out here on Earth. The climax of Revelations is a New Jerusalem returning to earth. So why do so many Christians seem happy to leave Earth behind? Wright seems to agree with C.S. Lewis's idea in Mere Christianity that maybe Heaven is all around us, unseen, in a dimension or level of existence that is more real than what we experience now.

The Resurrection, properly taught, dismisses dualism. God's kingdom comes, we pray, on earth as it comes in heaven. Therefore Christians take up the promise of resurrection, sharing with everyone the taste of beauty, the sense of justice, the burden of compassion this teaching unleashes.

I found myself reading this book with a Bible close by. Wright returns again and again to 1 Corinthians 15, the chapter in which Paul discusses our resurrected bodies and the state of our spirits after death. He covers the teachings of Christ and Peter, too. Every chapter was thought-provoking. It deserves careful thought--and the earnest student of scripture will not be disappointed.

I especially loved Wright's suggestion that the Pentecost Season--the 40 days between Easter and Pentecost--be celebrated as an anti-Lent. Christians should take up one good habit during this time, even as we give up vices for Lent. He even recommends champagne on Sundays during this celebration.

Easter 2010 is coming, praise God. But a Greater Easter is the promise of every spring. Resurrection awaits all who believe and who put their hope in God.

Cool Conclusions

2010-01-20T11:21:00.000-08:00

I've been teaching writing for thirteen years now. Every year or so I come up with a new wrinkle.

This year my challenge was lazy conclusion-writers in my 11th-grade class. Somewhere along the way--probably 8th grade language arts--they learned to "bail out" on a conclusion. In other words: restate the thesis, give a pat answer, get outta Dodge.

We're practicing for the statewide TCAP writing test by writing essays for college applications. I was trying to come up with a word that summarized a good conclusion.

I came up with three:

Jedi Mind Trick.

Remember how Obi-wan Kenobi would wave his hand in front of the object's face and say something like, "These are not the droids you are looking for"?

THAT'S how to write the conclusion to a good essay. You are placing in the mind of the reader the very idea you want them to say back to you. In a college application essay, that would be something like this:

"You will enjoy having me on your campus"

"These skills and more will make OSU a livelier, funnier place"

What Jedi mind tricks do you have? If you were applying to college again, what would you want the admissions clerk to mindlessly type into their computer after reading your essay?

Review: Rob Bell's Drops like Stars Tour, Nashville, TN

2009-12-10T19:33:00.000-08:00

Jenny and I joined four of our friends from the Bethpage Church at the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville Wednesday night to see Rob Bell, one of the few American pastors who can "tour" 1,000-seat theaters to promote a book in this day and age.

If you've seen Bell's "Nooma" videos, or you've read some of his books, you know what to expect. I've always been drawn to his intellectualism--his 'Everything is Spiritual' tour really spoke to me with its incorporation of physics and extra-dimensionality. But what has helped Bell to become one of the most widely recognized voices in Christianity is his embrace of 21st-century media.

I don't know of any channel where I can watch his sermon's every week. I do know that four or five times a year, NOOMA integrates a sermon into a compelling film which is then circulated among churches and Sunday schools of all denominational stripes--for those of you who don't know Nooma, it's basically a sermon delivered over a cool soundtrack, highlighted by a well-filmed backstory that elaborates on the sermon's themes.

Bell is media; he is message--and he integrates both sensationally.

In Drops like Stars, Bell tackles the thorniest of theological issues: suffering. It seems like a reach. It is one of the most written-about themes in Christian literature, from the book of Job to Bonhoeffer to Phillip Yancey's recent addition to this ouvre, Where is God when it Hurts. Bell's take isn't to reach for the big answers, but tries to propose a new context to suffering--to ask new questions about what suffering can accomplish in the believer's life--rather than why it occurred in the first place. Not "Why This?" as Bell puts it, but "What Now?"

I liked this approach. It testifies to Bell's creativity--his live presentation is a feast of the senses, something that evokes his fascination with music, art, film, and all manners of the creative process. It provides hope for all of us--not hope in a world free of suffering, but of hope in a community in which our own suffering, along with the shared suffering of those around us, spurs us to find more in ourselves than we ever would have expected.

While he used a host of well-chosen anecdotes about everything from Pope John to the Will Farrell movie, Old School, his message was grounded in solid biblical principles: Paul's exhortation to the Corinthians that he and his evangelizing companions had been "sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything" (2 Cor 6.10); Jesus' tale of the prodigal son.

I especially appreciated his meditation on the cross--the ultimate sign of suffering in Jesus' day. When Christians wear this--when we display it in our churches--we are saying, "I embrace suffering: I adore the man who suffered here; I am an instrument to embrace those who suffer around me."

How I wished Bell had gone on. The presentation lasted a solid two hours, yet it opened up so many more areas of the Bible for me. The Beatitudes call us "blessed" when we suffer, when we are poor, when we are meek. They embraced suffering two years before the Cross, and they prescribe a fair amount of suffering for those who choose to follow Christ.

Perhaps true suffering is where real Christianity begins and all the fake forms of the religion evaporate. The Prosperity Gospel, the Medieval crusades, inquisitions, premillenial and hellfire-and-brimstone brands of Christianity go to great lengths to either ignore suffering that goes on in the present or contribute greatly to it.

I can't wrap up this review without commenting on the media. In his "Everything..." tour, Bell had used a whiteboard, which he had filled over the course of the sermon with illustrations of the theories he was describing. The "Drops..." presentation was far more media-driven.

Early in his sermon, Bell said, "Someone tweeted before we started that he had the worst seats in the house, and from the picture he posted, he was somewhere up there." He pointed to the upper balcony, high above where Jenny and I were sitting in the front. A guy waved his hands.

"Come on down," Bell said, pointing to two empty seats on the front row of the floor.

"I want a better seat, too," a female voice cried from another side of the balcony.

"Bring her with you," Bell said. I was amazed that he would have been checking his Twitter so close to the presentation.

As Bell spoke, there was a huge screen on the stage. At several points of the presentation, Bell interacted with the image on the screen--standing in the middle of a pictured hospital hallway, for example, and walking from door to door. At other times the screen showed texts, quotes and video. I thought he used the illustrations in a unique way, interacting with them, using them as powerful parts of his stories.

He also used a couple of kinesthetic tricks that appealed to the teacher in me. He gave each member of the audience a bar of soap. Then he demonstrated photos of images that sculptors had found within similar bars of soap--this is a great technique, and I plan to use it when I teach Greece and Rome. However, there wasn't anything to carve the soap with, and onlookers were merely encouraged to take the soap home...and...carve away.

The second stunt was better. When we suffer we identify with others who are suffering. Bell described how an injury to his writing hand had provided him with empathy for all who are injured. He had us write, "I know how you feel," with our non-writing hand. Then he asked everyone for whom cancer had impacted to stand. They exchanged cards. He did this with those suffering from addictions, those struggling to pay bills, several other scenarios, and the room was filled with empathy as cards were exchanged. We knew how others felt. It was a cool display.

There were a few things about the presentation that are unique to Rob Bell (I'm not sure why this is part of his style, but I noted them).

He didn't cite scripture. He used scripture, but you would need a concordance to figure out which ones. "Jesus tells a story about a man with two sons" is how he begins the story of the Prodigal Son. "A man named Paul once said" was the prelude to the text to 2 Corinthians 6.10. I'm assuming that he's used to talking to unchurched people like this, but I--a rather overchurched person--found it difficult to follow along sometimes.

Comparing notes with Jenny after the service, it was interesting how our differences had affected what we had seen. Jenny is really going through a challenging time at the clinic now, and she encounters tremendous suffering on a daily basis in the stories of her patients. She really identified with Bell's message. Admittedly I am not as emotional as Jenny, and I didn't feel as blessed, although I picked up some great ideas and some fuel for further Bible study.

In my opinion, Drops like Stars stretches the media in creative, unpredictable new ways, but it didn't feed my mind and my spirit in the ways I have seen other messages do.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, the Birth of What?

2009-12-09T07:18:00.001-08:00

I'm preparing a lesson on Randall Jarrell's classic World War II poem.

As so often happens, I've found something new; something that I hadn't noticed before; something I wanted to share with you.

From my mothers' sleep I feel into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

I have always recognized the caustic reference to the State and the ultimate sacrifice it demanded.

For some reason, I have always missed the imagery. "Mother's sleep," "hunched in its belly," and "loosed from its dream of life" are all images of pregnancy and childbirth. Now that I think about it, the ball turret rests on the belly of a B17 much like that of a fetus, hovering innocently "six miles from earth."

So what happens? There is "black flak" and "nightmare fighters." The child awakens to the weapons of death.

It's an abortion that Jarrell is describing, isn't it? Read the last line again. It's an abortion.

Why didn't I understand that before?