Archive for December 2021
Metábasis eis állo génos (2-52)
To the Word has us in Isaiah. Advent is such a fitting time to read Isaiah!
Woe to the multitude of many people
Who make a noise like the roar of the seas,
And to the rushing of nations
That make a rushing like the rushing of mighty waters!
The nations will rush like the rushing of many waters;
But God will rebuke them and they will flee far away,
And be chased like the chaff of the mountains before the wind,
Like a rolling thing before the whirlwind.
Then behold, at eventide, trouble!
And before the morning, he is no more.
This is the portion of those who plunder us,
And the lot of those who rob us. (Isaiah 17:12–14, NKJV)
And in this mountain
Yahweh of hosts will make for all people
A feast of choice pieces,
A feast of wines on the lees,
Of fat things full of marrow,
Of well-refined wines on the lees.
And He will destroy on this mountain
The surface of the covering cast over all people,
And the veil that is spread over all nations.
He will swallow up death forever,
And the Lord Yahweh will wipe away tears from all faces;
The rebuke of His people
He will take away from all the earth;
For Yahweh has spoken.
And it will be said in that day:
“Behold, this is our God;
We have waited for Him, and He will save us.
This is Yahweh;
We have waited for Him;
We will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.” (Isaiah 25:6–9, NKJV adapted)
I have five different tunes for While Shepherds Watched in my music library. It’s hard to pick a favorite, especially now that I have one more to pick from:
Every social theory is a theology in disguise. (C. R. Wiley, “Culture and Worldview“)
Have you ever wondered what set the ladies dancing and the lords a–leaping? Well, it was the pipers’ piping:
Metábasis eis állo génos (2-51)
And Jesus, answering, spoke to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, “Is it lawful to meet on the Sabbath?” (Luke 14:3, adapted)
The striking thing about this is that he answered their watching.
Praise God:
The story of Noah is a comfort for Christians today. Faced with ungodliness on every side, we do not have rule or dominion. We live in a time of prophecy and Ark-building, warning the wicked and building the Church. In time, however, God will destroy the wicked, either through plague or conversion, and give rule to His people. The wine we drink in Holy Communion and the robes our church officers wear are our pledge that this is so. Like Noah, we must never shrink from our duty. (James Jordan, Primeval Saints, 50)
I keep falling farther and farther behind on podcasts. I am three and a half months behind on Ken Myers:
Shakespeare earned his place in our pantheon of minds by staging thought and action. Across his works, terms like think, thinking, or thought outnumber feel, feeling, or felt by a nearly ten to one ratio. He raises ideas into a quasi-physical reality, vivifying their dynamic power as a palpable force. (Scott Newstok, How to Think Like Shakespeare, quoted in MHAJ 151)
He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found: Two cheers for utopia.
Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man’s devising. Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead. (Acts 17:29-31, NKJV)
In read-aloud this week, we stumbled across this helpful history of a grown–up counting his NFTs:
Scott: The Little Prince is Jesus. He has tamed us, and we miss him so much. And all of the stars remind us of him.
Annie [sighing]: Thank you for reading to us!
Amos: I’m going upstairs to wrestle with Asher.
But: we tryst with the prince every week, and so he continues to tame and tend us!
When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wanders a little from the truth. I have not been altogether honest in what I have told you about the lamplighters. And I realize that I run the risk of giving a false idea of our planet to those who do not know it. Men occupy a very small place upon the Earth. If the two billion inhabitants who people its surface were all to stand upright and somewhat crowded together, as they do for some big public assembly, they could easily be put into one public square twenty miles long and twenty miles wide. All humanity could be piled up on a small Pacific islet.
The grown-ups, to be sure, will not believe you when you tell them that. They imagine that they fill a great deal of space. They fancy themselves as important as the baobabs. (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 68)
The population is now four times as great, so the dimensions are twice as great. But this is still a good thing to know.
In a multitude of people is a king’s honor,
But in the lack of people is the downfall of a prince. (Proverbs 14:28 NKJV)
“It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat fields.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 86)
The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.
“You are not at all like my rose,” he said. “As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.”
And the roses were very much embarrassed.
“You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you—the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.”
And he went back to meet the fox.
“Goodbye,” he said.
“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
“It is the time I have wasted for my rose—” said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.
“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . .”
“I am responsible for my rose,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember. (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 86–88)
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (Declaration of Independence)
Metábasis eis állo génos (2-50)
The law of entropy began to be overturned in AD 30 with the fuller intrusion of the Spirit into creation. Children are an especially potent way to multiply the Spirit’s influence in the world.
I discussed epistemology with an unbelieving friend recently. He’s right that it is not sufficient to simply say that the Bible is the basis of Christian epistemology, since we receive the Bible in the context of other things like language and history and embodied existence. For this I like Rosenstock-Huessy’s alternative to cogito, ergo sum. Rosenstock-Huessy says: respondeo, etsi mutabor; I respond, although I will be changed.
Everything is a gift: existence, embodied existence, relationships, language, the Bible. Our proper response to all of these is first to receive them as pure gift, with gratitude to the Giver, and then allow ourselves to be shaped and changed by that. Thus, in a way, our epistemology is founded on the Giver rather than only on his Word.
A friend introduced me to Psallos recently and I have their albums on repeat right now.
Earlier I shared Rosenstock-Huessy’s summary of a few modern revolutions. I am still stuck in the middle of his book, but I wonder what the next era will bring. I pray that it will be every-man-a-fig-and-vine-dresser.
Metábasis eis állo génos (2-49)
The laces on my running shoes come untied at least once a day, and almost always once per run, even with a double knot. A week ago I started using Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot, and they haven’t come untied by themselves yet.
Studies show the new variant is caused by climate conferences and includes myocarditis among its unprecedented symptoms. Scientists have decided to name it the “COP26 variant.”
A friend points out that Delilah is paid some multiple of 1,100 pieces of silver (Judges 16), and in the very next chapter Micah steals 1,100 pieces of silver from his mother. At a minimum there is a thematic link here, but it is interesting to consider whether Micah’s mother is actually Delilah. Micah is not the only son gone bad in this story; Jonathan the Levite is likely the grandson of Moses (Judges 18:30). It seems the tribe of Dan is wandering as well, certainly spiritually. At least it is ambiguous that they are conquering a city outside of their borders (Joshua 19) and which might not even be Canaanite.
Another friend points out that there are times when God will discipline his church for obeying the magistrate:
So [Moses and Aaron] said, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please, let us go three days’ journey into the desert and sacrifice to Yahweh our God, lest He fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.” (Exodus 5:3)
This was interesting:
Amen:
I gotta have my orange juice. 