Last week, I got this query:

Hello Anna,

As I walked to work this morning I saw posters for a “Hell-oween” event…I called the number on the poster and learned that it is going to be a haunted house similar to “Hell House”  which highlights “real-life” terror such as abortion, suicide, homosexuality, etc.

I am concerned, and frustrated. You can’t argue, you can’t call them out publicly, but at the same time I can’t just sit here.

What would your response be? As a human I fear for the teenagers that enter on Friday night and walk out with such intense, misguided understandings.

First, I apologize that I am only now getting to it: sick kids have dominated my thoughts this past week, and their yuck has been frightful enough!

I know of these houses.

Whenever I disagree with somebody, I try to get into their mindset.  It’s a trained habit, forcing me to move out of a reptilian, amygdala-fired reactionary frenzy and toward a thoughtful, perhaps even mindful, consideration of what is being presented and why.

It’s practiced caritas.

So, in the spirit of charity (which stems etymologically from the word caritas), people who create these houses of horror think that they are saving souls.  They think that if people would only “have eyes to see” the eternal consequences of their “immoral” choices, they would abstain and therefore regain their place in heaven.

While many of us find this “evangelism technique” distressing (to say the least) many of us would not hesitate, say, sending our children to a talk against drunk driving given by someone terribly maimed by their decision to do just that.  It’s not Schadenfreude, but rather cause-and-effect made manifest with the goal of averting disaster.

How much more, they figure, ought we literally scare the hell out of people?

We are doing it for their own good!

And let’s face it: it gets people’s attention.

Young people’s impressionable attention in particular.

But here’s the thing about young people: they are in the process of maturing.

And they are ripe (that’s the meaning of the word ‘mature’) for owning their own opinions, their own beliefs.

They are beginning the process of emancipation from the obligatory acceptance of Authority’s opinion, a move which frees them to learn not only that there are other ways of thinking about matters, but that it is acceptable to think!

And so I see these houses as an opportunity to empower them with the gift of some questions at exactly this fortuitous moment in their development into adults.

These questions, for example, aren’t a bad place to begin:

1. Where in Scripture does one see this notion of God’s desire to eternally damn people?

2. What is going on in those texts, and in the time in which those text were written?

3. Where do you see in Scripture contrary notions of God?

In other words, what does a teenager love to do as much as anything, but question authority?

And these houses try to gain authority by scaring the hell out of them.

So the teen has an opportunity to own what they believe, and why they believe it.

They also have the opportunity to learn how arguments are made.

Those who use this approach to make someone come to their understanding of God use coercion via fear as a primary tool.

“Believe or die” can be effective…though the integrity of the effect is questionable.

And so here are more questions:

1. Why use fear as a way to convince people to act or believe in a certain way?

2. How does fear as a catalyst for belief shape the nature of the end-result belief?

3. How does this method reflect the group’s/person’s understanding of God’s essence, or at least God’s way of engaging?

And then I wouldn’t hesitate asking yet another set of questions:

1. Why these terrors?

2. What do they seem to have in common?

3. What sort of terror might those who consider having abortions, or those who have suicidal thoughts, or those who fear coming out, be experiencing here and now?

4.How might we be complicit in their terror?

5. What of other terrors like starving children, the ill, the destitute?  Or of terrors such as greed, monopoly of power, of apathy, of ignorance?

6. Are we as ready to offer help and compassion as we are to condemn?

In short, it seems to me like these “Houses of Horror” are horrible indeed.

But for different reasons than they like to think.

And one can redeem them by inviting those who might be influenced by them to steer clear of the anxiety they produce, to remain calm, and to ask the questions.

One more thing:

Today is Reformation Day.

The key piece of the Reformation is that we are saved by grace and not by works.

That also suggests that we are also not damned by them either.

And it seems to me that that notion, the notion of grace for all, is more frightful to some then hell.

Maybe across the street from your friendly neighborhood “Hell-oween,” you could hold a Counter-Event , a “House of Heaven,” on All Saints’ Day, tomorrow.  You could call it, “Hello, even’ you?”

I’ll stick with my day job.

I’d never heard of the things, but wowza.

You don’t want to meet one in a dark alley, or anywhere else for that matter.

Here are several links to give you an idea about why a whole show was dedicated to rogue waves:

Discovery Channel

Another Discovery Channel

Damninteresting.com

Wikipedia

US News

So a ship sails peacefully on the blue, when out of this very same blue, a 70-to-115 foot tall wall of inviable power appears.

One can do nothing but wait for impact.

No escape.

No hiding.

No pleading.

No mercy.

The wave will sink you.

Until 1995, scientists doubted that rogue waves were anything but the inspired legends of captains and sailors who had spent too much time on the open sea.

But that year they changed their minds.

Off the coast of Norway, an oil rigg measured one of these fluid behemoths to be 76 feet high as it hit the structure.

And the legend became the documented phenomenon.

Now, not only was my friend taken aback by the awesome power of these rogue waves.

Not only did it cause her to rethink a tentatively scheduled cruise.

But she pointed out that life provides its own rogue waves.

You’re sailing along, and then you look up and have only a moment to realize that your whole life is about to be overcome.

And there’s nothing you can do.

You will be tossed into the sea.

In Scripture, the sea is a symbol, a metaphor, for chaos.

(Were I to have a natural personal totem, suffice it to say that it would be the sea)

The presence of God’s power shows itself when the sea is controlled and calmed.

There’s an image circulating about on Facebook (I got it on the Nebraskans for Peace page), and it looks like this:

Rogue waves, this confluence of power, this convergence of energy from unrelated directions, this concentration of destructive forces, threaten us all, and are threatening precisely because they are beyond our control or our perception…at least until the moment right before they stare down at us, and announce that we are about to be thrown overboard.

And, true to the metaphor, sometimes the power of the chaos isn’t believed by anybody.

But in point of fact, the chaos is there and, assuming that the wave doesn’t take us down, down, down, we need someone to rescue us, to pull us out of chaos.

Insofar as someone does just that, sending in the Coast Guard, the lifelines, plucking us out of the water and leaving the broken timber and sunken treasures behind, they’re calming the sea, and stewarding God’s presence, extending a hand to someone who is otherwise drowning.

That said, another way of looking at rogue waves is this story from Perth, sent on to me by my husband.

So here’s a guy with the best of intentions to do himself in, and a rogue wave comes in and saves him.

There’s an interesting thought: sometimes rogue waves might be the very thing that rescue us. Southern and Roman Catholic author Flannery O’Connor understood this idea: in fact, she built a literary career on it.  Sometimes it is precisely concentrated chaos that throws us onto shore.

And then yet a third take, also from my husband: perhaps there is something to be said about rogue blessings, a wall of tremendously overwhelming grace and undeserved forgiveness and unmediated love and unexpected reconciliation and awesome, joyful surprise.

Rogue waves.

On reflection, one hopes, I suppose, to be spared from, saved by, and blessed with them.

Though I confess that I prefer to think about the whole thing on the prairie while looking at amber waves of grain.

Anna

I was reminded of this on today’s Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor.  We wake up at 6:00 a.m. to classical public radio in my family, and at 6:15 Garrison lulls us right back to sleep with his tales and poetry and voice.

But it’s worth your time to look up Keillor’s superb summary of Bonhoeffer’s life here.

By 6:41, seven-year old Elsegirl and I had had a thoughtful little conversation about Dachau, gas chambers, Hitler’s suicide, pacifism, ambiguity, and grace.

She is so going to need therapy.

I know I’ve linked to this page before as well, a show done on him by the extraordinary Speaking of Faith program.  It’s worth your time on this day too.  53 minutes of stimulating thought, or a lesser amount of time scanning the transcript.

We Lutherans speak a lot about the both/and-ness of life.  The reign of God is already here but not yet, God has given us both Law and Gospel, and we are all saints and sinners.

Bonhoeffer is the poster child for Lutheran ambiguity.

A self-declared pacifist, Bonhoeffer recognized, as the darkness of Hitler’s regime spread over and through Germany’s land, government, church, and spirits, that resistance–even violent resistance–might be the only appropriate, and even faithful, response to his evil agenda.

And so Dietrich Bonhoeffer participated in several plans to assassinate him.

Of course an assassin (wannabe…well, he didn’t really want to be, but felt compelled to be) is the closest thing we Lutherans have to a saint.

Martin Doblmeier (whom Krista Tippett interviewed for the Speaking of Faith segment mentioned above) made an astonishing documentary on Bonhoeffer.  In it, he makes the case that Dietrich was a brilliant theologian, but an assassin?

Not so much.

Bonhoeffer’s ineffectual efforts got him hanged three weeks before his camp was freed.

But his theology?  Wow.

Listen to this observation regarding the connection between faith and life–or, more accurately, the connection between Church and politics:

The church has three possible ways it can act against the state. First, it can ask the state if its actions are legitimate. Second, it can aid the victims of the state action. The church has the unconditional obligation to the victims of any order in society even if they do not belong to the Christian society. The third possibility is not just bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself. No Rusty Swords

Or this thought regarding the possibility that God says different things in different ways to different circumstances:

The will of God is not a system of rules established from the outset. It is something new and different in each different situation in life. And for this reason a man must forever re-examine what the will of God may be. The will of God may lie deeply concealed beneath a great number of possibilities.  Ethics

Or this assertion refuting quietism:

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. Peace is the great adventure. It has to be dared.  (Speech in Fanö, Denmark, 1934)

So today, on Bonhoeffer’s birthday, it seems a good moment to pause and consider the possibility that life is messy.  That things are not always clear.  That God’s call can be ambiguous.  That inaction is itself an action of sorts.  That paralyzed by fear that we might have it wrong–and obsessing that God might just therefore damn us (or at least hate us for a while)–we might be more wrong than we can imagine.

Consider this quintessential observation of Luther’s (found here):

If you are a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary but the true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides. We, however, says Peter (2. Peter 3:13) are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where justice will reign.

• Letter 99, Paragraph 13. Erika Bullmann Flores, Tr. from:Dr. Martin Luther’s Saemmtliche SchriftenDr. Johann Georg Walch Ed. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, N.D.), Vol. 15, cols. 2585-2590. [3

Bonhoeffer did just that.  He trusted that he would sin, but he trusted in the grace of Jesus Christ more strongly.

So he acted out of trust in grace instead of the stultification of fear.

Of course, he got killed for it.

There’s precedence for that, I suppose.

When he died, however, he said, “This is the end, for me the beginning of life.”

There’s some active freedom in that.

The Gospel for the day, this birthday of Bonhoeffer?

Sin boldly.

I am very sad.

Ellie was the secretary in the foreign language department at St. Olaf College, where I went to school.  For some reason or another the work study gods smiled down on my blonde head instead of all the others on the Hill (maybe because my name doesn’t begin with Kris-something I got their attention), and they assigned me to her.

It sure didn’t seem like work, and even less so once Liz, Ellie’s sister showed up to secretary alongside her.  The three of us did get work done, but had we not enjoyed each other so much, perhaps a few more copies would have been made and letters printed and books delivered.

No matter.

Other important business was going on.  Our lives were touched and changed by each other, and for the better.

Ellie embodied mischief, good-heartedness, orneriness, laughter, principle, incorporated grief, kindness, and safety.

And for the record, I was awfully thankful that I was on her good side.

She died four years ago, and so I’m obviously tardy to the news.  I am sure I must have talked to her near the time she decided life was too much, and as I recall the long phone call, we laughed, got caught up, and promised to stay in touch.

So back in the day, the first day of every month, she and I would race to say “Rabbit Rabbit.”

It’s supposed to give you good luck if you say it before anyone else.

I’d never heard of the idea before Ellie but once I did, the game was on.  We orchestrated ways to beat the other to the line: leaving post-it notes on chair seats on the last day of the month before the office closed, sending a card in the campus post, leaving a voice mail to be the first one to claim victorious good luck even in absentia.

So when I looked at the calendar on February 1, habit compelled me to say “Rabbit Rabbit” to her, even in absentia.

I just didn’t realize how in absentia it was until I tried to track her down later that day.

I finally got a hold of a mutual friend of ours who broke the news to me via email.  This led me to finding Liz again on Facebook.  I asked her if I could write about dear Ellie on my blog, and she said yes, and I am so glad she did.

So this is a piece in honor of Ellie M.

She was feisty.

At one level, her suicide seems terribly incongruent with her feisty spirit.

And so when I read that she had died, before I got to the “I believe she took her own life” line, I figured it was those damn cigarettes she smoked (a topic I broached with her tentatively but earnestly….once).

But suicide?

So I’m trying to figure out what the ratio in my reaction of disbelief is: how much of my shock is due to her death, and how much to how she died.

And let me be clear: it is not judgment.  Many believe that suicide is the one unforgivable sin, because one can’t request forgiveness afterwards.

That’s hard for me to buy.

Walt Bouman pointed out that if that were true, then someone wanting to do themselves in would be wiser to jump off a bridge rather than shoot themselves, because at least one could bank on the time between the bridge and the water to ask for forgiveness.

It’s an almost obscene analogy, but it does beg the question, doesn’t it?

And really, how many sins do we commit with no knowledge of them?  Systemic evil, unintentional slights, consequences of addictions or abusive behaviors that we do not acknowledge or perceive?  Can we ever confess and repent of all of our sins?

Again, there is a reason we have the word, “grace.” It means something bestowed when it is not deserved, not earned, not expected.  The moment that you earn it you receive something and it is not grace.  It is a reward.

So no, I am not angry with her, and I do not fear for her soul.

But I am perplexed.  I am aching for those who knew her and loved her more than I.  I am sorry that I didn’t know of her pain and sadnesses.  I am wishing that she had not died alone.

And I am reminded of Camus, who said that suicide is the only important philosophical question.  Something must say “YES” to you to choose to live, for otherwise a “NO” is more powerful than the “YES,” in which case there is no longer any reason to live.

And so of course I am so grieving that she felt compelled toward suicide as a solution.

That said, I don’t believe that it is always so very conscious, when it gets to the point of “choosing” suicide.  I know enough of depression and brain chemicals and of unspeakable pain to know that sometimes the line between choice and desperate instinct is blurry.

I do not know many details of what lead up to Ellie concluding that the NO was more powerful than the YES.  She clearly felt that the NO was a NO to pain, to suffering, to grief, and the YES would have been to the same.

(Maybe, I say wryly to myself, she took Rabbit Rabbit to the extreme, and wanted to say it first in heaven.  I would have preferred a rented billboard into perpetuity, and would have conceded.

Most months.

And anyway, Ellie, the last shall be first, so there.)

I wish I could have been there to say “YES” to her, knowing that I am not alone in my wish, and wondering if a chorus of YESes would have made the difference anyway.

And I am also led to acknowledge, albeit ruefully, that to one facing great pain, “YES” seems trite, seems to overlook the real suffering that one is enduring, seems as obnoxiously helpful as “Just say no” is to an addict.

So Ellie has morphed from friend into symbol of the persistent presence of pain in our world, and how sometimes, despite protestations and heads in the sand and repeating-after-me’s that life wins, sometimes it doesn’t.

And that is sad.

And so today for me, four years ago for others, Ellie died, and so did a bit of the life in the world.  I have to give a win to the reality of NO, dammit.

But enough life is left in this world of ours to say YES to Ellie’s memory: her feisty kind mischievous funny sad warm memory, and to the memory of all those others who found themselves in the same dark spot as she.

And in that memory, I intend to steward those yeses, strewing them about like seeds, even into frozen tundras, in hopes that a bit of YES can melt a bit of NO.

So, in honor of Ellie, YES YES YES.

Advent, as you note in your defining of the term, comes from the Latin “to arrive”. We as Christians anticipate the second arrival, or as we commonly say, second “coming”, of Christ while celebrating Christ’s first arrival. In Christ’s first arrival, God offered Her only Son to die for the sake of all who believe (Jn. 3). Jesus rose from the dead in three days, and after remaining on earth for some time, ascended into heaven and is now placed in God’s seat of highest honor before Her throne (or as the creeds put it, God’s “right hand”). Jesus, who is most truly Lord and Son of God, left the earth to come to the point that it is now, in which people die of various diseases and various sufferings, and knew when He left this world that such things would happen (God is omnipotent, and so also Her Son must be). Why would God’s Son leave this world to return again later knowing that such terrible things would take place? What did God have to gain by having Her Son come twice rather than once?

Right.

Short version: I have no idea.

Well, I have ideas, but nothing I’m willing to put out there as the incontestable, incontrovertible truth.

So I’ll humbly put out there a few of those ideas, consoled by the fact that it is great fun wondering about the question, and by the fact that nobody really knows why anything is as it is, so I’m in good company.

The Christian claim that Jesus came, and then left, is characterized by some as tantamount to him saying, “Now, hold that thought!” while, as you point out, suffering goes on unabated.

What’s up with that?

It’s actually a great Advent season question, because it has to do with waiting.

I am increasingly interested in the difference between ‘waiting’ and ‘anticipating.’

If we wait, we are passive.  As I write this, I am waiting for my car to be repaired (sunroof is stuck in the up position, which is an unfortunate matter when my thermometer is registering 8 degrees!).

But there is nothing that I can do to help that car be fixed.  I can only bide my time, doing activities that are unrelated to the reason I’m waiting.

Anticipating, however, involves action.  When we anticipate something, we involve ourself in the act of waiting.

My daughter was on the phone with my sister last night.  Both are named Else, by the way. So Auntie Else asked Elsegirl, “Are you getting ready for Christmas?”  ”Nope,” said my daughter, “but we sure are getting ready for Advent!”

During Advent, and during this period of waiting for God to come again (for what purpose? you have asked), we wait.

But perhaps it is better said that we anticipate, which means (etymologically speaking) “to take before”.  We are, as Else says, getting ready.  Anticipating is like participated waiting.

Christians can learn a lot about waiting from the Jews.

Taped up on my wall at OMG I have a page from the German newspaper Die Zeit, a piece written by the Jewish theologian Elie Wiesel.  (For those who can read German, the link to this same article is here)  In it, he mulls this business of waiting, of anticipating the arrival of the Messiah.  And he writes this:

“Zurzeit träume ich nicht mehr vom Messias. Er besucht meine Träume nicht mehr. Er kam nicht, als er erwartet wurde. Also hat er Verspätung. Macht nichts, der Jude in mir wartet weiter auf ihn.”

“These days, I don’t dream any more about the Messiah.  He doesn’t visit my dreams any more.  He didn’t come when he was expected.  So he’s late.  Doesn’t matter.  The Jew in me will just continue to wait.”

Now, Wiesel is not speaking here about waiting in keeping with the sort of waiting implied in the joke, “Quick!  Jesus is coming!  Look busy!”  Wiesel is speaking about waiting that anticipates the one for whom we are waiting.  It is the very Jewish notion that we hear in John the Baptist’s cry, “Prepare the way of the Lord!”

So some theories are that Jesus did not disappear to some place far away, but rather appears to us now as the breath that moves in us to make the reign of God present.  Some theologians, notably those who teach something called Process Theology, believe that God works in every moment to inject love and compassion into a situation, and that there you see resurrection, there you see God in the fullness of the moment, seeking always to lure us toward the right and the good.

Others, who agree that Jesus did not ascend to some place, think that he ascended to the future.  The resurrection was a “downpayment,” so to speak, a promise-in-action that death does not have the last word.  It is a both/and notion.  God is already here but not yet fully.

I felt this take on matters when I was two months pregnant with my son Karl during December of 2000.  My life had already changed (I was taking new vitamins, not drinking great German beer any more, planning for his new and safe arrival), even though he wasn’t fully here yet.

It is not to be missed that the notion of God as mother resonates throughout Scripture.  Note Isaiah 49:15:

Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?  Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.

Feminist scholar Elizabeth Johnson notes that Jesus also compares himself to a mother gathering her chicks (Mt. 23:37).  Note what else she says down below in my “quotes” section.  It is goosebumpy good.

And one effect of this notion is, to quote my mentor Walt Bouman, “Now we know that there is more to do with our lives than preserve them.”

That is, we are now called to be “little Christs,” as C.S. Lewis would say in Mere Christianity.  (“The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.  It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.”)

At this point I am reminded of Lisa Ling, whom I once heard present here in Sioux Falls.  She said that she was not a religious person, but married one.  All of the horrors that she covers as a journalist led her to finally ask her husband, “Why doesn’t your God do anything about this suffering?”  To which he replied, “God did.  God made you.”

In other words, we who call ourselves Christians are called to be ambassadors of the reign of God, being in our selves and in the Church demonstrations, enactments, of life trumping death.  Allow me to also point out yet again that it is critical that Christians figure out what we understand Jesus to be, for that informs (dictates, one could say) who we are as “followers of Jesus.”

The tradition of the theology of the cross suggests that God does not passively sit by, but suffers with us, calling new life out of dark death.  It has often attended to the forgiveness of sins, but since WWII, it has asked the question of what the cross says and does not only for those who are the sinners, but for those sinned upon.

Another approach suggests that this period of time is the “gathering time,” the time when Christians are called to proclaim God’s word to all the world.  Even within this idea, there are (at least) two divergent notions: one says that we need to evangelize so that as many people can be “saved” as possible before Jesus comes again; others say that the point is to proclaim the risen Jesus because in him we see God’s agenda to heal and gather all the world.

Regardless of the ideas of what we’re to be doing in the meantime, your last question still hangs over the entire blog entry so far:

Why would God’s Son leave this world to return again later knowing that such terrible things would take place? What did God have to gain by having Her Son come twice rather than once?

How can there be such suffering in a world created by one whom we proclaim to be good?

There is an idea that although one can make the case that God is good, it might be more accurate to say (merely?) that God is God.

God is wild.

God is a mystery.

Even if you take God out of the equation, existence is a mystery.  It doesn’t make sense.

But for those of us who put some faith in something we call God, it behooves us to figure out what we mean by it, more or less, and what difference it makes.

I’ve begun dancing with a thought, a thought born out of an awareness that it is very easy to judge someone’s actions, or inactions, from a distance–and not particularly creative, either.

However, once stories are told from the inside, once differing and personal perspectives are heard, sometimes what appeared to be a cut-and-dry matter suddenly becomes, well, not that.

And one is compelled toward compassion, toward humility, and toward an appreciation of messiness and complexity, a recognition that life is anything but simple.

I look at the suffering you name, and am fully aware of suffering in my life and of the lives in my sphere, and I wonder too with indignation and with perplexity and with curiosity, “What is up?”

And then I wonder whether I need to apply the same sort of humility and compassion toward God that I strive to apply toward others whose actions cause me indignation and perplexity and curiosity.  Maybe something is up.

I do not know why the Messiah has not come/come again.

Some might see this concession as a cop-out.

I don’t feel particularly cop-outy when I point out my son’s brain injury and remind God loudly of God’s promises.

Nor do I find myself particularly relieved of my pain and indignation when I imagine that there is no God and this is all happenstance.

At the very least, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we’ve got a story of a God who gives God’s creation freedom–for if we did not have that, then this entire enterprise of life would be a game, a puppet show, an illusory matrix.

And, it seems to me, that is what love relationships are: wild, a mystery.

(Lest we forget, the Latin origin of the word passion means ‘to suffer.’)

The minute that there is the exertion of coercion, we have no longer a love relationship but a controlling relationship.

So there is freedom, and there is consequent suffering.

And the general trajectory of this same story is that God does not desire pain and suffering, but rather wholeness, healing, justice, mercy, and redemption….and God is passionate about that agenda.

So we’re talking about faith in this agenda, and therefore also in this persistent belief that God desires something different than what you so poignantly describe as this apparently persistent reality.

After all, in the very text you cite, namely John 3, verse 17 (which I have never yet seen held up on a placard at a ballgame) says, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

Below, then, a smattering of thoughts (more to come: I left a few on the floor at my study) on the matter to round out this entry, and to demonstrate some varying voices weighing in on the matter that I stumbled on as I read up on things.

Thanks ever so much for your question.

Jürgen Moltmann in The Coming of God:

…with the raising of the crucified Christ from the dead, the future of the new creation of al things has already begun in the midst of this dying and transitory world… (136)

The eschatological message of the New Testament–’The End of all things is at hand’ (1 Peter 4.7)–is geared towards resistance, and against resignation. (137)

Elizabeth Johnson in Quest for the Living God:

…seeking the female face of God has profound significance.  By relativizing masculine imagery it lassoes the idol off its pedestal, breaking the stranglehold of patriarchal discourse and its deleterious effects.  God is not literally a father or a king or a lord but something ever so much greater.  Thus is the truth more greatly honored.  This is not to say that male metaphors cannot be used to signify the divine.  Men, too, are created, redeemed, and sanctified by the gracious love of God, and images taken from their lives can function in as adequate or inadequate a way as do images taken from the lives of women.  But naming toward God with female metaphors releases diving mystery from its age-old patriarchal cage so that God can be truly God–incomprehensible source, sustaining power, and goal of the world, holy Wisdom, indwelling Spirit, the ground of being, the beyond in our midst, the absolute future, being itself, mother, matrix, lover, friend, infinite love, the holy mystery that surrounds and supports the world. (99)

[Referring to the multitude of maternal images for God in Scripture] Strongly associated with all these maternal images is divine compassion.  Biblical scholars point out that the Hebrew noun for compassion or merciful love comes from the root word for women’s uterus, rehem, which is also the root for the verb “to show mercy” and the adjective “merciful.”  Here the life-giving physical organ of the female body serves as a concrete metaphor for a distinctly divine way of being, feeling, and acting.  When scripture calls on God for mercy, a frequent theme, it is actually asking the Holy One to treat us with the kind of love a mother has for the child of her womb. “To the responsive imagination,” writes Phyllis Trible, this semantic connection “suggests the meaning of love as selfless participation in life.  The womb protects and nourishes but does not possess and control.  It yields its treasure in order that wholeness and well-being may happen  Truly, it is the way of compassion.”

Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality:

What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world.  By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love int he world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world.  In this sense, God is the great companion–the fellow-sufferer who understands. (532)

Kathryn Tanner in Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity:

Since there may come a time when the world no longer exists, this placement in God cannot e equated with God’s repsence or placement within the world.  A kind of indwelling of God in us is, however, a consequence of life in God, just as incarnation has as its consequence a human life lived by the power ofGod.  In imitation of Christ, we live in God and therfore the life we lead has a kind of composite character to match our new composite personhood: God’s attributes become in some sense our own; they are to shine through our lives in acts that exceed human powers and in that way become established as part of a reborn sense of self. (111)

Douglas John Hall in Professing the Faith:

The theology of the cross is about the courage to enter the darkness so that the light may be seen. (128)

Douglas John Hall in Confessing the Faith:

The “good news” (gospel) is formed over against and in response to the “bad news” of the historical moment. (11)

To wait for God is hard.  It is comparable to the posture of the beggar, who possesses nothing, is dependent, and is constantly made conscious of his inadequacy.  The Christian preacher who waits for God feels bereft in the presence of those who look to him for religious answers to all their questions; his expertise appears bogus; he does not command the respect accorded to those who possess authority in their fields.  Yet, who other than superficial persons can give credence to those who speak and act as if they already possessed….God? (271)

The Bible is well acquainted with Shakespeare’s thought that history may be “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  Think only of Sarah’s laughter when she heard “those men” under the tree talking about her forthcoming pregnancy (Gen. 18).  When Israel affirms that hope is a legitimate historical category, applicable to time, applicable to individual life as well as the life of the creation as a whole, it does not do so naively but in the full knowledge that this can never be done easily.  It is a matter of trust in God, not in processes naturally favorable to human welfare. (485)

Emil Fackenheim, Canada’s foremost Jewish theologian and philosopher, now living in Israel, has written that after Auschwitz, hope is for the Jew not an option but a “commandment.”  But hope is authentic only when the Jew remembers–that is to say, remembers not only the ancient “root experience” of the exodus but also the modern one, the Holocaust.  If the data of despair is neglected, then hop–or what will be called hope–will revert to shallow hopefulness, a conditioned reflex of the well off. (488)

Luke Timothy Johnson in The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why it Matters:

The…New Testament’s witness insists that jesus did not return from the dead to continue his former life.  That would be good news only for him and his friends and family.  It would not be a new creation.  It would not be good news for all humanity for all ages.

The resurrection is, the whole of the New Testament witness insists, Jesus’ entry into the life and power of God.  To express that truth, the New Testament uses the language not only of resurrection, but they symbol also of Jesus’ ascension and enthronement at God’s right hand. (185-86)

Jesus’ ascent is the premise for the sharing of the gifts (of the Spirit) with others (Eph. 4:11-16).  The ascension of Christ is not a distancing from us but the condition for a new form of intimacy with us. (189)

James Wm. McClendon, Jr. in Systematic Theology: Doctrine:

According to Revelation 5:9f, the sacrificial work of the earthly Jesus has already formed this “royal” people; we exist; the new politics has begun.  As [John Howard] Yoder puts it, “On the average and in the long run, truthtelling and the love of enemy are the effective ways to create and defend culture,” that is, to give viable shape to the world, even in the present age.  Relief work goes farther than war to enable a people to survive; the Red Cross outlasts the Nazi swastika cross. (99)

Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki in God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology:

The great reversal themes in the teaching and life of Jesus call for a radical openness to God’s rule.  Our structures, no matter how inclusive their original intent, tend to harden toward their own preservation and perpetuation, rather than to be continuously open to the needs of inclusive well-being.  The structures are to be in the service of love and justice.  Openness to God’s future calls upon us indeed to create structures, but always to submit those structures to the critique of the demands of God’s radical love.  Faithfulness to the past, when that past is the revelation of God in jesus Christ, calls upon us for a radical openness to new and unexpected forms of inclusive well-being, God’s reign.

Apostolicity, therefore, is a continuity with the past that nevertheless has an essential openness to it.  In every generation and in every Christian there must be a faithfulness to the content of the gospel: our words must point to the Word who is a person, living, crucified, risen.  Therefore, our words must also take the form of ever new interpretations of ways in which we can enact love and justice.  Word and deed together constitute the church’s faithfulness to its apostolic tradition. Constancy and openness form the dynamism whereby the apostolic church witnesses to the world. (141)

For some time, I’ve been mulling the experience of pain, grief, and suffering as it is experienced in the Church.  I wanted to use this assembly of healers as an opportunity to bounce of a couple of notions I have about the acknowledgement, and in fact stewardship, of pain in the Church.

This use of the term “stewardship” in this way might seem a bit bizarre, but here’s why:

I see stewardship as not about money, nor about the catchy phrase “Time, Talents, and Treasures.”

I like John Westerhof’s phrase, “Stewardship is what I do after I say, ‘I believe.’”

A steward is one who serves in the stead of, instead of, the absent master/mistress.  They do not act according to their own agenda, but rather represent the intentions of the one whom they serve.

So when we’re talking stewardship in the realm of religion, we are talking about acting on behalf of the one whom we call God.

Christians believe that on the cross, everything, including most poignantly pain and suffering, was absorbed into God.  That is, Christians believe that Jesus took upon himself the pain….and that the empty tomb echoes with the belief that life and love and mercy and hope overcame it.

So to make my point, I’m thinking that even the pain becomes God’s.

Like the cross is transformed into Easter, so too can pain be transformed into persistence and hope.

Insofar as that might be true, pain can be stewarded.  Its experience can be shared and, just perhaps, by so doing, can be an avenue for healing by way of solidarity, trust, and compassion.

What I’ve come to decide is that often, the Church doesn’t really know what do to with pain, either the affliction of pain (e.g., accidents, illnesses, natural disasters) or the infliction of pain (e.g., addictions, abuse, betrayals).  We tend to gravitate toward promises of God overcoming, and less time attending in a long-term way to the whatever-it-is-that-must-be-overcome.

The acknowledgment of pain, that life is messy, is often granted 7-8 minutes in a 14-17 minute sermon which ends in a rousing affirmation that we despite everything can trust God’s promises.

It’s probably not a coincidence that we extol those who “persist in their faith,” “believe that God is in control,” “remain strong in the face of adversity.”

The thing of it is, in point of fact, there are many of us who are grieving and/or guilty.

As I warned the Stephen Ministers, unfortunately, it is precisely because they are a Christian ministry that people might not trust them, because Christians often do pretty well with judgment, less well with a commitment to compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation as a matter of habit and course.

I’d like to see more openness to the reality of pain of both sorts: affliction and infliction.

I’d like to move beyond the simplistic (and not particularly creative) judgments about people’s behaviors toward the sacred ritual of asking questions.

I’d like to see us make God’s promises tangible.  If we read in Scripture that not a hair on our head will be harmed, how do make the spirit of that promise true when the literal meaning of it is false?

I’d like to see us be open to vulnerable acknowledgment of our mistakes, a practice which might provide others with the courage to speak about theirs, and finally find welcome in the pews instead of fearful repression of one’s regrets and persistent sorrows.

I’d like to see us name in sermons that some things in this world are inexplicable in the face of our attestation that God is love–and just leave it there.

In short, I’d like to see us reframe stewardship so that care for others allows for the telling of our tales, the sharing of our lessons, the acknowledgment of worthy and true doubt about–and even disgust at–God and religion, the pursuit of humble reconciliation, the consolation of real compassion in the form of meals delivered for months if not years, laundry washed, therapy paid for, babysitters secured, rent covered, tissues offered.

In short, I’d like to see God’s promises concretized, stewarded into presence even when God seems absent.

What do you think?

This latest book was born into being because she suffered breast cancer. While the entire experience for her was horrific, she was most particularly appalled at the expectation that she feel buoyant, positive, and thankful for the toughness earned and the lessons learned through her disease.

She didn’t particularly want to feel any of those.

There is no room in our culture, she seems to be saying, to be pissy.

Now, I haven’t read the book; only the review.

But even that caught my attention.

It brought me back to a conversation I had with a dear woman in my world who had suffered a stroke. That event took away much of her remarkable ability (even well into her 80s!) to create art, to amble around finding quirky gifts for even quirkier relatives and friends, to write, and to read letters sent to her by her many grandchildren.

And something of her brightness of being left her.

Naturally, people were worried. Trouble was, they had the audacity to express it, even mentioning the “D” word to her.

One day, when I visited her, she said, “Anna, I am so tired of people asking me if I’m depressed! Finally I had to holler at them, ‘Of course I’m not depressed! I’m a Christian!’”

To which I responded with my typical flair for pastoral care,

“What the hell.”

I don’t think that this woman is alone in her aversion to naming her pain (even to herself), though.

I worry that Christians are so awfully wrapped up in making a person feel better that we don’t allow for the sacred space of pissiness.

Sometimes I do believe that we might be so ready to leap to Easter that we ignore that there is a grave over which we are leaping.

Now that said, I’m all for the healing of body, mind, and spirit!

But could it be that were Christians to be more overt and more intentional about recognizing faults, regret, sadnesses, anxiety, fears, and the possibility that healing-might-not-come-and-what’s-up-with-that, that trust could be built up that maybe, just maybe, this group understands and allows for pain?

After the accident I wrote an extensive blog about Karl’s healing. At the end of most every entry, I wrote, “God is good.”

I did, until someone who had suffered much too asked me, “How do you know? On what basis are you judging that? I prefer,” said he, “to simply say that God is God.”

It was an interesting comment, because then I was invited to express my deeply grieved and astonished self to God. Honestly. And what I wanted to say to God was exactly what I said to this woman close to my heart:

What the hell.

If a relationship is one, then my figuring suggests that there has to be some relating. There are reasons for people to be upset with God, because God’s promises aren’t apparently living up to God’s reality. I can’t help but wonder if some authenticity is surrendered when there is no room for sacred pissiness.

That said, I do realize that not everybody needs to wrestle with God. Some are quite content and quite faithful in their pure and unquestioned faith.

For the rest of us, however, I’m thinking that if one can say to God, “I am really hurting here, and I feel really betrayed by you, and soon and very soon clearly is not soon enough,” then there’s the beginning of renewed trust.

Annie Dillard gets to the matter in Holy the Firm when she retells the following story:

“Once, in the middle of the long pastoral prayer of intercession for the whole world—for the gift of wisdom to its leaders, for hope and mercy to the grieving and pained, succor to the oppressed, and God’s grace to all—in the middle of this [the pastor] stopped, and burst out, ‘Lord, we bring you these same petitions every week.’ After a shocked pause, he continued reading the prayer. Because of this, I like him very much.”

Ah. There’s authenticity. There’s honesty. There’s a man I can trust. He probably wanted to, but couldn’t in the Prayers of the People of all things, say,

What the hell.

Now, in case some are wondering, things are remarkably hunky-dory in my world. This blog is not a vent of some personal, present crisis. It is really only that that review jarred a series of reflections on the pervasive sense of joy, which just plain old doesn’t always jibe with the plain old reality of trouble.

What do you think?

Anna

This is why theologians get paid the big money [insert ironic chuckle here].

We are supposed to know what is going to happen when we die and why.

Let me be straight up and, on behalf of a whole bunch of us, say: We don’t. For sure. We have hunches, we have hopes, we have hints, but we don’t really, really know.

It’s tricky, right? There are texts that can really scare the dickens out of a person. Take a look at the one you mention: Hebrews 10:26-31.

And why stop there?

Matthew 7:13, Luke 16:26, 2 Thessalonians 1:9, Revelation 20:13-15 all can be cause for deep fear and even despair….and there are a lot more where these came from.

Of course, other texts aren’t so frightening, and actually suggest a wider door.

1 Tim. 2:6, 1 Cor. 15:22, Romans 5:17, Col. 1:20, 1 John 2:2.

Of course, each of these texts are bound to the verses before and after it, and bound by the author’s historical context, and many can be interpreted a number of ways.

My point here is that the Bible (in the cases listed above, the New Testament) isn’t as monolithic as one might believe.

Not that it is a huge surprise for those who read my blogs carefully, but I am of the mind that the question of what happens after we die is largely a theological question, and that in the end, we have to humbly say that we don’t know…and that we will not be paralyzed by that notion.

The way in which you phrase your thoughts, however, raises some interesting questions. You begin by saying that “If we are saved by God’s grace….” and close by wondering if we can “fall short of God’s grace.”

My immediate thought is, saved from what?

My second thought is, what is grace?

And my first answer to the first thought is, sin.

And my first answer to the second thought is, the gift of something undeserved.

And so two theological questions:

If we really believe that God offers grace (an undeserved gift) to we who sin (namely we who reject God in favor of something else) then:

1. isn’t the demand to repent, to stop the sin, to pray, etc…..aren’t these all acts to make us deserving of grace? And along side of that (this doesn’t cut into my two questions, btw! ), then what is grace, really? Can we fall short of something we don’t deserve in the first place?

2. Who doesn’t sin, and (again, still part of the same question!) who is aware of all the ways in which one sins? Is it ever possible to confess and repent of all our sins?

These are just beginning questions. Then begins a whole run of ‘em.

Like,

Are all sins choices, or could there be sinful behaviors which are bound up in mental illness, in fatigue, in family systems?

Do we really want to say that only Christians are going to heaven…and does even Scripture make that case?

Is this a slippery slope to universalism?

And if “all people get into heaven,” then what’s the point of believing?

Ah, but then there are counter-questions:

Like, if a person believes to get into heaven, isn’t the integrity and authenticity of the belief self-serving, since it appears to be motivated by a protecting one’s own eternal hiney?

When does one believe “enough” to be in God’s good graces?

Is there anyone who is purely good? And even if not entirely good, are there parts of people which are fundamentally good, and then are those parts not in need of salvation….and what would that mean?

But don’t good deeds matter somehow?

And yet if we say that they do, then don’t we say that we in part can save ourselves?

And what happens if we’ve lived a pretty good life, and in the moment that we allow ourselves to wonder these sorts of things, get hit by a car? What is going to be God’s final answer?

Regardless of how one comes down on the question of heaven/hell, salvation/damnation, this much is safe to assert is true:

If one says that they believe in God, then there are implications for how they live their lives, for the choices that they make.

We all mess up, sometime quite gloriously, even those who say that they–and in fact really do–believe.

There’s a reason why we have the word “grace,” in other words. We need it.

But generally, if one says that something is core to who they are, then they live life consistent to that notion: not to get something, but because they can’t help but to live in such a fashion.

I tell my husband that I love him not to get him to love me, but because I love him. I play with my kidlets not to get them to respect me, but because I adore them.

Actions are an expression, in other words.

And let it not be missed that some of the most life-giving people are those who are not connected to any one particular religious tradition.

So the point is not to “diss” confessing and repenting and praying and discerning what is faithful and striving to live accordingly.

The point is to rather raise the question about whether these are pre-reqs for salvation…and if we answer that they are, well….who doesn’t fall short of that?

It’s all clear…as mud.

Peace,

Anna

I have not been lax in thinking, however.

This summer has been as crazy-busy as it is hot.

OMG open house in April.

Wedding in May.

New husband in China and Thailand for two weeks.

Family from Alaska in June, their visit culminating in a first-ever, 100% attended family reunion on my mother’s side here in Sioux Falls.

And now we sit in Düsseldorf, Germany.

We find ourselves here, in the land where I did my doctoral work, and in the land where the accident occurred, that event which killed my first husband and caused my son to suffer a traumatic brain injury.

Frankly, I never considered coming back here. The memories, both good and painful, are so vibrant that even imagining the place causes a visceral reaction in me, a palpable sense of presence even from the distance of time and place.

Yet here we are.

Germany offers stem cell therapy, you see, an approach to healing not yet available to us in the United States. We learned about this opportunity through our acupuncturist, also a “novel” approach to healing in the States. But the novel stopped my son’s seizures after only three weeks, and has kept them thus at bay for over a year and a half.

So I told our acupuncturist that she had convinced me that there was a lot to be said for “fringe” approaches, and if she knew of any other any other fringy possibilities out there, I was all ears.

She told me of stem cell therapy, and put me in touch with a colleague of hers, who then put me in touch with the XCell Center in Düsseldorf.

And several months later, Karl is now resting tonight after having 11 million of his own stem cells injected into his traumatized brain.

Whew.

Needless to say, I have a nice glass of red beside me.

Hope and I? We have a dicey relationship.

On the one hand, whether we realize it or not, just swinging our legs out of bed is a hope-filled move. Hope, even subconsciously, allows us to function. We hope that we will have a good day, that we’ll get to work on time, that our loved ones will get home safely, we marry, we have children. All are trajectories of hope.

But sometimes hopes are dashed.

Quite literally, actually. Mine were dashed across a street 6 years ago, almost to the day.

And ever since then, hope and I haven’t made nice with each other, precisely.

So I hope for Karl’s complete healing from his brain injury, and everything I do is geared toward making that hope tangibly true.

The reality of that occurring is slim. And so then, what good is hope?

So I have come to wonder about the toxicity of hope; that is, can hope itself be detrimental? thwart one’s acceptance of reality? allow one to live a quixotic life built on vanities and illusions?

Yep.

But the danger of succumbing to hope’s opposite, despair, is equally numbing.

And I don’t particularly like the blandness of mere optimism either. I am optimistic that Karl’s present fever will go down.

But I’m not here to get a fever and reduce it.

I’m here to get Karl walking and talking.

So I have made peace with hope in the same manner as I engaged my first pregnancy, a pregnancy which ended in miscarriage. I had been told that many first pregnancies end in miscarriages, almost as if my body needed to learn what to do. And when I did miscarry, I grieved, but I did not despair….and we did not give up, and were blessed with Karl, and later Else.

I refuse to give up on the possibility that Karl can heal. And I insist upon going to great lengths to make the impossible possible. My vocation as mother calls me to that pursuit. Karl himself teaches me about the art of joyful defiance.

And, vis-à-vis God, it gives me an opportunity to remind God of God’s promises, and as I explained to a dear friend lately, I do so in a hold-God-accountable-to-God’s-promises sort of way. It is manifestly evident in Scripture that God has as God’s agenda healing. Perhaps it’s the Jew in me who feels quite comfortable pointing that out to God.

So the doctors and nurses and drivers and care-givers here, consciously or not, are ambassadors of healing. Their professionalism and clear recognition of the stakes demonstrate empathy and determination to patients and families who tend toward the isolated and exhausted. That the staff here engage in this sort of novel procedure is itself a tangible act of hope. Many of those who travel here, myself included, were told to suppress even optimism.

One last note. Germans have “doch,” a fantastic word which can be translated as an innocent, “I think you are mistaken,” to a sharp and sometimes rude rebuttal, the likes of which ought not be written down in this blog. Karl and I have a “gig.” I ask him, “Karlchen, when the doctors said that you would never talk again, or walk again, or laugh again, or make mischief again, what did I say to them?” And he says with a smile, “Doch!”

I said it in the latter sort of way.

Doch=spoken hope, and suddenly I understand hope against hope.

Peace,

Anna

I stumbled on it while preparing for last night’s forum sponsored by 1Sky and Repower America about Christianity and the care of Creation.

Below, as my next post, I’ve pasted the text of my presentation. As always, I look forward to your responses!

_____________

Christians aren’t so much called to be successful, but rather faithful.

Depending on your perspective, this is either freeing or a real bummer.

Generally, it is safe to say that “success” tends to be associated with a decent and stable job, family, comfortable house, good reputation, etc.

But the trouble comes when we Christians reflect upon the one who is the foundation for our beliefs: Jesus.

He had none of these.

And yet he was faithful.

Christians believe that Jesus came to deliver soteria, a word often translated as “salvation,” but which in the Greek implies health, healing, and wholeness…the sort you don’t have to wait to die for.

And so he was in the business, so to speak, of restoring, forgiving, feeding, serving. Now.

It can’t be overlooked, of course, that he did also end up on a cross.

Sometimes being faithful is risky business.

Now, typically, Christians have looked to the cross as being primarily about the forgiveness of sins: “Jesus died for you.”

And while I’m all for that, the last 70 some years of theology has begun to wonder if perhaps there might more to his death than the forgiveness of sins.

Nobody is objecting to the forgiveness of sins, to being justified by Jesus’ blood, mind you. But after Auschwitz, it is difficult not to wonder whether justification has to have something to do with justice.

In other words, did Jesus die for more than just sin? Did Jesus die not only for the sinners, but also for those, or for that, which are sinned upon?

And it’s out of that idea that Christians recognize that God is in solidarity with those who suffer, that Jesus isn’t the only one to cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”, that God feels our pain more deeply than do we, and, again, that Jesus came to bring soteria–health, healing, and wholeness–to those who suffer, because from a Christian standpoint, if God’s primary agenda were death and decay, then Jesus would still be dead in the tomb.

Instead, Christians believe in Easter, an empty grave, an announcement that life, not death, has the last word.

Now, what does this have to do with the topic at hand?

Perhaps surprisingly, lots.

Many Christians look at Jesus’ life ministering to the oppressed and outcasts, and his death on the cross, and see that God is interested in attending to the crushed.

And so a movement has begun that asserts that while God is concerned with the well-being of all people, God has preferential concern for the poor, for the voiceless, for the subjugated.

Feminist theologian Sallie McFague states that “nature is the new poor,” and that we would do well to “integrate needy nature and needy people.” (Super, Natural Christians: How We Should Love Nature, 170.) I think she’s absolutely right. And in fact, they already are related; areas of environmental degradation directly correspond with areas of communal poverty–one need only look to the effects of BP on the local economies of the coast to see this to be so.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has put out a fine Social Statement about ecological concern entitled “Caring for Creation: Vision, Hope, and Justice.” (http://www.elca.org/What-We-Believe/Social-Issues/Social-Statements/Environment.aspx) It states, “When we act interdependently and in solidarity with creation, we do justice. We serve and keep the earth, trusting its bounty can be sufficient for all, and sustainable.”

That’s fantastic.

It goes on to say that through participation, sufficiency (that is, having what we need, and not what we want), and a sustainable lifestyle, we can honor God’s creation by acting out just living for all creatures.

Now, to some, this seems like an extraordinary leap. A theologian named Gordon Kaufman points out that the main vocabulary of Christianity–like sin, salvation, forgiveness, repentance, hope, faith, love, righteousness–all concern human relationships. (“The Concept of Nature: A Problem for Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 65 [1972]: 350, as discovered in Paul Santmire, The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology [Fortress Press: Philadelphia, 1985], 6.)

In fact, the New Testament is hard pressed to demonstrate a real pattern of concern or interest in an ethic toward the land. One can argue that’s because they were anticipating Jesus to return at any moment, and their attention was focussed instead on evangelism.

And while Walter Brueggemann, the Old Testament scholar, points out that the Old Testament has no “environmental agenda” that we would recognize as such, “land is a central, if not the central theme of biblical faith.”

He writes these stunning words to make the point.

“Place is space that has historical meanings, where some things have happened that are now remembered and that provide continuity and identity across generations. Place is space in which important words have been spoken that have established identity, defined vocation, and envisioned destiny. Place is space in which vows have been exchanged, promises have been made, and demands have been issued. Place is indeed a protest against the compromising pursuit of space.”

He goes on to worry about how having land, i.e., power and wealth, “can…be…the enemy of memory,” namely forgetting what it is like to have no place, and therefore no identity, no power, no promise. (The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, 2nd edition [Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 2002], 4)

But Wendell Berry, author, philosopher, and advocate of the earth, speaks about the Jewish-Christian tradition of scripture reading and worship as showing a “pattern of reminding.” (Wendell Berry, “The Responsibility of the Poet,” What Are People For? [San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990], 91.)

So, although the New Testament leaves a bit to be desired in terms of specific references about respecting and stewarding creation, it does have a fine pattern of reminding for those in pain, threatened by death, devoid of hope–like speechless nature.
And it has this key event, this resurrection story, which tells us that now that we who can speak know that death isn’t final, there is more to do with our lives than preserve them.

We can instead be faithful, even, and perhaps these days most precisely, on behalf of all creation.