Relocating To Elfland

“We give thanks unto thee, O Lord God of our salvation; for thou doest all things which are for the welfare of our life, that we may ever look upward unto thee, our Saviour and the Benefactor of our souls. For thou hast refreshed us in that part of the night which is past, and hast raised us up from our beds, and hast led us to stand here in adoration of thy precious Name. Wherefore we entreat thee, O Lord, vouchsafe unto us grace and power, that we may be enabled with understanding to sing praises unto thee, and to pray without ceasing, in fear and trembling working out our own salvation, through the succour of thy Christ. Call to remembrance, O Lord, those who cry aloud unto thee in the night season; hearken unto them and have mercy, and crush under their feet invisible and warring enemies.

“For thou art the King of Peace and the Saviour of our souls, and unto thee we ascribe glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.”

(Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, ed. Isabel Florence Hapgood)

A significant “stumbling block” in interpreting the New Testament is the apparent expectation of Christ and His apostles that He would “come” in judgment in the near future. Jesus, for instance, tells His disciples, “There are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom” (Matt 16:28). He tells His disciples during the Olivet Discourse, “This generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matt 24:34). He says to the Sanhedrin at His trial, “From now on you [all] will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Matt 26:64). Then there is a rather cryptic word about the beloved disciple that generates all kinds of gossip: “If it is My will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?” (Jn 21:22).

Paul in writing to the Romans says, “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone; the day is at hand” (Rom 13:11–12). To Corinth he writes, “The present form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor 7:31). Writing to Thessalonica, he seems to think the “Day of the Lord” will shortly come like a thief at night, but assures the church they will not be surprised, for they are children of light and know the times and seasons (1 Thes 5:1–11). Later, he assures them that Christ is coming to be glorified in His saints, and prays that Christ may be glorified in them (2 Thes 1:10, 12), even as he puts their minds at rest that the Day has not yet come (2 Thes 2:2). This sense of imminence was so strong in the early church that some even taught, heretically, that the resurrection was already past (2 Tim 2:17).

The writer of Hebrews, likewise, believes a “shaking” of heaven and earth is about to occur that will remove all shakable things (Heb 12:26–27). Peter is very strong: “The end of all things is at hand” (1 Pt 4:7), and judgment is about to begin that bodes very ill for those who do not obey the gospel of God (1 Pt 4:17; given the similarity of language, this likely refers to the same event as 2 Thes 1:7–8). In his second letter, since time is passing, he must reassure his readers that he and the other apostles “did not follow cleverly devised myths” when they made known “the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Pt 1:16); and he must answer what seemed at that time a plausible objection by certain scoffers – “Where is the promise of His coming?” This objection almost certainly derived plausibility precisely from apostolic teaching concerning the imminent “coming” of Christ. So what are we to make of all this?

In the face of the evidence, two solutions have been proposed. The liberal “solution” is simply to say Jesus and His apostles got it wrong: they misjudged the timing of His coming in judgment. A popular conservative “solution” is to try to find a way to reinterpret the imminence in the various statements cited above, so they can be read to allow for the thousands of years that have actually elapsed since Jesus’ ascension to the right hand of the Father.

There is, it seems to me, another and far more straightforward solution: that Jesus taught His disciples to expect His “coming” in power and glory within their own generation, distinct from His final coming to judge the living and the dead and to deliver the kingdom up to the Father at the end of history. What possible exegetical grounds might exist for such a solution?

When Jesus predicted the destruction of the Jerusalem temple (Lk 21:6), His hearers were moved to ask when this would occur. Jesus answered simply that there would be “wars and tumults” and deceptions about “the time” of His coming, but “the end” would not be at once (Lk 21:8–9). In what followed He explained this in some detail: His disciples would go through a difficult period in which they would be persecuted and imprisoned and brought before kings (one immediately thinks of the stories in Acts); and by their endurance they would gain their lives (Lk 21:10–19). But then a time would come when they would “see Jerusalem surrounded by armies” – the time of its “desolation” (Lk 21:20). This would be a season of “great distress upon the earth and wrath against this people [the unbelieving Jewish nation]” (Lk 21:21–24). What follows is remarkable apocalyptic imagery:

“And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world. For the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Three things should give us pause before we refer this section to something other than the ruin of Jerusalem. First, there is little or no indication that Jesus has suddenly started talking about some period of history other than the one He has just been describing. Second, He says that when these events take place “the kingdom of God is near” (Lk 21:31) – thus situating these events near the beginning of the kingdom of God, of which He Himself claims (elsewhere) to be the inaugurator. Third, though it is much debated, He does say quite plainly in verse 32, “This generation will not pass away until all has taken place.”

Did Jesus’ messianic judgment upon Jerusalem, in fulfillment of His own prophecies, qualify as a “coming” in power and glory and a “shaking” of the powers of heaven? Much more exegetical data would have to be sifted through, but Jesus’ Olivet Discourse as recorded in Luke suggests a strongly positive answer; and this, in turn, would make perfect sense of the apostolic intimations that Christ was coming soon to take vengeance publicly on His unbelieving adversaries.

Daniel Boorstin, in The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination, describes the classical distinction between comedy and tragedy:

“By mid-fifth century B.C., Tragedy and Comedy each had staked out different realms. Tragedy recaptured the ancient and the remote, gods and heroes. The spectator could see an enlarged version of himself struggling with grand issues of time and destiny. . . . Tragedy was a vision of events at a great distance in time (usually too in space) from the spectator.

“Comedy held up a mirror to the present. If Tragedy conjured up the unseen, Comedy rescued the familiar from the cliché. Comedy intensified daily experience, dramatizing the garrulous old man, the boastful soldier, the vain courtesan, the rude conceited youth, who all were so commonplace that they had ceased to be interesting. But Comedy made them laughable.” (Boorstin, Creators, p. 214)

Perhaps tragedy and comedy are reverse images of each other. When we look at man through the microscope, blowing him up so he is larger than life, we want to laugh at him. Enlarged beyond his ordinary size, he cannot be taken seriously. But when we look at man through the telescope, placing him on the epic stage of all things, we want to weep, for what is he on such a scale? And we ache for ourselves in him. It is when we see man for what he is, in his created proportions and relations, that we are humbled with hope and not despair, and laugh with joy instead of ridicule. “What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You care for him? Yet You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.”

“Sin started with lying (John 8:44); it is based on illusion, an untrue picture, an imagined good that was not good. In its origin, therefore, it was a folly and an absurdity.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 3.69)

A few posts ago, I mentioned the “atmosphere” created in a home or individual life by a “eucharistic” way of living. I have so much more I want to say about this, it’s hard to know where to begin, but I’ll start with these ruminations from Psalm 63:

David is in the wilderness of Judah, in one of his periods of exile, running from either Saul or Absalom. Here in this dry, exhausted land without water (v. 1), he seeks with longing for his God. His search does not disappoint: he discovers afresh the lovingkindness (hesed) of Yahweh that is better than life, and the “atmosphere” of his life changes from dryness and exhaustion to singing (v. 3), uplifted hands (v. 4), and satisfaction as in the fatness of a joyful feast (v. 5).

But what is the point of encounter? Does David enter a cave and have a prayer-closet epiphany of some kind? Does he see a vision (a burning bush, perhaps)? Does he experience a moment of ecstasy while reading his private copy of the Torah? What we are told is that he remembers the worship in which he participated when he visited the “holy place,” the dwelling-place of Yahweh. What he longs to see in the wilderness he has seen in the sanctuary (v. 2): there he beheld God’s power and glory, the majestic loveliness of Yahweh’s strength on behalf of His people.

So what went on at the sanctuary? The simple answer is liturgy, the lively rituals of worship. Worship didn’t center on didactic communication of ideas (though there may have been some pretty exciting retellings of history); nor did it center on images (visual aids intended to evoke sentiment and serenity). One didn’t go to the sanctuary to learn new information, or to sit and watch a spectacle. One went to participate in liturgical rituals: to present offerings and see them consumed in the fire of God, to fulfill vows and contribute tithes, to eat a meal with God and His people, to pray and sing and rejoice (Deut 12:5–7). And in all these things, the unseen God made known from behind the veil His superabounding power and grace toward His chosen ones.

The worshipper carried away with him from the sanctuary this abundance of God, and feasted on it from afar with mingled longing and satisfaction. This, it seems to me, is the “atmosphere” of Psalm 63: David yearns to be in the sanctuary again, even as the power and glory he beheld there transform his wilderness into a banquet house.

How much more ought this to be the case for participants in New Covenant worship! Our ears should echo every morning with our Lord’s salutation, His faithful “grace to you and peace.” We should live out our days in the confidence that He means these words. We should sing daily the praises we have sung, and pray again our petitions for mercy and help. We should remember His pronouncement of pardon, His receiving our offerings, His Word from His heavenly throne to us and all the host assembled before Him, His feasting with us in grace, and His commission to go out into the world under His benediction of peace. We should reenact the rituals of the sanctuary at our family tables and altars, and bless one another in His name. This is “eucharistic” living, it is liturgical living, it is living that can turn the world upside down. It is public enactment in the world of our confession, “Jesus is Lord.”

O Lord our God, blessed Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, our hearts rejoice this morning in the grace that invites us to know Your name and to call upon Your name, and in the grace that has called us by Your own name. We thank You, our God, for Your outgoing love, for Your insistence on making Yourself known to us in all of Your majesty, beauty, and goodness; we thank You as well for Your ingathering love, for Your insistence on adopting us as sons and daughters, and giving us royal privileges in Your household. We bless You that in all You are as God – and how can we begin to take that in? – You are our God, and You command us to believe it is so. We rejoice, our Lord, in revealing grace, saving grace, and enlivening grace; we rejoice in baptizing grace and nourishing grace; we rejoice in justifying, adopting, sanctifying, and preserving grace.

And yet we cannot think of all Your grace, our Lord, without knowing in our inmost hearts how terribly we sin against it. We do not begin to love You as Your love deserves. We do not begin to serve You as the King You are. We are often so muddled, Lord, that compared to various created things we find the Creator barely interesting. You call us Your sons and daughters, but we surely don’t behave like it; we carry about Your name in this world and disgrace it by living with little more zeal for Your glory than our pagan neighbors. And yet, our God, while sins against grace are the worst sins, we know also that precisely here is our hope: that if Your grace abounded to us while we were enemies, it will be still more abundant to us now that we are children – and we beseech You, our Father, not only that You would pardon our dullness, waywardness, and neglectfulness before You, but also that You would make this hour of worship a turning point in our lives; that You would grant us to go forth from here a more faithful and affectionate people, just because we have feasted here afresh on Your glory and grace. We ask these things in the name of Your dear Son, Jesus Christ.

Ten reasons men don’t lead at home and in the church (in no particular order):

1. They haven’t digested God’s mission for His kingdom people, or thought through a plan for accomplishing it; and so they can’t guide would-be followers toward definite objectives.

2. They are great at dreaming and terrible at executing; they haven’t counted the cost of a long obedience in the same direction.

3. They haven’t stopped to take prayerful inventory of their lives in at least a year, if ever.

4. They are preoccupied with the pleasures of youth, or with a personal success program.

5. They are more relationally insecure than they want anyone to know; and when people aren’t eager to follow, they aren’t eager to lead.

6. They have a longstanding habit of making “soft choices” (the easier of two options).

7. They have not developed communication and listening skills, and have no serious intention of doing so.

8. They feel ill equipped intellectually and/or educationally, and stop at this feeling.

9. They feel morally compromised and unable to call others to a standard higher than what they have attained.

10. They have never seen a role model of a good leader, and have no plan for locating one.

I finished reading Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World last night. In the context of various other things I am reading, it was a bombshell on the playground of my mental life. Some thoughts now running about vigorously in my head (I would not want to blame poor Schmemann for all of these):

First, this work is probably the most helpful thing I’ve ever read on the “sacramentality” of the world. I’ve been mildly obsessed lately with how “heaven” intersects with “earth,” with how we may articulate the relationship between the world above and the world below in a way that is not dualistic. According to Schmemann (it is always perilous to paraphrase something as brilliant as his work), religion emphasizes the world above (heaven) as escape from the world below (earth), and tries to replicate the life of the world above by living apart from the world below; secularism by contrast emphasizes the world below and ignores the world above. Both of these, he says, are outgrowths of the fall of man, which was (and is) “noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world” (page 18). God intended all created things to be “sacramental” to man, in the sense that man was to “respond to God’s blessing with his blessing” (page 15). It was precisely man’s refusal to use the world in this sacramental way – it was his insistence on eating and drinking the blessing of God apart from God, and without thanksgiving to God – that was the essence of man’s fall. It was in this “noneucharistic” partaking of the world that heaven and earth were rent asunder – heaven is now pursued by religion, earth by secularism, while both agree that “this world” is no longer the sphere of “life in God.” The world, by both religion and secularism, has been secularized.

It is in the Eucharist, and in the liturgy of the church as a whole, says Schmemann, that this “life in God,” abandoned by Adam but restored in Christ the Last Adam, is enacted once again; and it is out of the liturgy of the church that she goes forth into the world on a mission to “live in God” once again. Her life in the world is an extension of her liturgy, one might say: she receives all of life, in Christ, as God’s blessing, blesses Him in all of life, and in this life disciples the nations.

Second, even before reading Schmemann, I had been thinking about the distinctive “atmosphere” generated by “eucharistic living”; and I found Schmemann deeply confirming at every turn. It is amazing how cold and harsh is the “climate” of so much life among the religious. Where is “the joy of the Lord” and its strength? Where is serving Him “with joyfulness and gladness of heart, because of the abundance of all things” (Deut 28:47)? Where is the light and laughter, the delight in fire and food, in oil and wine, in His daily benefits in the land of the living? Why the suspicion of created things that nourish our bodies and gladden our hearts? Why do we “secularize” these things, distancing ourselves from them as much as possible so as to concentrate on “holy” things with deadly seriousness? Can we possibly expect our children to be excited about such a life, or to have any idea how to connect it with the “real world” they must live in every day?

I will go back to this work again and again. But my deepest desire is to live in this way, to live a heavenly life firmly embodied in this wonderful created world.

“A Deist is a person who in his short life has not found the time to become an atheist.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 2.603)

“Who can say that Christianity has had the time to translate the totality of its contents into institutions? I have the impression that instead we are still at the beginning stages of Christianity.” (Rémi Brague, The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, p. 22)