Infinite creation

Psalm 36:1-12
Deuteronomy 4:32-40
2 Corinthians 3:7-18
Luke 16:1-9
Psalm 80:1-19

I think I’ll look at parts of this over a couple of days. As always, there are connecting threads between the passages, but sometimes I’m just more interested in the fragments, even in a single line. That might be picking and choosing, but I’d prefer to think it’s just one of the ways the Bible presents itself.

The lines from Paul’s letter talk about how Moses covered his face when we was still glowing after speaking with Jehovah (Ex. 34), and then how the new covenant allows for the face-to-face encounter. “but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another…”

David and Sarah Dark (two friends in Nashville--she's a songwriter and singer, he's the author of several useful books including Everyday Apocalypse) use the phrase “Unveiled Faces” as the name for one of their discussion boards , the one for general “how’s things going sharing.” I’ve never asked David or Sarah about who designed what on the website. A fellow named James Stewart has done a lot. At any rate, the use of the phrase in this context strikes me as an idea I would expect from David, that the mirror in which we see the glory of the Lord are the faces of those people closest to us. It’s a neat, elegant formulation—designed in God’s image, both you and the person you talk to, so when you see the other in those terms you also see your inheritance of divine design.

The passage has a couple of several subtleties. It is still a reflection—a mirror yes, but a mirror can be distorting, even dark. Not quite there to face-to-face. And the mirroring of glory in unveiled faces is not a single event or state, but an ongoing process that feeds on itself to pass to new degrees. This adds sense to the community interpretation (and earlier passages in the letter indicate it is very much concerned with the practical business of community). As the community adds depth of affiliation and mutual understanding, the divinity it reveals increases. Or the divinity itself increases. Is it a matter of what is seen, or of what exists?

This passage describes the believers being transformed into the same image. Interesting to think about this in light of recent discussion in the Republican debate about evolution. Sam Brownback published an editorial in the Times trying to explain why he said he didn’t believe in evolution. He doesn’t clarify much of anything, but he does rely on the formulation that people were formed in God’s image, and as long as the scientists don’t try to dispute that we’re cool. I don’t think the theory of evolution has an opinion about God’s image one way or the other, so I guess Brownback’s saying he didn’t mean it when we raised his hand to indicate he didn’t believe in evolution.

But this passage from Paul makes the business of people and God’s image more fluid, more progressive—more evolutionary. People develop—evolve?—towards higher degrees of being in God’s image. And they do this after receiving the Word, not at the time of creation. So people before the New Covenant were not so much in God’s image, not like those in Paul’s formulation. If people are developing forwards after Christ, in the community of belief, could there not have been similar progression occurring in the direction back into time. It seems to me that we are free to see creation in God’s image as a movement towards this state. And it is a movement that does not finish. Creation is an ongoing process, not just something that occurred in 6 days. And if it is ongoing from the point where the narrative of the Bible picks up, why would it not have been ongoing before that, an infinite regression of creation fitting an infinite creator.

Life in the City

Psalm 15:1-5
Deuteronomy 4:25-31
2 Corinthians 1:23-2:11
Luke 15:1-2, 11-32
Psalm 48:1-14

Today’s passages are about being-together, something like a discussion of polis. This is a quality that is more spatial than simply social or familial. The morning Psalm asks “O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill?” The evening Psalm praises God in His city, and ends with references to this city’s features. “Walk about Zion, go all around it, count its towers, consider well its ramparts; go through its citadels…”

The other passages introduce absence from the city. The OT reading from Deuteronomy tells the Hebrews that “The Lord will scatter you among the peoples” and in the Gospel we get the Prodigal Son, who squanders all he has in a distant country and then gets stranded there.

It’s easy to assume these are just metaphors and that God’s city is a figure of speech. But why this metaphor and not another? Just to add variety? Don’t the qualities of the image count for something? Otherwise they are just words. A degree of literalness gets you someplace richer. Familial relationships occur in space, by being together to each other, the intern notwithstanding. So does the relationship with God. And a city, polis, isn’t just a place. It is a web of interdependent beings and forces, the thrust of physical structures, the churning of climate, and the ways people help and harm, entertain and disturb each other. God exists in such a web of relationships between physical, natural, and human being. Recently I read an article in The Believer by Jenny Price, a nature writer talking about how Los Angeles is the perfect place to write about nature because it is a place where humanity and nature constantly encounter each other, and where all of the impacts of humans in nature reveal themselves when you look for them These are the kinds of organic relationships that define the city, not just the buildings dropped on the street grid.

Paul’s letter touches on the nature of relatedness in a community. It’s one of those almost chatty letter covering early church family business. I decided not to come to your house—we’d just get on each other’s nerves, and what could would that do—I still love you, but you’re driving me nuts.” This is a family going through a little thing. The key point in the passage is “Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive.” If they are going to become a community, the polis, at the end of the day the participants will have to figure out a way to share experiences and decisions, to get to the same place on important things. I’m reading Danielle Allen’s book The World of Prometheus, on punishment in Athenian society. An essential aspect of Athenian democracy was the ability, in certain kinds of cases, to convert the isolated anger of the individual into a collective anger shared by the city and expressed in city-regulated actions of judgment and punishment.

In a passage like this one from Paul, the Bible offers us a glimpse of polis, of humans living, in the Christian view with God, with each other, in society, in space, in time.

No Image

Psalm 123:1-4
Deuteronomy 4:15-24
Luke 15:1-10

“Since you saw no form when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire, take care and watch yourselves closely, so that you do not act corruptly by making an idol for yourselves…” And the Deutetonomy passage goes on to list the basic religious icons—human figures (male and female), animals, fish, the stars, sun, and moon. All of them are God’s creation, not God. So many religions focus on images, but not Judaism (or Islam). Christianity is more complex. We inherited this insight that a creator god must be greater than any single aspect of Creation, and must reside outside of the created categories. But then we have such a wealth of images, of God in many guises, Jesus, the figures from the Bible, saints over the ages. Two of the other passages from the lectionary contain a couple of those images: Psalm 123 opens with an image of God enthroned. Luke tells the parable of the Good Shepherd, carrying the found sheep on his shoulders, the subject of a thousand Sunday School classroom prints.

Now the Deuteronomy passage is after from the Old Testament. The New Testament puts things on a new footing, with the incarnate God. One interpretation is that God decided people were ready to relate more directly to the Creator, not just experiencing flames and clouds, and even that only through privileged intermediaries like Moses. Or that they could only get so far with the fire and smoke, and God decided it was time to try something new. The Bible tracks a progression in the relationship of people and God. Break the ties with the old ways of relating, then move back to something similar but now made new.

One talks about having a personal relationship with Jesus. To have a personal relationship requires the personal form—you could never have the personal relationship with the voice in Horeb’s fire. The personal relationship with Jesus is of course a modern formulation and it suggests everyone’s on the same level, just friends. But what kind of relationship could it be, even if God deigned to become flesh. God is still also the being of no form, and in incarnation Jesus was an elusive character, often saying his peace and then withdrawing, and making references to the things he knew which his hearers could not. He didn’t make it easy to be with him, and didn’t really seem to encourage it.

Even with the image of Jesus in front of you, you can’t lose sight of the fundamental truth of God’s infinitude, which must ultimately end up in an ineffable form. The Trinity matters, because it makes the “relationship” part of it just that, part of God’s being, pointing to something much more than an individual’s contact with God.

I’ve never felt drawn to the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus. It may be a failure of my faithfulness, a fatal gap, but I prefer the mystery of the God of no form, something to chase after always. I suppose one can enter into an awareness of God through any of the Trinity’s doors, the God door, the Spirit door, the Jesus door. At various times in my life I have come to that conclusion, but it is hard to stick to that given the voices screaming about the nature of salvation. To me, one knows Jesus not as a “person,” but in the way He comes to us, embedded in the pages of the Bible. God resides in the narrative, in the stories handed to us. In fact, every person is composed of their stories, and we understand others by the stories we tell of and know of them. I don’t want to replace the stories of Jesus in the Bible, the canonical text, the stories every Christian has read and holds as a touchstone, with personal narratives of private dealings with Jesus.