lift me up and let me stand

I have heard that non-Christians may complain the Christian faith is overly simplistic. It gives too many glib answers without taking into account the way the world really is, they say. Yet as I read the Bible and talk with pastors and other believers, it keeps coming up that the record we have of Christianity considers all aspects of human life. Take the Psalms: not only do you find devotion, trust, and piety, you also find fear, hatred, and accusations. The heroes of the Bible are sometimes the most fantastic sinners—proving that God really can work his will through dire circumstances, and that we have hope he can work in us, unworthy though we are. Questions are raised, such as in Job or Ecclesiastes or Romans, and left unanswered. What is constant, and miraculous, is the assurance that God loves us and wants to bless us. If we don’t wrestle with the questions of how God’s love is revealed, how we should share it with those around us, and why God doesn’t operate the way we expect him to, then that is our own shortcoming, not the religion’s. Faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” says the writer of Hebrews. It is not a blindfold. We can trust and still inquire. We can pray and still not understand. The benefit in this life of being a Christian is that we gain, sometimes slowly but always in increasing measure, the “fruit of the Spirit”: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control; as Paul points out, “against such things there is no law.” And we have the story and the promise of a God who is carefully involved in our history and our lives. There’s nothing simple about that.

because he lives

Somehow, things seem to keep coming back to Romans…

In our Bible study tonight, we began reading parts of Job. We’ve been discussing creation this semester, and the claim from Romans 1 that “what can be known about God is plain … his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” led into a proposal that we discuss the final chapters of Job, in which God speaks to Job in response to Job’s desire to face God with an accusation of injustice. If you haven’t read those chapters recently, I recommend them as an exceptionally rich depiction of God’s hand in creation and his continued work in the natural world. It is good fodder for discussion, too, as God’s rhetoric is tinged with sarcasm and indignation, while still revealing his great care for the world and the majesty of which he wants Job to be aware. Job has been asking for a chance to accuse God; God reveals that there are so many things in the world that Job can’t understand, he can’t begin to grasp the place and the justice of God.

After the study, I asked about another passage from Job, related more to the theme of justice than to creation. In one of his earlier discourses, Job complains that he has been abandoned (he has friends there with him, but at this point in the book he is finding less and less comfort in their words, which weren’t terribly comforting to begin with) by everyone in his family and household. Then he makes the declaration, using the words Handel chose to open the third part of the Messiah: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth.” Who is he talking about? I asked. Who is it, when he has been abandoned by everyone who should defend him, that will come and save him, will stand with him before God? The standard Christological interpretation (the one used by Handel) is, of course, that the Redeemer is Jesus. But even if you don’t assume that from the outset, it’s hard to interpret the text as indicating anything other than that Job knows he needs God to intercede with God. He must be asserting someone supernatural, or at least not an ordinary human, will come and rescue Job from his suffering, and take him so that he can “see God.”

Which brings me back to Romans. Because, if the good man Job (and he was emphatically good, no question about it, not at a single point is it even hinted that he did anything wrong, except perhaps to question God’s wisdom and justice) was left by all he loved and cared about, what shall become of us, who are so much less good? Paul answers: “one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” This must be the Redeemer that Job looked forward to. The one who gave Job hope can give us hope, too, even when we feel worthless or abandoned.

Coda: if you’ve made it this far, then as a reward let me lead you to the MySpace page of a musical based on Job. You can hear selections from the musical on the site.

wait

I could use some running and not being wearing about now…

Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint.
(Isaiah 40:30–31)

I know what it is to be exhausted. I have faced that in my life, primarily in my college and Peace Corps years. I am not now exhausted. I am tired. I am productively busy. I am keeping up with most things, and falling behind on others. I am, in these aspects, leading a normal life, as far as I can tell. I go to church, and I yawn a bit from not sleeping in, but I focus on the sermon and I pray. Except that these meditations have been making me more thoughtful during the day, I may not seriously pray much by myself during the week. I want that strength Isaiah spoke about. How do I get it? By waiting? What does that mean?

In fact, this whole chapter of Isaiah, despite being beloved and well-known, is perplexing in its logic. It begins with comfort and the proclamation that God will even out the ground, making rough places plain, and his glory will be known throughout the earth. Then it talks about how fleeting human life is, no more enduring than the grass of the field. Next, a return to good news: the shepherd of Israel is returning! He is coming with strength and compassion! There follows an extended discussion of how no other god or creature is worth comparing to the Lord, the God who is. And because of that, we are nothing before him. Nothing we do can be hidden from him. He is all-powerful and inscrutable. Yet that means he knows us intimately, and he can and will uplift those who are struggling. This already is good news and a promise: that God saves his people from their struggles; later he will save them from their guilt.

So can we wait for the fulfillment of our hope? That we will know God and his immense power? I guess that big picture can lift us from any dreariness we might find in daily living. I want that promise. I have it. I will wait, and hope, and maybe with that I’ll find my feet moving more lightly in the present. I can tell that I barely even understand the promise, because my faith is so small. I’m glad God is more patient than I am, and that he will continue to pursue me to give me blessings.

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.

a wonderful savior

To pick up where I left off last time (and yes, I know I’ll have to catch up a few days sometime; I started this entry on Wednesday, and have been hung up finishing it)… Here’s an excerpt from the second chapter of Philippians, which I linked to last time:

…being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name…

Jesus’ martyrdom (and resurrection, which I’ll address in a different entry) is qualitatively different from the others I mentioned before. Everything in Jesus’ life was supernatural, in the sense of stretching beyond what what is possible for each of us. I can imagine he had charisma (that’s part of what I think was meant when people said he “spoke with authority”) and compassion (favorite verse for elementary school kids to memorize when required to choose one: “Jesus wept.”), but that he displayed them in ways just enough subtly different that every act was miraculous.

At this point, to further contemplate who Jesus was requires a bit of mysticism. I generally make no secret of the fact that I spent several years, at the end of high school and the beginning of college, holding onto anti-Trinitarian theology. I couldn’t make sense of Jesus being God incarnate—not just from an essential perspective, but from a redemptive perspective. I mean that I wasn’t just confused about how Jesus could be both God and man (that’s a mystery never to be explained), but why Jesus could be a savior if he was something so different from us. In one of Paul’s most meaningful but most perplexing metaphors, he describes Jesus as the “last Adam”, exactly paralleling Adam in that sin entered the world through Adam while the world is saved from sin through Christ. For that to be so, I reasoned, Jesus had to be just like Adam in the beginning—wholly created, without any mark of wrongdoing—so that he could choose the right way on behalf of humanity and lead us back to God. (Which reasoning, at the time, obliged me to believe in an historical Adam.) Jesus was still to be exalted as our eternal ruler (good, just, and able to perfectly instruct and uplift us) and our intermediary with God (only the righteous can be in God’s presence and live). But it made no sense for him to be God, as well. (The time when I began to turn from a strong anti-Trinitarian position was when my dad explained to me that Trinitarianism isn’t an answer to the question of God’s nature—it’s simply a statement of that question.)

That position doesn’t really stand up to other parts of the Bible, however. The opening of John’s gospel and the opening of the letter to the Hebrews, among other places, acknowledge that God (the Father) made the world through Christ. I have no idea what that means, but it at least means Jesus is eternal. And Isaiah prophesied that his suffering and death would in fact take the place of our punishment; he humbled himself, then was humiliated.

So much more to say, but it’s gotten late once again and I’ve taken too many days off. So I’ll pick up some of these threads later.

skaters and flying saucers

This one isn’t about Lent; it’s about math. I’m going to describe some excellent examples that came up in Thurston’s seminar this morning. To do so, I’m going to have to assume some pretty sophisticated manifold theory, so this isn’t really a “general interest” post. For those who have some knowledge of manifolds, however, these examples may prove enlightening.

We were talking about different kinds of admissible structures on a manifold $M$—specifically, what kinds of local homeomorphisms can be used to define structures. The last two we discussed were symplectic and contact structures. The former is fairly well-known: you have a non-degenerate, closed 2-form on $M$ that lets you do things like Hamiltonian mechanics. Thurston’s examples of symplectic transformations were flinging a chair around (position + momentum of an object gives a manifold, called the phase space of the object, with a canonical symplectic form) and light passing through lenses (presumably also a phase space-type manifold, but my grasp of Hamiltonian mechanics is relatively weak, having been acquired almost entirely in symplectic geometry classes).

Contact manifolds are less well-known. They’re often brought up to illustrate a “sister” geometry to symplectic geometry: symplectic manifolds are always even-dimensional, while contact manifolds are always odd-dimensional. Here’s the definition: a contact manifold $M$ has a non-degenerate 1-form $a$ whose exterior derivative $da$ is non-degenerate on the kernel of $a$ in each tangent space to $M$. Okay, flung that all out there at once. Here’s the geometry: since a 1-form restricts to a linear functional on each tangent space, its kernel (if it is non-degenerate) is a codimension 1 subspace of the tangent space—i.e., a hyperplane. So a contact manifold has a special collection of “tangent hyperplanes”, and the condition on $da$ tells in what way this field of hyperplanes is special. Here I’m not really interested in the technical reasons this definition is chosen. I just want to give the examples Thurston described.

The first was of an ice skater. On a skating rink, one has both position and direction: that gives a three-dimension manifold $M$, which can be thought of as (rink)x(circle of directions), or can be unfolded into $R^3$ if, as Thurston put it, you keep track of the winding number of the skater. However, at a given position and direction, you can’t move arbitrarily in $M$; the skate can move forward and backward in the direction it’s facing, or it can change direction. So you have a hyperplane $H_x$—i.e., a plane—in the tangent space to $M$ at $x$, which describes these possibilities of movement: one direction in $H$ points in the direction you’re currently facing, and one points in the “direction of changing direction”. This is a contact manifold. Skating a path around the ice rink means tracing a curve in the contact manifold that always remains tangent to the hyperplanes.

The second example shows how the first might be generalized. Suppose you have a jet, or a flying saucer, which can be at any point in $R^3$ and can take any orientation at any point, but can only move to a different point in a direction of the plane of its current orientation. The position-orientation manifold is a product of $R^3$ and $RP^2$ (the real projective plane)—or $S^2$ if you keep track of which way is “up” for the flying saucer—and hence 5-dimensional. The contact structure at a particular pair (position,orientation) is the product of the plane in $R^3$ corresponding to the current orientation and the tangent space to $RP^2$/$S^2$, which corresponds to the fact that you can roll either up-and-down or side-to-side.

Thurston went on to remark that many physical systems with some sort of dynamical possibilities can be described by contact structures, and the dynamics of the system are represented by diffeomorphisms that preserve the contact structure. I know more can be found in his book Three-Dimensional Geometry and Topology. I’m going to have to go look that book up soon.

keep me near the cross

I am currently listening to Messiaen’s organ piece L’ascension. I first heard this piece in a cathedral in England—I believe it was in Canterbury—in the summer of 1998, while I was traveling after the St. Olaf Orchestra tour. I already loved Messiaen at the time. It is a cycle of works essentially about prayer and the presence of God. It seemed appropriate as I try to think more about the cross and drawing close to Christ.

As I said before, for Jesus’ death to have the meaning we impart to it, it matters that we know who he is/was. I cannot hope in the death of a martyr or any other merely good man. I can only mourn them, and be inspired by what blessings they may have left behind. I may work to right injustice that led to their death. I may study their lessons more closely, having been brought to a realization of my own mortality and shortcomings. But I do not obtain hope from it.

What led to Jesus’ death? Lots of answers here; I’m going for the ones that don’t just appeal to God’s inscrutable wisdom. It seems that he garnered the ire of community leaders in two ways: firstly by challenging their authority, and secondly by raising genuine concern that he was blaspheming. As one of my pastors has pointed out, he didn’t just set up new rules or tear down old traditions, he “loosened what had been made too tight, and tightened what had been made too loose.” Thus by definition he had to be acting against the establishment. It turned out that in the process he had to lift the burdens of the common Jewish believer while chastening the leaders who had become lax in their morality. The prophet Micah had reminded the people generations before: “what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

The example of Jesus has led me to wonder if it is inevitable that a truly good man will be persecuted and perhaps killed. I know this idea is influenced by my reading of both Kierkegaard—for whom true belief and morality are impossible unless they stand in sharp contrast to the milieu—and Gibran—who writes many tales and poems about the oppression of people and the insistence of leaders, political and religious alike, to maintain their power by oppression. If so, it would add a different spin to the statement that “Christ died as a victim because it was God’s will that he do so”—namely the nuance that God willed Jesus to come to earth not only in order for him to die, but in spite of his inevitable death. He foresaw it, but declared that Jesus would come anyway; “the cup” would not pass from Christ untasted.

It is a bleak view of the world that it would be unable to restrain itself from killing a good man. It is not so far from the world we know, however. Consider Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK, Benazir Bhutto, Thomas Becket, Thomas More, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Itzhak Rabin, and so on. I could certainly list many genuinely good men and women who were not killed by either an individual or a government, but being good is no bullet-proof vest, and indeed often draws unwelcome attention due to one’s unwelcome message.

There is more to Jesus than this, however. Something in the way he humbled himself in life and death makes those unique; there is also the resurrection. These will probably be the things I reflect on in later days.

my hope is built on nothing less

The crucifixion makes very little sense to me. It is the emotional and theological core of our religion; it simultaneously echoes pagan myths and completely contrasts with them in import; it is the basis of our hope for salvation, yet for all we depend on it, even as great an event as it was seems at times insufficient. Whole sermons, whole weeks and years and lifetimes of sermons, are devoted to what it means that the Son of God came to earth and died for you and me. Paul writes in one of his letters:

[W]e preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

I still get stuck on the stumbling block sometimes.

Here’s the thing: yes, it was terrible. Yes, it may have been the greatest evil ever perpetrated by humankind. But you can’t tell that from the externals. Jesus suffered a unfair trial and half a day or so on the cross. Plenty of people have been tortured way beyond that since. One can look at either the individual or the cultural level and find grotesque acts of violence, hatred, contemptuous murderous evil. We as Christians claim the murder of one good man is the hope for our forgiveness. Every evil deed ever done by any one of us, we claim, can be struck from our record because of the crucifixion. For this to make any sense, it matters who Jesus was.

I’m trying to avoid the “churchy” language, and put these things in my own terms (the way I do with math ideas I barely understand). The language we use shapes our understanding and perception of any topic. Talking (or writing) about our records before God or the perfect sacrifice to redeem humankind seems to dismiss the issue, just because it’s talking with a different set of vocabulary. I want to know how it is that I can hope in the death and resurrection of Jesus—His “blood and righteousness” as the hymn from which the title is taken continues. That means, for now, I don’t have any way to wrap this up, and I’ll probably be dealing with this in writing over a few days.