In search of tranquility

Not everyone seems to be in search of tranquility. At the Y recently, I have resorted to reading Outside magazine while on the elliptical machine, when I can’t find a new issue of one of the magazines I prefer, and the intended readers apparently are looking more for excitement than tranquility. But even they probably find some kind of peace of mind and spirit while battling the elements and the limitations of their bodies rather than the stresses of modern life.

I’ve been thinking about tranquility lately, not because life has been particularly hectic, but because of a verse in 1 Peter. At Bible study last week, we looked at 1 Peter 3:1-7, where Peter gives advice to women who are Christians and whose husbands are not. (There is no corresponding advice to men with non-Christian wives because in the culture of that day, the head of the household determined the religion for the entire family.)

I found myself wondering about verse 4, where Peter commends “the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” I understand what it means to be gentle, but what is a “quiet spirit”? We agreed among ourselves (the half-dozen women at the study) that it probably did not have to do with how talkative a woman is or how loudly she speaks.

I’ve always tended to be quiet, but I’m not so sure I have a “quiet spirit,” so I wanted to know what that meant. Later I looked it up, and found out that the Greek word would be better translated tranquil. It means neither disturbing others nor being disturbed.

Perishability and value

I’ve been studying 1 Peter lately, and I keep noticing the words perishable and imperishable. We have an imperishable inheritance (1:4), we are born again of imperishable seed (1:23) which is the word of God, and a gentle and quiet spirit has an imperishable quality (3:4).

But gold is considered perishable (1:7), as is silver (1:18). At first I didn’t think much about that, other than to notice that it is just one more example of the way spiritual values are the opposite of worldly values. But when I started thinking about, I had trouble coming up with a sense in which gold or silver is perishable. Objects made of these metals can be melted down, but the metals themselves retain their value.

When I mentioned this to someone at Bible study last week, she pointed out that gold can be stolen. That fact is one reason that we want to invest our lives in setting aside “treasure in heaven” that can’t be stolen, but stolen gold doesn’t lose its value. It’s just someone else who gets to make use of its value.

So I’ve been thinking more about the word perishable. When I was growing up, I heard it most often in the context of putting away groceries. My mother was adamant about getting the “perishables” put away the minute we walked in the door. I couldn’t hang up my coat (or throw it on my bed or whatever I used to do with it) or go to the bathroom or anything else, until the perishables had been put in the refrigerator or freezer.

Awake, my soul

There are many things I like about Easter, but one of the best has to be the glorious music. When I was little, the older children’s choir at our church always sang “In Joseph’s Lovely Garden,” and I always found both the music and words very moving. (Unfortunately, by the time I was old enough for that choir, the music program had changed and that choir no longer existed, so I never got to sing it.)

Once I was old enough to join the adult choir, I got to sing the Hallelujah Chorus for Easter. As the lone high schooler in the group, I struggled to learn the alto part while the adults easily sang through it from many years of practice. Once I had learned it, though, I was disappointed to discover, over the next several years, that most churches do not perform it every Easter, as did the church I grew up in. (Adults in most church choirs seem to consider it too difficult, and I have to admit that in some cases they may be right.)

Even so, there are several wonderful Easter hymns to sing. There are “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” and “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today,” two hymns by Charles Wesley that are so similar that unless I have a hymnal in front of me I tend to intermix the words and music of both hymns. I never heard “Low in the Grave He Lay” until I was a teenager at a fundamentalist church, and I have to admit that it has never become one of my favorites, but it provides an effective contrast between the disciples’ grief, and the joy of the resurrection, that few other hymns do.

Today, at the early service (I am reluctant to call anything at 7 AM a sunrise service) at the Methodist church, we finished with “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” Like the Hallelujah Chorus, it speaks more to me of Christ’s Lordship over all than specifically of the Resurrection, but if one is fit for Easter then certainly the other is also. What struck me as we sang it this morning, though, was the first half of the third line: “Awake, my soul, and sing.”

Parable of the talents

Yesterday’s sermon was on the parable of the talents (Matthew 25). It’s a familiar story to many churchgoers, about a master who entrusted three of his servants with different amounts of money based on their abilities. Two of them doubled the money by the time their master returned to settle accounts. The third buried his in the ground.

The thrust of the sermon was much the same as most teaching I have heard on this passage: we are responsible to use the resources we have been given, not to just hold onto them. One thing the pastor said surprised me though – that the man who buried his talent acted not out of fear but laziness, and used fear only as an excuse when confronted by the master.

I suppose that’s possible. Lazy people tend to develop the ability to come up with all sorts of excuses, and while the excuse of fear clearly didn’t keep this man out of trouble, he may have thought it would result in a lesser punishment than if he admitted he just didn’t want to bother.

I’ve always thought his explanation of fear made a lot of sense, though. This was one of the Bible stories I didn’t like as a child, because I easily identified with the man who buried his talent out of fear. I had plenty of abilities: I was good at reading, math, spelling, art, music – just about everything except sports. But I disliked taking risks.

What does God look like?

“What does God look like?” That was the question asked during the children’s sermon at the church my son and I attended Sunday (where our family often visits when my husband is not preaching elsewhere, though on this occasion he was filling in for a pastor who does two services on Sunday morning, at different locations, which is why we didn’t go with him).

It’s a question I imagine most children have wondered about, at least those who grew up with some kind of religious faith. I don’t remember ever having a specific mental picture of God, because one of the earliest lessons I remember learning was that “God is everywhere.” I don’t know if I also was told that God is invisible, but I know I always thought of God that way – after all, if a God who is everywhere were not invisible, how could I possible see anything else?

I don’t know what other children think when being told God is everywhere, but I concluded that it meant God inhabited every cubic inch of the universe. As a young adult I puzzled over what meaning there could be for the Holy Spirit to live in the hearts of believers in Jesus Christ. If God was already everywhere, how could He not be in every person, as well as every tree, rock, and single-celled organism?

Because I had been taught that God is specially present in believers, I believed it, but I couldn’t make logical sense out of it. My husband was the one who finally pointed out that saying God is omnipresent does not mean He is literally present everywhere. It means that there is no limit to where He can be, no place too far away or too hidden for Him.

A fresh look at the Bible

Reading a familiar passage of Scripture in a different translation than what you are used to can make it seem fresh and alive. I remember reading books by J.B. Phillips and being amazed how the verses he quoted – in his own translation – seemed so relevant to me, in a way that they did not when I read them in my usual translation. (And my usual translation at the time was the NIV, which had the same effect as Phillips’ translation the first time I read it.)

For a really fresh look, take a look at a graphic designer’s interpretation of Scripture – in graphic form, of course. In Jim LePage’s blog post on “An Idiot’s Guide to Reading the Bible,” he explains how he came to start his Word project, in which he creates a design for each book of the Bible. The designs aren’t intended to represent the entire book, just some aspect of it that particularly struck him.

Enjoying poetry

I’ve never enjoyed poetry a great deal, though there are individual poems I like very much. It’s something I can enjoy in small doses, but I have rarely sat and read poetry the way I sit and read a novel or a non-fiction book. Even a single poem that is too long to fit on one page rarely draws my interest.

There are narrative poems that are an exception to that. I enjoyed reading “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” when I was in ninth grade, and Macbeth when I was in eleventh grade. But I think of those more as stories told in verse than as poems – I read primarily to enjoy the story, and to a lesser extent the rhythm and sound. I didn’t have to spend much time trying to decipher meaning wrapped up in mysterious metaphors.

On a recent trip to the library, I decided to try again to find something both interesting and educational in the non-fiction section. This time I ended up looking at books of poetry, and remembered that there are a couple of poems I particularly like by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I looked in the catalog to see if I could find more of his poetry, but the anthologies referenced only contained the poems I already knew.

One of these, however, intrigued me for another reason. There are two volumes entitled Chapter into Verse, which consist of poetry based on Scripture. (Some poems are based wholly on a passage of Scripture, others merely make a reference to it somewhere.) As one volume was for the Old Testament and one for the New, I decided to start with the Old Testament.

I had expected that I would just read a bit here and there as I do with most poetry anthologies, but instead I have now finished nearly half the volume. It helps, of course, that I have a good idea of the content of the Old Testament. I don’t know what poets I will be reading, or what direction they will take with any particular passage, but I feel like I am in more or less familiar territory.

One surprise is that I am particularly enjoying the poetry of George Herbert. I vaguely recognized the name as a poet from centuries ago, which are usually not among those I enjoy most. The older poems often seem to be rather long, and when they are published using the original spelling (which was not standardized until a couple hundred years ago), I find that rather distracting.

Fortunately, the editors of Chapters into Verse chose to modernize the spelling. As a result, I wasn’t even sure, initially, whether I correctly remembered George Herbert as an “old” poet. So far my favorites have been “Aaron” and “The Bunch of Grapes.” (The links I found, unfortunately, do not modernize the spelling.) If you are not familiar with his poetry, I hope you enjoy these as an introduction to his work.

Books: Radical

 I finally finished David Platt’s book Radical yesterday. When I started it, back on Super Bowl Sunday, I couldn’t put it down. (Admittedly, it doesn’t take much to distract me from watching a football game.) Once I was offered the chance to take it home, and finish it at my leisure, I couldn’t seem to get interested in picking it up again.

That’s perhaps not too unusual a reaction. As one of the editorial reviews at amazon.com points out,

“Sometimes people will commend a book by saying, ‘You won’t want to put it down.’ I can’t say that about this book. You’ll want to put it down, many times. If you’re like me, as you read David Platt’s Radical, you’ll find yourself uncomfortably targeted by the Holy Spirit. You’ll see just how acclimated you are to the American dream.” (Russell D. Moore, dean, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)

Most days I read for relaxation and intellectual stimulation. I like to sit in a comfy armchair, often with a snack or at least a beverage handy. Picking up a book that makes me feel guilty for time or money I spend on my own comfort doesn’t quite fit the picture.

When I did finally pick it up again yesterday, I had another surprise. Most of what I remembered about the book was the emphasis on American Christians needing to be willing to give up at least some of their material comforts and give to people elsewhere in the world who have so much less. Apparently I had pretty much finished that part of the book, because when I started reading again, it was all about needing to take the gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ to people who have never heard, so that they will not all go to Hell.

Modern metaphors

Yesterday my emailed daily Bible reading took me to Revelation 1:9-20, where the appearance of Jesus is described. I realize that much of the language of Revelation is figurative, so I don’t know how much benefit there is to trying to compose a mental picture from John’s description of Jesus. But I tried anyway – if nothing else, it serves as a counterbalance to the pictures of Jesus in the stained glass windows at the church we have been visiting recently (images which, to me, convey little except adherence to a particular style of religious painting).

I tried not to get too distracted by a literal interpretation – I do tend to take things rather literally, and even when I know they are not meant that way I can’t avoid thinking of what it would mean if they were. For instance, if his face were “like the sun shining in full strength,” it would be rather hard to distinguish a detail such as that his eyes were “like a flame of fire.”

Mostly I tried to focus on the sword coming from his mouth, and what that was symbolic of. My first thought, of course, is Paul’s reference to the word of God as the sword of the Spirit (Eph. 6:17). Hebrews 4:12 also compares the word of God to a sword, saying that the word is even sharper, penetrating “even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”

I associate the image of the sword with truthfulness, though I can’t say why, other than its use to represent the word of God in the verses referenced above. (I looked up commentary on this verse in Revelation and it did say the sword indicates truthfulness and accuracy.)

I realized that I really find it hard to think of swords except in a symbolic sense, which means that their symbolism is whatever I have been taught that it is, unlike the people to whom these words were written, who experienced the use of swords in everyday life. (We do own a ceremonial sword that is kept in its sheath in a closet; it would have been nice if our older son could have used it as part of his costume when he had to dress up as an explorer of the New World for school, but of course today’s zero-tolerance policies made that impossible even though the sword is quite blunt.)

(I have, of course, seen movies in which swords were used, and movie magic made the injuries they caused look relatively realistic. But I know when watching a movie how fake it all is – so much so that I had a hard time, when viewing the footage of 9/11, the morning it happened, convincing myself that it was real people falling to real death and not just another example of Hollywood at work. I knew it was real, but it just didn’t feel real – does that make sense?)

Another passage I read yesterday, in the same emailed Bible reading, was Psalm 23. I’ve read books on the details of sheep and shepherding to help understand the Scriptural use of such metaphors, and even collaborated with my husband on a sermon series on this psalm. But knowing what it means and feeling the emotional impact of it are two different things. People to whom these metaphors were part of daily experience must have felt a greater impact from these Scriptures.

I know that God chose to have the Scriptures written in a certain time and place and therefore culture, and these metaphors no doubt have greater universal significance through other times and places and cultures than if they had been written in our time and culture. There have been paraphrases of the Bible (or at least parts of it) that try to use metaphors suited to our modern life, and they quickly become dated, as our modern life at the end of 2010 is different from what modern life was like just ten or twenty years ago.

But I found myself wondering, as I do from time to time, what certain Scripture passages would sound like if they had been written today. I am certain that people inspired by the Spirit could have found appropriate metaphors to express eternal truths in our culture or any other. That doesn’t mean the originals are unable to speak to us today, just that one way to meditate on Scripture is to imagine how it might be rephrased in terms more familiar to us today.

For instance, if I were writing Hebrews 4:12 I think I would refer to the word of God as sharper than a surgeon’s scalpel. (I thought of perhaps a laser, which is used in much surgery today, but it just doesn’t have the connotation of “sharpness” that a scalpel does.) The scalpel metaphor doesn’t work so well for Ephesian 6, though. Today’s weapons tend to be explosive rather than piercing, which doesn’t work well to describe the word of God.

I thought of a Kevlar vest to take the place of the breastplate in Eph. 6, but that left me without anything to substitute for the shield. Helmets still work just fine, but army boots? Hmm, I don’t know that much about military stuff myself anyway, better to think of some different sorts of metaphors.

How about if Psalm 119 were written today? What modern metaphors could we find for the word of God?

The law from your mouth is more precious to me than billions of dollars in stocks and bonds. (See Ps. 119:72.) Of course, these days people aren’t too sure of the worth of a lot of stocks and bonds. But the idea of billions of dollars still means more to me, in an emotional sense, than pieces of gold and silver.

Your word is a flashlight for my feet, a light on my path. (See Ps. 119:105). A flashlight is a good substitute for a lamp in terms of how much light it gives, since the oil lamps they used back then didn’t light one’s way very far. But somehow it doesn’t sound very impressive, since – at least in urban and suburban areas – we’ve used to having bright streetlights to show the way in the dark.

Instead of trying to adapt existing verses, I decided to just look for metaphors that seemed appropriate.

Your word is like a traffic light. It tells me when to stop and when to go.

Your word is sweeter than pecan pie, more satisfying than ice cream.

Your word makes me wiser than winners of the Nobel Prize.

Your word is like a GPS. It gives me directions, step by step, which way to go. (And it is better than a GPS because it doesn’t give wrong directions sometimes.)

[1/1/2011 - forgot to add this one]
Your word is like a radio, always broadcasting your truth – but only heard by those who are “tuned in.”

Hope and expectation

One thing I like about attending a church that celebrates the Advent season is getting to sing Advent hymns. This morning we sang “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus” and my favorite, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” (We also sang “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks,” which doesn’t strike me as an Advent hymn at all, but I happen to enjoy singing it - as long as it is to the tune by Handel.)

Advent is all about waiting, hope, and expectation. I have heard many times, in sermons and Bible studies, that when the Bible speaks of hope it is something one is sure of, not the way we use the word in English to express a wish that we may have little confidence of having fulfilled. When I studied Spanish, I found it interesting – and somewhat confusing – that a single verb, esperar, means to wait, to hope, and to expect. How, I wondered, would you express the idea of hoping without much expectation of fulfillment? “I hope he will come, but I don’t expect he will come.” (I have read since that the meaning has to be determined from the context.)