The Earth Stood Still (Advent Music)

Merry Christmas from Future of Forestry:

Advent Homily: Salvation is of the Law (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king; He will save us." Is. 33:22

Here we see two simple yet staunch truths, one offensive and the other startling (and perhaps even more offensive). The offensive truth is that God, far from being a mere authority, is revealed as the absolute authority (of Israel specifically and by extension all things). The titles that He is given in this verse form a pattern that shows His authority to be all-encompassing.

As the "judge," He is the one who enforces the law: He passes sentence either to vindicate or punish, to deliver or destroy. As the "lawgiver," He is the one who makes the law: He (literally in Hebrew) "engraves" the law on tablets of stone, declaring forever what is right and wrong, just and unjust. And as the "king," He is the Law: He embodies its very essence and is its very reality, for the law is not the result of His arbitrary whims but the reflection of His perfect character. In sum, He is all-in-one the application of the reflection of the will that made and maintains and runs and rules all things. He is the one who is greater than us: greater than our notions and nations, greater than all our fads and fashions, greater than all our meta-narratives or private interpretations, and greater than all our Sin.

That last phrase points to the more starting truth: "He will save us." What's startling about this is that His identity as Savior is a direct result of His identity as the Absolute Authority. To put it simply, He can save us because He is in charge, because He has the power and the right to do so. Now, we often treat salvation as a category unto itself: God does save us, maybe not in spite of Himself, but at least in isolation from Himself, as though God took a holiday from His other attributes. ("Despite His sense of justice and holiness, God saved us anyway.") Scripture shows such well-intended thinking to be false: God's role as Savior is right in line and in accord with all His attributes, viz., His role as Absolute Authority. It is all linked together in one brilliant pattern that is God.

I suspect that we do not like this. Of course, we do not like the idea of absolute authority, but how much less will we like the idea of absolute authority being the grounds for heroism? It is bad enough that we have a king, but now we find that only the king can save us. And why? Because we have broken the law. Rebellion will not save us; rebellion is what's killing us. It is the height of idiocy to say that we must rebel against God in order to be free. We have rebelled against God, and we are not free but instead are enslaved to other masters, ones armed with cruel hate: the Devil and Sin and Death. It is vain to speak of questioning authority; we have questioned it. It is vain to speak of transgressing the boundaries; we have transgressed them. We have breached the wall, we have scaled the city, we have cast down the thrones of universal law, and we have paid for it with our souls, for in Adam we all died (I Cor. 15:22a), and all our talk is the rigor mortis setting in further and further and further. This rot will be purged with wrath, and we will be consumed in the purging, for the wages of Sin is death (Rom. 6:23a).

The only one who can save us from the wrath of the law is the Law Himself, the Law-giver and Law-applier, the only one who knows how to satisfy it. And He did satisfy it. He breached the walls of our insurrection to satisfy it. He mingled with the dust so that He might rebel against our rebellion. For this He was manifested: that He might destroy the works of the Devil (I John 3:8), the scheming, lying, son of perdition, whose trick have wasted the world. The King of kings met our anarchy with a little Anarchy of his own: the anarchy of righteousness against evil, of light against darkness, of order against chaos. That is the meaning of Christmas: the Law is our Savior, the King is our Hero. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Advent Homily: Born a King (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"Behold, a King shall reign in righteousness...and the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness [shall be] quietness and security forever." Is. 32:1, 17

The child in the manger is a memorable and adorable emblem of Christmastide and time, but we must not lose the substance of a greater image. The Christian Faith is fundamentally monarchical in its vision, and the child in the manger is our king. He is a special king, of course. He has condescended to His people in ways that are unthinkable, submitting to every limitation we have, taking upon is trinitarian Person the burden and fragility of flesh. A unique tale indeed: the prince became a pauper so that all paupers might become "princes [ruling] in judgment" (vs. 1). Our king is no ordinary king.

Even so, He is still a king. Much more than a king, but no less than one either. You owe Him your allegiance and life, a life He bought and paid for with His own life and blood. The blood is a mystery, but the allegiance is an offense. In our highly fragmented, postmodern, democratic West, where every man and woman is a king and kingdom unto and locked up into themselves, dutiful allegiance to another (especially as authoritarian a figure as a king!) is anathema. The whole thing reeks of hegemonic oppression or discursive tyranny of panoptic meta-narratives or some other nonsense bloated on non-words. We don't like kings because we are all anarchists at heart, regicidal maniacs in our very being.

The proof of our anarchy is in the pudding of Calvary. When the King of kings made Himself a man, we found Him amusing for a while but did not hesitate to slaughter Him when it was convenient for us. Alas, it would be our undoing, for His death led to His resurrection, which in turn legitimized His throne forever, a throne of grace and seat of mercy, pouring forth love like the sun does its shining. It was truly a beautiful defeat on our part, and if you embrace that defeat, swearing fealty to the once and future and forever King, then you shall be a partaker of His Kingdom, a Kingdom of love and joy and dance and song. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

In the Name of Peace and Quietness (an Advent post by an Original Orthodox Rebel)

The following is from Dorothy Sayer's essay "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged," from the book Letters to a Diminished Church:

[The Incarnation] is not just a pious commonplace; it is not commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man---limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death---[God] had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

[...]

Possibly we might prefer not to take this tale too seriously---there are disquieting points about it. Here we had a man of divine character walking and talking among us---and what did we find to do with him? The common people, indeed, "heard him gladly," but our leading authorities in Church and State considered that he talked too much and uttered too many disconcerting truths. So we bribed one of his friends to hand him over quietly to the police, and we tried him on a rather vague charge of creating a disturbance, and had him publicly flogged and hanged on the common gallows, "thanking God we were rid of a knave." All this was not very creditable to us, even if he was (as many people thought and think) only a harmless, crazy preacher. But if the Church is right about him, it was more discreditable still, for the man we hanged was God Almighty.

[...]

If this is dull, then what, in Heaven's name, is worthy to be exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore. [O]n the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him "meek and mild," and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. To those who knew him, however, he in no way suggests a milk-and-water person; they objected to him as a dangerous firebrand.

True, he was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers, and humble before heaven; but he insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites. He referred to King Herod as "that fox"; he went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a "gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"; he assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the temple; he drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; he cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people's pigs and property; he showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, he displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and he retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb. He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, [then] there can be nothing dull about God either. But he had "a daily beauty in his life that made us ugly," and officialdom felt that the established order of things would be more secure without him. So they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness.

 

Lower Still (Advent music by Current Orthodox Rebels)

I consider this to be a musical postscript for this post. Though technically not a "Christmas song," it is still one of the best presentations of the Incarnation (as well as the death, burial, and resurrection) of Christ that I have ever heard.

(Note: This "video" is nothing but the song. No need to watch; just listen.)

Death and Rebirth (some Advent thoughts by an Original Orthodox Rebel)

The following is an excerpt from "The Grand Miracle," a chapter in C.S. Lewis' book Miracles.

In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature He created. But he goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. He must stoop in order to lift; he must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders.

Or one may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, back to color and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover. He and it are both colored now that they have come up into the light; down below, where it lay colorless in the dark, he lost his color too.

In this descent to reascent everyone will recognize a familiar pattern: a thing written all over the world. It is the pattern of vegetable life. It must belittle itself into something hard, small and deathlike. It must fall into the ground; thence the new life reascends. It is the pattern of all animal generation too. There is a descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoon and ovum, and in the dark womb a life at first inferior in kind to that of the species which is being reproduced; then the slow ascent to the perfect embryo, to the living, conscious baby, and finally to the adult. So it is also in our moral and emotional life. The first innocent and spontaneous desires have to submit to the deathlike process of control or total denial; but from that there is a reascent to fully formed character in which the strength of the original material all operates but in a new way. Death and Rebirth--go down to go up--it is a key principle. Through this bottleneck, this belittlement, the highroad nearly always lies.

The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the center. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God. All the instances of it which I have mentioned turn out to be but transpositions of the Divine theme into a minor key. I am not now referring simply to the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. The total pattern, of which they are only the turning point, is the real Death and Rebirth; for certainly no seed ever fell from so fair a tree into so dark and cold a soil as would furnish more than a faint analogy to this huge descent and reascension in which God dredged the salt and oozy bottom of Creation.

Gravity and Kittens (some Advent thoughts by an Original Orthodox Rebel)

Continuing our Advent posts this season, here we have an excerpt from G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man. In the first chapter of the second section (called "The God in the Cave"), Chesterton talks about the unique qualities of Christmas and how no other religion or philosophy in the world could have produced it. Here is a small sampling. I encourage you to sometime read the whole chapter.

Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other: the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still connect them, [even] when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection. For him there will always be some savor of religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God.

But the two ideas are not naturally or necessarily combined. They would not be necessarily combined for an ancient Greek or a Chinaman, even for Aristotle or Confucius. It is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten. It has been created in our minds by Christmas because we are Christians; because we are psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones.

In other words, this combination of ideas has emphatically, in the much disputed phrase, altered human nature. There really is a difference between the man who knows it and the man who does not. It may not be a difference of moral worth, for the Muslim or the Jew might be worthier according to his lights; but it is a plain fact about the crossing of two particular lights, the conjunction of two stars in our particular horoscope. Omnipotence and impotence, or divinity and infancy, do definitely make a sort of epigram which a million repetitions cannot turn into a platitude. It is not unreasonable to call it unique. Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet.

 

 

The Lonely Maker (some Advent poetry by an Original Orthodox Rebel)

Now that Thanksgiving has passed, the Christmas season can officially begin. (That's right: I'm a purist. Don't hate.) In light of this and in honor of the season, I'll be sprinkling my blog with an occasional "Advent post," starting with this excerpt from George MacDonald's Diary of an Old Soul.

I do remember how one time I thought,

"God must be lonely--oh, so lonely lone!

I will be very good to him--ah, nought

Can reach the heart of his great loneliness!

My whole heart I will bring him, with a moan

That I may not come nearer; I will lie prone

Before the awful loveliness of loneliness' excess."

A God must have a God for company.

And lo, thou hast the Son-God to thy friend.

Thou honor'st his obedience, he thy law.

Into thy secret life-will he doth see;

Thou fold'st him round in live love perfectly--

One two, without beginning, without end;

In love, life, strength, and truth, perfect without flaw.

Thou hast not made, or taught me, Lord, to care

For times and seasons--but this one glad day

Is the blue sapphire clasping all the lights

That flash in the girdle of the year so fair--

When thou wast born a man, because alway

Thou wast and art a man, through all the flights

Of thought, and time, and thousandfold creation's play.

We all are lonely, Maker--each a soul

Shut in by itself, a sundered atom of thee.

No two yet loved themselves into a whole;

Even when we weep together we are two.

Of two to make one, which yet two shall be,

Is thy creation's problem, deep, and true,

To which thou only hold'st the happy, hurting clue.

No less than thou, O Father, do we need

A God to friend each lonely one of us.

As touch not in the sack two grains of seed,

Touch no two hearts in great worlds populous.

Outside the making God we cannot meet.

Him he has made our brother; homeward, thus,

To find our kin we first must turn our wandering feet.

It must be possible that the soul made

Should absolutely meet the soul that makes;

Then, in that bearing soul, meet every other

There also born, each sister and each brother.

Lord, till I meet thee thus, life is delayed;

I am not I until that morning breaks,

Not I until my consciousness eternal wakes.

[...]

Go, my beloved children, live your life.

Wounded, faint, bleeding, never yield the strife.

Stunned, fallen-awake, arise, and fight again.

Before you victory stands with shining train

Of hopes not credible until they are.

Beyond morass and mountain swells the star

Of perfect love--the home of longing heart and brain.

 

 

The Dance and Death (an Advent devotional by an orthodox rebel)

There is stillness in God, but not as we understand stillness. In God is the highest life and energy. In Him and from Him is all movement, as Dante would describe it. In Him is the Great Dance, as Lewis would say. With God there is no ceasing of activity, but rather the perfecting of activity, because the activity is no longer wild and aimless and weary from wandering. It has found its object, its mark, its "resting" place. It has come home, and that is the stillness of God: the inward peace in finally becoming one with God's life and energy, of becoming one with the Godhead's triune dance. The peace of God, the stillness of God, is in the soul coming home at last, where God turns our mourning into dancing (Ps. 30:11).

There is stillness in Sin, and it is exactly as we understand stillness. Decay. Corruption. Moth and rust destroying. The sinful soul is the derelict soul. The soul that sins shall die (Eze. 18:4), and death is the final stillness, the final ceasing of all energies. Whenever a soul sins, it has turned itself away from God, away from the movement to the frigid static, away from the dance into the outer dark. For Sin is the calcification of the self onto anything that is not God. All other things of creation (even if they are good and noble) are dumb, lifeless idols whenever they try to take God's place, and their worshipers become just as dumb and lifeless. In the holiness that is the worship of God, in that grand dance and symphony, is life everlasting; but in the sin that is the worship of the self, or any other created thing, is the petrification of the soul unto death.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011

The Gifts of God (an Advent devotional by an orthodox rebel)

"Behold, I do a new thing...." Isaiah 43:19

Existence is paradoxically simple and bewildering. It is mundane and it overwhelms. Like that strange little game with the black and white discs: minutes to learn but a lifetime to master. Mere existence takes only seconds to admit (if we are sane) but an apparent eternity to comprehend (again, if we are sane). Whenever we walk through it and amongst it, its presence is so commonplace that it becomes transparent. Whenever we pause and look upon it and think on it, its presence is so odd and its meaning so incomprehensible that it becomes equal parts beatific and monstrous. Ever tree is both a flowering wonder and a demon with a thousand bursting hands, shedding flakes of green blood and other fantastic colors. Even the size of the universe that we know of (and we know very little) overcomes us. The seemingly infinite expanse overhead is as wide and rolling as an open plain and as dark and gaping as an open maw. We shudder and we wonder, and then we try not to think about it.

Those who try to think about it hardly do better. Their quaint explanations run hollow, and only satisfy us in those deathly moments when the world is transparent rather than monstrous. Even we, as Christians, do no better. In the face of the universe, we spit the phrase "God did it," as though that solved the puzzle or ended the mystery. Only in the church pews, those deadest of the dead moments, can such a glib statement stick. Step out of the dusty church hall back into the wilderness wonderland outside, however, and that insubstantial thought drains from your soul like color from your face. It is not good enough to simply say, "God did it," for it does not answer the ultimate question of "Why?"

God is perfect, which means that he is complete or whole. He lacks nothing and needs nothing; if He didn't, then He wouldn't be God. Whence comes creation, then? It cannot be for Himself. There are some bizarre (though sincere) notions that creation is God's way of "completing" Himself, that each soul's experiences will fill up what is lacking in the Godhead. It sounds quite charming, and perhaps even lovely; but it is in error, for the Godhead cannot "lack" and still be the Godhead. So we are still left with the question of why: why did God make all of this stuff anyway?

Some would say that he made it for us, but that does not solve anything either. It is a matter of biblical authority and Christian orthodoxy that the earth and its fullness are the Lord's. All glory belongs to Him. Nothing in creation is "for" us in an ultimate sense; the heaven's declare His glory, no matter how beautiful they shine on us. Furthermore, even if it was "for" us, that still does not solve the problem, for why then did God make a creation that needed creation? What was the purpose of making needy beings? The neediness itself becomes one more facet to the "stuff" of existence, and so we are back to square one.

Herein are the two facts: God needs nothing, yet everything is for Him and His glory. What then, are we to make of this? I am no theologian, and am at best only an "arm-chair" philosopher, but I would posit this: it seems to me that existence is fundamentally arbitrary, i.e., it is there, but there is no reason why it should be here. It just is. Even though it gives glory to God, He does not need glory anymore than He needs creation. The whole thing is ultimately superfluous; yet there is a unique beauty to its superfluousness that is found in this fact: for God, superfluous does not equal meaningless. There is a reason to this random rhyme, and we have a name for something that is completely unnecessary and yet full to bursting with sweet meaning. It is called a gift.

All is a gift of God, and marvelous are His gifts. He did not make them because He needed glory, or stuff, or needy beings to need the stuff and give Him glory. Rather, he made it because He simply wanted to: for the sheer good and joy that is inherent in the act of creation, for the sheer joy of being able to see it and see that it is good. Every scrap of this universe is the bounty of God, a treasure whose light Sin can diminish but not extinguish, and some day it will burst forth in an eruption of brilliance and sound that will eat away the darkness like some benevolent cancer that restores the very cells of Being back to health. For redemption, too, is one of the gifts of God. Arbitrary, because the creation it saves is arbitrary; meaningful, because like the creation it redeems, it is chocked full of the goodness and delight of God, a substance that is weightier than the densest star and more infinite than the voids of Hell.

God's arbitration is not that of a machine; it is that of a Creator. He is not the steel-cold mind lost in a fog of its own frigid and abstract divinity. He is the supremely happy artisan, working wonders out of His own two hands, who makes out of the sheer delight for making and for no other reason; and every occurrence, whether it be good or ill from our view, is yet another chance for Him to prove His good pleasure. All glory is another place for creation, and all sin is for recreation. He makes all things new, always making a new thing out of His unquenchable gladness for making and newness. Thus it has always been and ever shall be.

In the vast, burning simplicity of perfect communion that was God's existence before Time began, the Godhead rolled up Their sleeves, and in Their Trinitarian nature said to Themselves, "Watch this." Thus was creation. When our first parents sinned, and death's black sorrows spread like spilt ink across that creation, God had already rolled up His sleeves and said to the host of Heaven, "Watch this." Thus was redemption. And I would like to think that when we reach that golden shore, and the grey rain curtain of this world fades away, and we finally past the threshold of Revelation's final chapter, and the last words of Time are written in the last book ever written, we will look into those glad eyes of the glad Creator and say, "Now what?" And He will smile, and roll up His sleeves, and say yet again, "Watch this," not out of necessity, but out of love, and goodness, and the sheer unutterable joy of gift-giving.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011