Psalm 104-the glad heart of God

Today I have three more verses of Psalm 104 to contemplate. They all have to do with how God made a world that gives us pleasure and gives him pleasure.

First, vs. 15 which says:

“Wine that makes glad the heart of man, oil to make his face to shine, and bread that strengthens man’s heart.”

This is in a section that talks about how God gives water, causing springs to gush and valleys to make streams, thus providing for wildlife (vs. 10-13). Then the singer turns to domestic animals and farming (v. 14). Verse 15 gets more specific, singling out the product of the grape, the olive, and of grain.

Wilderness nomads, Bedouins, cultivate none of these things. Manna had been compensation for the inability of the people to cultivate grain in the wilderness. But the grape and the olive are gifts of settled life in the promised land. They are not necessities.

God provides them not for necessity but for pleasure to make the heart glad and to make the face shine. God provides a surplus beyond necessity.

Second, there is vs. 26, which speaks of “Leviathan that you made to play in the sea.” Or it could be translated “Leviathan whom you made to amuse you.” The Hebrew word, sachaq, means to laugh, play, make merry, or take pleasure. Translators differ about whether it is Leviathan who is amused or God. Perhaps the sense is that God is so great that he made this fearsome creature as his plaything.

Leviathan is a marine monster. The extensive description in Job 41 seems to point to the Nile crocodile, the nastiest creature anyone in the Ancient Near East was ever likely to encounter. Yet God had made this creature for pleasure.

Third, is vs. 31, where it says, “Let the LORD rejoice in his works.” God takes pleasure in what he has made. As Genesis 1 says, he is of the opinion that creation is “very good.”

God did not make a merely utilitarian world, but gave it a surplus of good and beauty that calls forth pleasure in him and us. This would undermine any view of religion as dour, stuffy, and opposed to pleasure.

 In the 1981 film Chariots of Fire British Olympic runner Eric Liddell says he runs because God “made me fast, and when I run I feel his pleasure.”

Today I will take pleasure in God’s world and ponder what pleasure God may take in his creation of me, my family, and my community.

Psalm 104-His creatures fill the earth

I have said a prayer over a deceased pet on occasion. Children and adults have animals they care about. The majority of prayer requests in a grade school youth group were about pets and grandparents. I interpret Philippians 4:6 as permission to pray about anything people care about.

However, for me the death of a farm animal or a wild animal has never occasioned prayer. There were hunters and 4-H members in my congregations, so not much romanticism about wild animals and farm animals.

George Weigel is amused by new Episcopal liturgical prayers apparently for funerals of such animals. The one for a wild animal goes:

“Almighty God, who make the beasts of the wild move in beauty and show forth the glory of your Name: We grieve the death of this creature, in whose living and dying the power of your Spirit was made manifest. We reverence the loss of that which was never ours to claim but only to behold with wonder; through Jesus Christ our Redeemer, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

Psalm 104 shows appreciation for the animal kingdom, but no sentimentality or romanticism. God gives food to predators as well as the peaceful herbivores (vs. 20-21). Yet I like the line in the above prayer that says that God’s spirit is made manifest in the living and dying of wild animals. Psalm 104 says that too.

Weigel cares that we avoid confusing animals with humans. Certainly the Hebrew Scriptures avoid this. Animals serve humans as food, and in agriculture and war. They serve as acceptable sacrifices, while human sacrifice stands condemned.

Still, Psalm 104 expresses a positive way of thinking about animals that is in line with other writings in the Hebrew Bible. God’s saves the animal species in the Flood saga. At the end of Jonah, God expresses pity for the livestock as well as the people in Nineveh. So the Hebrew attitude puts God as Lord and caretaker of the animal world as well as the human world. Without any urban over-romanticizing, the Bible values animals. Thus, we can say cruelty to animals or neglect is a serious sin.

But most of all the animal world inspires awe and gratitude to God. It is not just that animals are useful. It is also that they contribute to the beauty of creation. “O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all: The earth is full of your creatures” (Psalms 104:24).

　

Marriage without benefit of the county clerk

Marriage has been in the news a lot lately.  People probably think clergy are all strong defenders of marriage as currently practiced.  But some of us have become uncomfortable with our expected role in weddings and registering marriages with the state.

So here is something to think about: Why Churches Should Stop Performing Marriages.

My understanding is that civil marriage in the U.S. goes back to puritan opposition to marriage as a sacrament governed by canon law.  This was the practice in the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England.  Puritans wanted marriage to be purely a civil contract.  In the early days they discouraged clergy from participating in weddings at all.

But civil marriage today is neither a sacrament nor a contract. (Contracts have penalties for breach of contract, but no fault divorce eliminates this.  If you want a contract, you have to get a plenum.)   Vows  about the permanence and exclusivity of marriage only get enforced in groups that have a separate church law to govern marriage.  This is not Protestant churches, where pastors pretty much get to make up their individual rules.  We sign the marriage licence, but nobody asks us to sign the divorce papers.  Marriage becomes largely a sentimental declaration of intentions.

My wife and I have been caught up in what the book of Ephesians calls the “mystery” of husband and wife for forty-three years.  Our marriage is registered in Los Angeles county, but that isn’t what makes us married.

Pdalm 104-Creation and boundaries

Boundaries Training is a workshop ministers in my denomination must take every few years. It is a response to the problem of clergy abuse that everybody knows about in the Catholic Church, but which also occurs in other churches and in the secular world.

A person who has no boundaries is wide open for disaster.

If you go here, you will find this helpful definition of boundaries:

“Boundaries are physical, emotional, sexual and mental limits we set in relationships that protect us from being controlled, manipulated, abused or exploited.”

Also, increasingly, they protect us and our insurance companies from the appearance of misconduct or from false accusations.

Psalm 104 pictures the Creator setting limits, imposing boundaries. “You have set a boundary that they may not cross; that they don’t return to cover the earth again” (v. 9). God sets a limit on the oceans. This psalm in vs. 5-9 along with Genesis 1:2 and several other places in the Hebrew Scriptures assume that an ocean of chaos was the uncreated state of the world. Creation brings order out of this chaos.

“And I marked out for it my boundary, And set in place its bolted gate, and said, ‘To here you may come, but no further; And here shall your proud waves be confined? (Job 38:10-11).

This has roots in pagan myths where the gods or chief god kill a sea monster named Chaos in order to create the world. The Hebrews revise this, but still sometimes personify the sea of chaos. They see creation as the defeat of chaos and the imposition of order.

Boundaries have the purpose of protecting. The breakwater protects the dry land. Avoiding a compromising situation protects you from complications. Boundaries are what gives the world order instead of chaos. So God set both physical boundaries and moral boundaries.

Of course you can set too many boundaries, or set them in the wrong places. I think of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This is what the detective, Monk, in the TV series struggles with. If you are too afraid of chaos and go overboard with boundaries, you close yourself off from life.

This would be one way to see the Hebrew purity codes. Don’t eat dairy with meat. Don’t sew a garment with two kinds of thread. It seems sort of OCD. But the intent was to deal with the threat of chaos.

I imagine that setting boundaries must have been necessary for this planet to be livable. We get just the right amount of gravity, just the right amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, temperatures within a pretty narrow range. Cross these limits and our kind of life can’t exist.

On the other hand, boundaries that are too restrictive squelch life and freedom. God could have set more boundaries, but he didn’t. In the Genesis creation saga he said to the man, “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden (Genesis 2:14). Only then did he set a boundary.

Psalm 104-the Spirit, the giver of life

This coming Sunday is Pentecost on our church calendar. Psalm 104 is one of the readings and a favorite Psalm of mine. This week I will have a few posts on this psalm. I’m not going to start on another book until after some family visits that will be distracting me for the next few weeks.

My belief in God stands on the fact that I am alive, not some philosophical proof. I am alive and I did not give myself life. To say that life comes through the reproductive process leads to an infinite regression. Yes, I know about the birds and the bees, but who gave life to the first bird and the first bee?

So I am alive and I did not give myself life. I haven’t gotten this gift because I am good. The sun shines on the just and the unjust. Maybe it is because I almost died when I was born. Maybe it is because I grew up on a ranch with a sense of more direct dependence on nature than most people today have. But to receive the grace of life without worshipping the Giver seems to me not so much mistaken as…well, rude.

The Nicene affirmation of faith says “we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life…” So on Pentecost Sunday we read about the Spirit, not as some weird religious experience that causes us to role on the ground, but as the one who creates and renews all life (Psalm 104:30).

Psalm 104 seems connected to the Hymn to Aten of Pharaoh Akhenaton. Reading the Hymn and the Psalm in English, there are obvious similarities. Also the art of the Amarna period in Egypt seems to coincide with the attitude of Psalm 104. Akhenaton decorated the royal tomb, for instance, with images of animals and birds cavorting in the rays of the rising sun.

Akhenaton’s religion worshipped the sun god as the sole or preeminent god. Prophets forbid the Hebrews to worship the sun. Yet the sun gives life and so is an appropriate metaphor for a deity who is the giver of life. In spite of the relentless prophetic attack on the Canaanite fertility religion, Israelite religion was open to cultural influences from other religions. They purified and borrowed.

The psalm begins with a vivid word picture of the creator God:

“Clothed in majesty and glory, wrapped in a robe of light

You stretch the heavens out like a tent, you build your palace on the waters above; using the clouds as your chariot, you advance on the wings of the wind…”(vs. 1b-3 The Jerusalem Bible)

This has the same common sense, rather than scientific. worldview as Genesis 1–with the sky a firmament stretched over us like a tent and the blue of the sky representing waters held above. It is what the world looks like when you go outside and look up, but rendered with moving poetic images.

However, in Psalm 104 creation is not so much something that happened “in the beginning” as it is something that goes on all the time. We can imagine God as shining down life-giving light upon us without thinking that he is literally the sun, or even that he is literally “up there.” But he is literally the reason we are alive.

More on archeology at Khirbet Qeiyafa

John Hobbins at Ancient Hebrew Poetry has more on the implications of the finds at Khirbet Qeiyafa, including a link to my discussion of Adam Welch on Deuteronomy 12.

Last week I mentioned a press conference that made more claims about the finds there: replicas of the Ark of the Covenant.  I was not convinced.

What strikes me about this site is that it seems to have been a fortification over against Gath at about the time of Saul or David.  But David was pretty thick with Gath and had a whole bunch of Gittites in his personal army.  So the time of Saul seems a more likely time for Israel to fortify against Gath.

Four Views-Conclusion and final thoughts

Bruce Demarest, the editor of Four Views on Christian Spirituality, writes the conclusion. He is from an evangelical Presbyterian background. He used to be a missionary and now is a seminary teacher.

He seems more critical of the non-evangelical views than Evan Howard was. Since Zondervan is the publisher, I think the book assumes most of its readers will be evangelical. So Demarest takes up the task of reaffirming evangelical distinctives. He may think evangelicals need this before they will feel free to borrow anything from the other traditions. It comes off, though, like this: they are wrong and we are right, but once you understand that, there are a few things we can learn from them.

One example is when he discusses Catholicism and quotes Catholics who have left their church for an evangelical church as saying that Catholicism failed to offer them a personal, intimate connection with Christ. I thought, “Yes, but what do former evangelicals who find a home in Catholicism say?” This church-hopping goes both ways. It reminds me of our penchant for divorcing and remarrying. This personal-and-intimate thing comes up in justifying that too. Fickleness seems a modern American trait.

When someone whose family and ethnic connections are all Catholic comes to me wanting to switch, my practice is to send them to see the priest. Somehow, I don’t think that would be Demarest’s approach.

Sometimes he just goes over the top. He says:

“Recent Catholic ‘new morality’ teaching involves a radical reinterpretation of sexual ethics, including validation of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. The traditional moral code rooted in Scripture is replaced by a situational ethic governed by love.” (Demarest, Bruce A. (2012-05-01). Four Views on Christian Spirituality (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology) (Kindle Locations 3926-3928). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.)

What? Surely he knows that this is not the Pope or the bishops. He cites a work by Charles Curran, a dissident Catholic. But everyone paying attention knows that this position is the opposite of the Catholic position.

He does not acknowledge the claim of both Joseph Driskill and Evan Howard that there is something of a spiritual renewal going on in the mainline Protestant churches. Instead, he just he says that, although he appreciates the intellectual rigor of that tradition, it has sold out to secular culture and abandoned the gospel, which is “the heart of authentic spirituality”.

His take on Eastern Orthodoxy is that it is too formal and ritualistic. It risks losing the personal relationship aspect of spirituality. He doesn’t deal with the opposite perspective that evangelicalism risks losing the communal aspect of spirituality. He does say, though, that it would be good for evangelicals to recover a “legitimate sacramentalism” and find more of a place for the body and senses in spirituality. (Demarest, Bruce A. (2012-05-01). Four Views on Christian Spirituality (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology) (Kindle Location 3920). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.)

The most useful thing, in my opinion, that Demarest does is right at the beginning of his essay where he mentions specific spiritual practices and emphases from the four traditions.

For the Eastern Orthodox these include the beauty of the liturgy and sharing in the Eucharist, rigorous fasting, sitting in silence, praying continually using the Jesus Prayer, using icons as windows to eternity, submitting to spiritual direction, and physical service to others.

For Roman Catholics the list includes using rosary beads in prayer, spiritual retreats, and journaling. He mentions the lectio divina, a method for contemplating the Bible. I have found this useful myself. To see what it is like, you can listen to one of the pod casts at Pray-as-You-Go.

For progressive Protestants spirituality can include studying the Bible in a critical way, praying for Christian unity, entering into discussions with other religions, and trying to carry out social change.

For evangelical Protestant the main disciplines are Bible study and prayer. They practice an activist kind of prayer. They stress petitionary and intercessory prayer. In other words, when they pray they ask for something to happen.

Demarest says that evangelicals can selectively draw from the other traditions as long as they stay focused on the gospel and a personal relation with Christ.

The book has made me sadder as I think about how Christians divide themselves up into tribes. Although I agree that theology has to be at the base of our spirituality, I do not think we need to go down a list of the categories of systematic theology (God, creation, sin, Christ, salvation, church, the last things, etc.) to see if we agree on them all before we can pray together.

I believe that a lot of people are like me and have some connection with all or most of these traditions. I am a mainline Protestant with family and personal connections in all the other traditions. I have many problems with my own tradition.

When I was training to be an interim minister, there were people in the training from all sorts of denominations. One of the exercises involved putting a chair in the middle of a large room. We were all supposed to stand closer or farther away from the chair depending on how close or alienated we felt from our own tradition.

I appreciate my denomination, but I don’t get my identity as a Christian from it. Theologically, I am often closer to people from other traditions. So I stood several paces away. Many of the trainees stood far away, some out in the hall. One of the tasks of an interim minister is to help reconnect a congregation to its denomination. But many of these ministers felt really alienated from their own denominations.

Spiritually, I think there is some advantage to standing a little way away from your own tradition. It gives you some freedom. On the other hand, there is a communal facet to spiritual practice. Many things you can’t do all by yourself. If you stand too far away, it will hurt you spiritually.