Tag: Saint Paul

08May

Foul Balls and Foul Smells

Thwack!. I am enjoying a beautiful spring day, attending a minor league baseball game with my family. My attention is diverted toward my bratwurst when suddenly a shadow seems to appear above me. Is it a bird? Then fans around me gasp and lunge as the shape– now clearly baseball sized–appears to be zooming toward my head. The maroon-uniformed batter down below has hit a foul ball and its wayward trajectory is about to ruin my day, or worse. Fortunately another spectator with a glove catches the ball, snatching it out of my orbit. This man in the stand cheers and waves his catch around like a trophy. He has caught the foul ball!

This baseball memory came back to me the other day as I was in a hospital corridor. Sunlight was streaming though patient windows. Spring was in the air–until suddenly it wasn’t. For some reason the door to the surgery recovery unit was closed. As I pushed it open, I soon learned why. Wafting down the corridor was an acrid stench that almost felled me. It was like bowel gas mixed with something infectious, like the purulent stinky drainage from a boil or the rot of an infected abdominal wound. It slapped me in the face and drove away all other thoughts. I started to hold my breath as I exited the unit. Soon I was back outside in the sunlight and the fresh blossom-scented spring air.

The word “foul” has layers of meanings that are worthy of reflection. When we go astray (like foul balls) we have deviated from God’s intended trajectory for us. It has happened to all of us: “all we like sheep have gone astray”, as you may remember from Handel’s famous chorus which is taken straight from Isaiah 53. Paul in Romans 3 also reminds us that we have all “fallen short” of God’s glory.

What is worse, though, is that our misdeeds make us, in a sense, smell bad–we “stink to high heaven” as an old saying goes. In Isaiah 65, God says the following of his wayward people. Here I use the Living Bible translation, for its descriptiveness:
“These people are a stench in my nostrils, an acrid smell that never goes away.”
When we stray from God’s will, we become like that odor I encountered in the hospital. Or like my dog, who sometimes on walks through wooded parks will suddenly dart into some leaves and roll in the liquifying remains of some dead rodent, thereby acquiring an awful odor. (When this happens, he finds that he very quickly gets some kind of bath).

But there is a promise to the faithful. Through the prophet Hosea, God exhorts His people to return to Him, and promises to make Israel smell good: “His splendor will be like an olive tree,
    his fragrance like a cedar of Lebanon.” In Ezekiel God says, “As a pleasing aroma I will accept you, when I bring you out from the peoples and gather you out of the countries where you have been scattered. And I will manifest my holiness among you in the sight of the nations.”

Blast forward four centuries to the New Testament, and we find that the apostle Paul used the idea of fragrant burnt offerings as a metaphor for the Christian life. He asked his readers to become “living sacrifices”–they are to be as consumed by passion for the things of God as to be on fire, and as dead to self as the animals consumed by that fire on the altar.

“But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things?”
(2 Corinthians 2:14-16, Holy Bible, English Standard Version).

The Living Bible clarifies verse 16: “To those who are not being saved, we seem a fearful smell of death and doom, while to those who know Christ we are a life-giving perfume.”

So, don’t be like my dog, or like that festering sore. Instead turn from worldly ways and embrace God’s love; let God bathe away your stench. (Though I won’t pursue this further in this little meditation, I will mention in passing to any non-Christian readers that the Christian initiation rite of baptism is a rich metaphor for such a spiritual bath–consider looking into this further).

I’ll conclude with another passage: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
(Ephesians 5:1-2)

02Mar

Jesus is The Answer, and Ash Wednesday Tells Us the Question

“Jesus is the answer!” So proclaims numerous road signs, Facebook posts, and bumper stickers. For those posting such things, it is an expression of their faith, of their confidence in Jesus. It a touchstone of peace and happiness for them and perhaps also for many who see it–but not for everyone. To a great many others, this statement provokes rather a sense of bewilderment, and begs a follow up question: “If Jesus is the answer, then what is the question?”

This thought brings to my lips a smile as I recall the analogous situation in Douglas Adams’ humorous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which a planet-sized super computer named “Deep Thought” was constructed and directed to come up with “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything”. The program ran for millions of years, and finally returned an answer: “42”. Unfortunately neither the Deep Thought nor his designers knew what the ultimate question happened to be. The pan-dimensional beings seeking this answer were then forced to construct another planet-sized super computer to figure out the ultimate question.

Ash Wednesday is a Christian celebration that reminds us of the question for which Jesus is the answer. Or, more accurately, we are reminded of the problem for which Jesus is the solution; That is, the problem of death:

“Remember, o man, dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return.”

Thus intones the priest in many a ceremony as ashes are imposed upon the foreheads of penitent Christians, these words echoing God’s curse in Genesis 3, pronounced upon humankind as punishment for sin.

Death is literally the bane of our existence. It destroys all that we hold dear. Try as we might to banish it from our thoughts, death catches us all. We recoil from it as we simultaneously yearn for permanence and significance. The idea of the extinction of our consciousness into an eternal nothing is difficult for us to fully grasp, for “God has set eternity in the hearts of men.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

Death is universal. We all die, because of our sin. Death is universal because sin is universal.

Fortunately, Ash Wednesday is merely the prelude to Easter. Whereas Ash Wednesday reminds us of our mortality, in essence saying, “Ye are dead”, Easter tells us: “Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).

The good news of Christianity is that God has set eternity in our hearts for a reason. It isn’t a dreadful taunt, or a meaningless musing. Jesus, the Christ, has died our death, in order that we might live his life. “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

As the old Easter canticle proclaims:
“But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.
For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.”
(This comes from 1 Corinthians 15)

Jesus’ resurrection from death foretells our own liberation from it, and not only in the future, in an eternity after physical death. We may be liberated from its shadow, and its dread, and its power over us even in this life.

In the light of this good news, St Paul exults in his first letter to the Corinthians: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

As John Donne, the 16th century poet we recently profiled, elaborated so eloquently:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
(Sonnet X)

13Apr

Winning the Race

image
(Two athletes, Greece, 4th century BC; From decorative vase in the Kunsthistorisches museum, Vienna)

The Olympic Torch relay is the event that traditionally marks the start of the Olympic Games. Over the years, the flame has been transported in some interesting ways. For example, in 1976, the flame was sent by radio signal between Greece and Canada. The flame was detected by heat sensors in Athens, and a signal was sent to Ottawa, where it triggered a laser beam to relight the torch. You can read about some of the other interesting methods of transporting the flame here.

In ancient times, the “lampadedromia” or “torch race” was a relay race, in which several teams of athletes ran through the city, bearing aloft torches. This kind of race took place at various times in Athens, Corinth, Ceos, Byzantium, and elsewhere. Initially there were religious overtones; the first person to reach the designated altar with flame still alight was granted the honor of relighting the sacred flame. All members of the winning team were considered equally honorable, and shared the glory of the victory. More about this event can be read at Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1898); accessed online at this Tufts University site.

In some of the earliest of Christian writings, the Saint Paul the apostle borrowed from Greek culture for a metaphor of the Christian life. For example, in his first letter to the Corinthians, he urged them:

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable.

Here and in a famous passage from 2nd Timothy, Paul emphasizes running hard, being focused on the prize, and finishing the race. In the Timothy passage he looks back upon his efforts:

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.

I don’t know if Paul was invoking “lampadedromia” specifically, or some other kind of race. The torch race was run in Corinth, to whose resident Christians his earlier passage was addressed. Some interesting things about that early torch race do come to mind.

1. Bearing a torch is both a joyous honor and a solemn responsibility. The sacred light that we bear aloft is no votive offering to pagan gods; in Christianity light is the symbol of God’s presence. Jesus declared himself to be the “Light of the World”. At Pentecost, as recorded in the book of Acts, the Holy Spirit manifested to the early disciples in the form of “tongues as of fire”. Even today we see that Christian literature, buildings, and denominational logos sometimes use the image of a flame to represent the Holy Spirit.

2. Being a relay race, the contest is a team effort. This isn’t a case where one guy runs and everyone else gets to sip beer and eat brats on the sidelines. We are all runners. All of us must do our part for team Christianity. We must strain and get sweaty, but we don’t do it alone. We help each other out, and we all share in the glory of the final victory.

3. As in the torch races of old, if we run well but don’t tend to the flame, allowing it to burn out, then we lose the race. May we run in such a way that we reach the end with torch alight, with God’s spirit still blazing forth in our lives. May we, with Paul, be able to say “I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.”