When Beauty Rocks Your World

Sometimes the world can be breath-takingly beautiful – as it was last night under a bright full moon. A silver halo, an unusual lunar corona, framed the moon over the waters of Lake Norman in North Carolina. Some days – and nights – the world feels like paradise itself.

But the news reminds me that others are digging out from fierce winter blizzards, that scud missiles are falling in Syrian neighborhoods, thugs attacked Christmas worshippers in Nigeria and the families of Newtown face a grief that can’t be spoken.

On Christmas Day Tiffany and I went with thousands of others to the opening of the new movie of Les Miserables. What an uplifting story of hope against

CSI - Ancient Israel Water Ritual

What should you do if a dead body is found in a field, and your basic detective work cannot discover a killer? Here is an ancient water ritual that ensured that cold cases didn’t just suffer the indignity of civil neglect.

You can read the extended ritual in Deuteronomy 21:1-9. Here is a brief summary:

Laver - God's Peace

When King Solomon replaced the Israel’s primitive tabernacle with a magnificent temple, he had a huge water-reservoir built to serve as the laver for the purification for the priests (1 Kings 7:23 and 2 Chronicles 4:2-6) It was so large – 15 feet across, 45 feet circumference and holding 16,500 gallons – that it was called a “sea”. This grandiose symbolic ocean illustrated the expansive dimensions of God’s grace and forgiveness.

But it also conveyed another level of meaning. Since the sea for Israel represented the chaotic forces of evil opposed to God, this artifact probably also symbolized “the forces of chaos that have been subdued and brought to order by the Lord who is creator of the world”(1) It affirmed that Yahweh was supreme over the Canaanite deities Yamm and Baal, gods of sea and storm.

Laver - God's Purity

If the first function of water is for human survival – for drinking and irrigating crops, the second function of water is for washing. Washing faces, hands and clothes is both hygienic and pleasing to the senses. It also symbolizes inner cleansing, purifying of the spirit.

Every culture and religion has its rituals of ablution – ceremonial cleansing. Hindus bathe in the Ganges, Cherokee in the Southern US have a ‘going to water’ ceremony; other indigenous people believe the body’s own sweat purifies them, The Qur’an tells the faithful to wash before prayers and if water isn’t available, they can ‘wash’ their hands in sand or earth. (Surah 5:6) The Jews also had a complex system of washings, and the rabbis of the Second Temple period around the time of Christ had mastered the art of complex washings.

Waters of Unity

In the first twenty years after the resurrection of Jesus, thousands of people expressed their faith in him through the water-ritual of baptism. Baptism is laced with connotations of cleansing, forgiveness, repentance, resurrection and new life.

One early story of baptism adds another dimension that speaks especially into our fragmented globalized world.  Acts 8 tells about an African government official who had been on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and was now travelling home by chariot, reading the prophecy of Isaiah. By coincidence he met a Christian named Philip who just happened to be on the same road. He offered Philip a ride and asked him about the text he was trying to decipher.

The Roar of a Waterfall

There’s a distinct sound reverberating across Canada today. It's Election Day.

After weeks of political speeches, debates, promises and threats, millions of voters are going to get the last word. It’s called democracy – a flawed system to be sure, but better than most other ways of governing in our world.

In the days of imperial Rome, John, the last-surviving disciple of Jesus, was a political prisoner. The emperor and his regime feared the truth about Jesus and tried to silence John’s witness by exiling him to their version of Alcatraz or Robben Island, the Aegean island prison of Patmos.

A voice like a trumpet shattered John’s solitary reverie one day. Whirling around to see who was speaking, John was stunned speechless by a vision of Christ and by the sound of his voice – which thundered like ocean waves or the roar of a cataract.

Royal Wedding

In honor of the wedding today of William and Kate in Westminister Abbey, I’m re-posting some thoughts from October 17 on the ancient words from the Song of Solomon about water and love:

Many waters cannot quench love;

Nor can rivers drown it.

Song of Solomon, 8:6-7

The minister told the royal couple in Westminister Abbey today - and millions watching on television - that every wedding is a witness to hope. But it is an island of hope in a very perilous sea.

Beyond Fishing

When Jesus rose from death in Jerusalem, he surprised his friends by meeting them in various places – on country roads, in urban gardens, closed rooms, on mountain tops - but only one of these recorded events occurred near water. You can read the story in John 21.

I suppose it was inevitable, really. Most of Jesus' disciples hailed from Galilee as did Jesus, so it was only natural that he would re-connect with them back in their familiar haunts.

The angel-in-the-tomb told the disciples Jesus would meet them in Galilee, so they left Jerusalem and went back north. One night eight of them went fishing – except that the fish didn’t cooperate. It was a fruitless outing and as dawn broke over the horizon, their nets were empty and their arms ached. No doubt they talked a lot about the recent events and the puzzling whereabouts of Jesus. Their whole sense of mission seemed as vague and futile as this fishing venture.

Thirst-Quencher

It is one of the high-water marks of the Bible’s entire witness to water and the grace of God. It happened during the annual Jewish Festival of Tabernacles.

This late-summer festival looked back in history to Israel's exodus and God’s provision of water in the desert, and it looked ahead to the dream of Israel’s restored honor among the nations as predicted in Zechariah 14:16. Every year pilgrims came to Jerusalem from every direction in what Josephus called as “a most holy and most eminent feast.”
- Antiquities of the Jews, VIII, iv, 1.

* * * Feast of Tabernacles painting - Valerie R Jackson

New Birth

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the most water-drenched of all C. S. Lewis’ Narnia stories. 
It tells about an obnoxious young boy named Eustace who took refuge from a rain-storm in a cave that turned out to be a dragon’s lair.  In the dim light of the cave he discovered hoards of gold and silver and jewelry. He filled his pockets and slipped a magnificent bracelet on his arm – and then fell asleep.

When he awoke, his arm throbbed because it had grown larger overnight and was covered with reptilian scales. Having fallen asleep “with greedy dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.”

Darwin Awards - The Jesus Edition

Since 1994, the Darwin Awards have held up a mirror to human folly. Their tongue-in-cheek books and web-site tell true stories of people who, as they say, ‘live in the shallow end of the gene pool’, people who 'show an astounding lack of judgment and cause their own demise'.

'Terminal stupidity', they call it, with lethal personal consequences. They cite these stories not to laugh at calamity, but as cautionary tales.

Jesus used a different metaphor, but his insight into disastrous human stupidity is just as clear. His story about the foolish carpenter and the raging river seems the perfect parable for April Fools Day!

As a carpenter Jesus knew the consequences of shoddy house-building. He probably knew peasants in the hills around Nazareth who skimped on the foundations of hasty summer-built houses only to see their investment collapse in ruins when the winter rains fell and the wadis swelled with torrential floods that tore the earth away from their doorsteps.

New World Comin'

A river runs through it – from start to finish, from the Garden of Eden to the last chapter of Revelation, the story of God and Earth is told as a river-story.

At one of the lowest points of the story, in exile far from their homeland, the prophet Ezekiel (Ch. 47) imagines a trickle of water bubbling out of the dry ground in Jerusalem. It flows from the temple of God across the desert hills to the Jordan valley and into the Dead Sea.

The further it flows, the deeper and wider the current grows and, astonishingly, the more lush the barren landscape becomes. Everything is refreshed and renewed. Fishing and agriculture burst into life. Trees flourish along the banks of the river. The Dead Sea becomes a fresh-water lake.

Out, damned spot! Out, I say!

Guilt is a terrible thing.  But if there is something worse than guilt, its name would be Denial.  Denial is the paralyzing refusal to come to terms with the monster that is destroying you.

Helen Rynne as Lady Macbeth

A grim scene in Macbeth illustrates the destructive power of repressed and unacknowledged guilt:  Lady Macbeth sleep-walking the halls of her castle with a candle, trying in vain to scour the damning blood-guilt from her hands.

Yet here's a spot . . .

Out, damned spot! out, I say! . . .

Who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him? . . .

What, will these hands ne'er be clean? . . .

Here's the smell of the blood still:
All the perfumes of Arabia will not
sweeten this little hand.

Oh, oh, oh!

Her façade is cracking; denial is hard to sustain. 

In Over Your Head and Going Under

Sometimes life gets crazy – everything happens at once and you feel yourself going under. A child gets sick, a friend turns hostile, your wallet is empty, dead-lines converge, you're losing your capacity to hold it all together.

You’re being sucked under, over-whelmed.

Some of Israel’s songs express this kind of nightmare experience.
Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck.
The floods engulf me.
Don’t let me sink;
Do not let the deep waters swallow me up.
Psalm 69

A Town Called Lifta

In the suburbs of northwest Jerusalem, on the edge of the busy Jerusalem-Jaffa highway, water flows from an ancient spring. It fills a small pool and then flows out into the Wadi-al-Shami.

This spring has a rich and tragic story to tell. Millenia ago it quenched the thirst of the early Canaanite inhabitants of the land. Across the centuries all manner of people have washed their faces and laundry in its waters.

It is mentioned in the Book of Joshua, Chapter 15:9 and 18:15 as “the spring of the waters of Nephtoah” at the time of the Isrealite occupation. Nothing else is told about this landmark except that it helped to mark the border between the tribal territory of Benjamin and Judah. It was not assigned to one tribe or the other, but as a shared resource, giving both tribes equal access to the waters.

Pure as the Driven Snow

Snow – it’s the proverbial measure of clean, bright purity -- as in Snow White and Ivory Snow laundry soap.

I like Mae West’s quip “I used to be pure as snow but I drifted.”

We’ve all drifted, Mae.  Anyone who says otherwise is giving themselves a snow job.  Politicians do it with words; most of us cover up with denial.

King David knew that you can’t cover up forever.  His resume includes a shameful shabby episode – when he seduced his friend’s wife and then arranged the murder of the cuckolded man.  He pretended innocence as long as he could, but eventually broke through his denial.  

Genocide and Hope

During a horrific 100 days in the Spring of 1994, almost a million Tutsi and Hutu men, women and children were slaughtered and crudely dumped in Rwanda’s Kagera River. The current carried their bodies - shot, hacked, clubbed or burned - over the waterfall down towards the quiet waters of Lake Victoria.

The history of genocide has deep roots in the rivers of Africa.  The first chapter of The Book of Exodus tells how a cultured Pharaoh in the 18th or 19th dynasty, tried to obliterate the surging numbers of Hebrew people living in his land.