My dog and the New Creation

 

 

This morning, while procrastinating a talk I’m supposed to give tomorrow, I began staring blankly at my dog who had wandered into the office to lay down beside me. Scout is a mutt whom Annie and I salvaged from eastern Kentucky while running an outdoor program for impoverished kids there four years ago. She was just a pup at the time–a couple of weeks old–and had been found floating down a river in a soggy cardboard box in the days following one of that region’s worst floods in recent memory. (Why we didn’t name her Moses is a question we still lament over.) Stray dogs were in ample supply there and we figured that it would be a more appropriate place to adopt one then back home in Boulder where even the pound seems like a Ramada.

And so Scout became a Powell; but not without a difficult road. She had been badly abused and was an incredible pain in the rear to train. Eventually, she grew to care about what we said to her and after an arduous road, her true personality began to come out. Now, I’m convinced she’s the best dog in the world. I hate overly needy dogs. Those dogs that incessantly beg for attention and petting and like to drool all over ones crotch quite impolitely. (Disclaimer: don’t get me wrong and take that to assume that I’m a cat person because of that taste.) Scout is independent. Does not demand affection. She is part Border Collie so she likes having a job to do and gets restless and whiny when she’s bored. And I can respect that. She does enjoy affection, but only on her own terms–and only after you’ve earned it. Her bark is unfortunate; Scout’s not a terribly big dog (about 45 lbs on a good day), but has the high pitched yelp of a lap dog. No ones perfect I suppose. She gets along well with other dogs, unless they’re jerks, and then she wants nothing to do with them. She’s great with kids and babies, and, I gather, considers it her vocation to sit nearby and guard them against any impending danger. (This is good news considering our newborn–due any day now!)

So how does this relate to the theme of New Creation, which, I suppose is the overall theme of this blog? I’m not sure. I am convinced however, that my dog will have some role in the New Heavens and New Earth. Hopefully, her bark will be less obnoxious there though. Dogs (and animals in general) are not hindered by concupiscence. They have no temptation to do what they ought not–apart, that is, from our own human brokenness, which we afflict them with. It’s good to remind myself that whatever flaws Scout has (separation anxiety, nervousness) were probably inflicted by the creeps who beat her before we met each other. This follows with what St. Paul says in Romans 8 when he declares,

…creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility [brokenness], not of its own will, but by the one who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children  of God. (Romans 8:19-21)

In other words, the redemption of the created world (dogs, trees, etc) is dependent on usdoing our job as Christians. Likewise, any discord with the natural world, it seems, (bears, tornadoes, etc.) was likely caused by our (or Adam’s, or whoever’s) sin. This news should both trouble us and give us great hope.

For now though, I’ll content myself just to look at Scout (who is now snoring loudly next to my chair) and remember that she’s counting on me to live out the hope that Christ gives me.

 

A longing for springtime: wilderness and the garden

 

The following is the first installment of what I consider some important passages from “A Longing for Home; Rethinking a Biblical Ecological Worldview”–my own Master’s thesis. I’ve been thinking about today’s particular passage a lot lately. There is an interesting metaphorical (as well as literal) relationship in Scripture between the wilderness and the garden; between the times of spiritual desert, and the new life that God wishes to give to all of us. How is it that God wishes to use the painful times in our life to lead us to rejuvenation? What does the one say about the other? This section explores the Old Testament and prophetic relationship of the two.

For centuries in the life of the Church and prior, the desert has held a particularly significant theological place. As we have seen, the desert was often the backdrop for exile, although to merely equate desert with exile would be to lose sight of this ecosystem’s true role. Although the Scriptures focus heavily on the desert during Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, the desert is also portrayed in the Old Testament—particularly through the prophets—as the place where YHWH would woo his people back to himself after they turned away from him like an unfaithful bride. Likewise, it was John the Baptist in the New Testament who fulfilled the role of the messenger whom both Isaiah and Malachi foretold would prepare the way for YHWH’s return. Continuing this tradition, many of the early Fathers of the Church sought refuge in the desert, where they produced some of the most beautiful and meditative theology in Christian history. In Scripture itself, there is no shortage of figures that turn to the desert (or wilderness) for strength, inspiration and holy rest. It is in the desert that Moses meets God face to face, that Elijah withdraws to hear the voice of YHWH. Indeed, it is the place where Jesus himself goes for forty days and forty nights to prepare to inaugurate his public ministry. Even St. Paul goes to the desert to prepare for his own ministry after his conversion in Acts of the Apostles. It should come as no surprise then, that in the Christian tradition, the garden and the desert have always been key symbols.

Why the desert? For many, the desert represents a wasteland; a certain absence of beauty. Vegetation is often sparse, life difficult to sustain. Theologian and gardener Vigen Guroian gives us some insight into the attraction. He points out that “the early Christian writers thought that there is no virtue more profound than the perpetual remembrance of our mortality.”[1] “The Bible”, he says, “recalls past paradise; it also prophecies a future blessedness.”[2]

On the flip side, we might speculate on the crucial role of gardens in Hebrew and Christian history. Every human-made garden, Guroian muses, “grows from a seed of Paradise dropped in memory by Adam’s dolorous lament. Sometimes we yearn to return to it, as though Paradise were an ordinary ‘place,’ as if with map and compass we might find it.” He quotes Jennifer Bennett who says perhaps more properly that “the archetype and perfection of every garden ‘is the place where we knew nature before innocence was lost.’”[3] It is in gardening, he says, that man longs to return to the Garden of Eden, to somehow recreate what has been destroyed. In a certain and very real sense the desert leads man to this desire. It is a stark reminder of what it is that humanity has lost.

Not coincidentally, the desert is also the place where God promised to woo his people back to himself. In Hosea, God says that despite her sin, he will “allure” Israel, “and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.”[4] God chooses to woo his people back to him in the desert because it was the desert where God first revealed himself to his people.  Fresh from Egyptian slavery, and surprisingly, right after the golden calf apostasy, God reveals to Moses that he is,

The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means free the guilty.[5]

 

This is by far the most in-depth view of the nature God up until this point in Scripture. Through the prophets, the Lord wanted his people to remember that it was in the desert that this was first revealed. Hosea continues:

 

[In the wilderness] I will give her her vineyards, and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.[6]

 

We see then that the stark reality was not only meant to be a reminder of what mankind had lost in the fall, but also to be a reminder that all hope and trust ought ultimately fall on God.  In Isaiah 51:3, we read that

 

the Lord will comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.  

 

Here, as in a chorus of similar Isaian passages[7], we have no mere metaphor. The Lord led his people to the wilderness to remind them of a real, tangible, touchable, smellable reality that had been lost; and to create a real longing for its return.  Guroian concludes,

 

It was entirely fitting, therefore, that Christ was buried in a garden, a seed planted in the ground that blossomed into the flower of a glorified humanity. The New Adam [Jesus] refurbished the devastated garden that the Old Adam left behind. No wonder at the empty tomb, Christ came to Mary Magdalene as the gardener (John 20:15). For he is the Master Gardener, and we, we are his apprentices as well as the subjects of his heavenly husbandry.[8] 

 

This, he says, in essence, is why we garden.

 

---

 

[1]Vigen Guroian, The Fragrance of God. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2006) 42.

[2] Ibid, 44.

[3]As quoted by Guroian, 45.

[4] Hos 2:14

[5] Ex 34:6-7

[6] Hos 2:15

[7] Consider Is 32:16; 35:1; 35:6; 41:18; 43:20.

[8]Vigen Guroian. The Fragrance of God. 47.

 

Snow, gardening and a longing for Eden

 

We had an unseasonal snowstorm here in the Denver area this morning. It caught me a bit off guard and my wife and I were not able to cover our budding herb garden or our flowers in time. My hope is that they’re hearty enough to take the cold, but I can’t be sure. If they die, I will lament a bit. Not just because I worked hard to grow them, or because I spent money on the seeds and garden boxes. Rather, my sadness will come from someplace far deeper. The theologian-gardener Vigen Guroian has convinced me in his writings that all gardening is, at its root, a longing to return to the Garden of Eden–that place where man was called to gardening as his primordial vocation.  Indeed, every time we garden, every time we till the soil or work the ground in an effort to bear new life, we participate to some degree that original life of harmony in the Garden. We return to that time when the earth did not oppose us; when all gardening was an act of true joy. If my little garden dies, its loss will be a remembrance–however faint–of the loss of Eden because of sin. The failure of my garden speaks to the reality of a broken world. In his book, The Fragrance of God, Guroian quotes St. Augustine, who says,

Perhaps we should say that what man cultivated in the earth…he guarded or preserved himself by discipline.

In other words, says Guroian,

Because man obeyed God, the earth obeyed him, so there was harmony within man, and he, in turn, was in harmony with his surroundings. Yet “in the end, since he [man] did not wish to remain obedient and guard within himself the likeness of Paradise, which he cultivated”, Augustine continues, “[Adam] was condemned and received a field like himself, for God said: ‘Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth.’

Guroian adds,

I am not speaking merely metaphorically. My meaning is sacramental. Paradise is truly present even in this fallen Creation, even in my humble garden. “Do not let your intellect be disturbed by mere names, for Paradise has simply clothed in terms akin to you (St. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise)…Paradise is in this world. It is inside of every earthman and earthwoman and all around them, waiting to be reclaimed. We all should be gardening Paradise, since “All bliss consists in this. Do as Adam did,” says Thomas Traherne.

Guroian concludes,

I believe that gardening is the first and final sacrament of blessedness. Both the first Adam and the last Adam were gardeners.

I strive to be a gardener in the shadow of the last Adam, Jesus, who appeared to the holy women on the morning of his resurrection as a gardener, standing in the garden from which his glorified body had freshly bloomed. I pray that the garden of my backyard as well (and much more so) as the garden of my heart, will not be killed by the threatening chill of the lingering winter.

 

The Pretention at Spiritually Longing Ridge

A friend of mine recently told me that her and her husband were moving from their home in Florida to a place called ”Grove City” Ohio, apparently a suburb of Columbus. This reminded me of a theory another friend has that most modern suburbs and subdivisions are named after whatever had to be cut down or killed to build them. Denver has places like Fox Ridge, Wolf Canyon and Antelope Bluffs. My boss lives in a town called Lone Tree, which was probably a pretty easy place to conquer. Even my wife and I live in a neighborhood called Pheasant Run. Pity. Those are (were) lovely birds. Thinking about this, I stumbled across a blog which deals with a similar topic. It’s an urban planning site called “DenverInFillBlog”. I particularly enjoyed the included table with which you can mix and match names of Denver subdivisions to form your own ridiculous sounding places like “The Enclave at Antelope Bluff Butte”. 

http://www.denverinfill.com/blog/2006/09/guide-to-suburban-denver-subdivision.html

It’s quite interesting to me that so many of us have become so driven to feign a connection to the outdoors while maintaining our well-protected urban or suburban lifestyles. In most of these neighborhoods, the only connection to the natural world is a soddy greenbelt or a little park (all good things–don’t get me wrong). But, as the aforementioned friend has also noted to me, what all of these fake Tuscan villa, slate stone lined, rustic fire pit in the backyard houses suggest is a longing for something real. Perhaps a return to the bygone days when these things were actually necessary for life. When slate floors made sense because slate was the most logical resource available to you; when houses were large because they needed to shelter large families, and massive kitchens served the purpose of gathering people together.

It’s no coincidence that people buried in suburban sprawl long for the natural world. It is, as theologian Vigen Guroian points out, ultimately a longing to return to the Garden of Eden. To that place where man lost his primordial home because of his own selfish desire to conquer it. We pine after what we’ve neglected, and our hearts–ultimately–will remain restless until God renews and resurrects not only our own physical bodies when Jesus comes again, but also until he renews the natural world itself back to the Eden it was always intended to be–the New Heavens and New Earth promised by the prophets and the book of Revelation.

 

John Paul II was a hippy

Imagine if more Christians lived as though this were true.

“Faced with the glory of the Trinity in creation, we must contemplate, sing, and rediscover awe.  Contemporary society has become dry, ‘not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder’ (G.K. Chesterton).  Contemplation of the universe also means, for the believer, listening to a message, hearing a paradoxical and silent voice, as the ‘Psalm of the Sun’ suggests: ‘The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.’  Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.  ‘There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world’ (Ps 19:2-4).

   Nature therefore becomes a Gospel that speaks to us of God: ‘For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator’ (Wis 13:5).  Paul teaches us that ‘Ever since the creation of the world his (God’s) eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made’ (Rom 1:20).  But this capacity for contemplation and knowledge, this discovery of a transcendent presence in creation, must also lead us also to rediscover our fraternity with the earth, to which we have been linked since creation (cf Gen 2:7).  This very goal was foreshadowed by the Old Testament in the Hebrew Jubilee, when the earth rested and man gathered what the land spontaneously offered (cf Lv 25:11-12).  If nature is not violated and humiliated, it returns to being the sister of humanity.”

–Pope John Paul II, General Audience, ZENIT Translation, January 26, 2000

 

Creation, Gardening and the New World

Over the last several weeks, I have been heavily engaged in a writing project aimed at getting to the bottom of the Biblical notion of the “new creation” and what that has to do with the way Christians ought to interact with the created world today. Unfortunately, many Christians see environmentalism and Christianity as disparate realities. Likewise, many environmentalists see the same opposition but for different reasons. This is tremendously problematic. What do the Scriptures have to say about this? Indeed for the Bible, man is not a foreign invader into the natural world, as many secular streams of thought seem to suggest. Neither ought man be a domineering slavemaster over creation, free to use it and abuse it according to his whim, as many Christians have tended to suggest. Rather, mankind–from the beginning–was called to be a gardener. This was Adam’s primordial vocation in the garden; to tend, keep, guard and care for creation. Fundamentally, it did not belong to him. Creation is Gods’; we are but caretakers. For the Bible, this has eschatalogical consequences. Just as Jesus came to redeem humanity, and by doing so, redeemed the human body which will be raised on the last day (just as Jesus’ was), so too, he also came to redeem all of creation which will also be raised, restored and glorified on the last day. In Revelation, the prophets, St. Paul, and even in the words of Jesus himself, we are led to the reality that when he comes again, God will not obliterate the created world, leaving all of us to float off to some disembodied heaven, but rather, a new creation; a new heavens and new earth; a new heavenly Jerusalem will come down from heaven. Indeed, in the end, it will not fundamentally be us going up to God, but rather, God coming down to us.

The following is a brief passage from my project (more of which, I imagine, will follow in the coming days and weeks) explaining how Paul seems to allude to this idea in his letters.

If our assessment is correct, it is safe to say that most Christians need to change their view of the created world. The Church has long recognized that the body ought to be respected and treated with a profound honor and dignity because it is in fact the material “stuff” that the resurrected body will be composed of. Just as Jesus himself took on a human body, with all of its shortcomings and weaknesses, and then transformed that same body it when he arose on Easter Sunday, Christians are to understand that God will do the same for the rest of mankind. In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he calls Jesus the “image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation,” saying that “in him all things were created…He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first born from the dead.”[1]  Paul is suggesting that just as he rose from the dead as “first-born”, so will all the rest of creation follow.  Likewise, in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he assures the church there that,…in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the “first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.”[2]  

This leads to a very logical reality. If our physical bodies will be raised on the last day, they ought to have a physical dwelling place as well. Enter Scripture’s theology of a “new heavens” and “new earth.”            

In St. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, he comforted a worried group of apparently newly converted Christians who were concerned over what exactly would happen to their loved ones who have died. Clearly, the resurrection of the dead was still a shaky concept for them. In 4:13f, Paul tells them,…

“we would not have you ignorant brethren, concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him all those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord shall not precede those who have fallen asleep (emphasis mine).”  

He goes on to tell them that when Jesus returns at the time of the second coming, …

“the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”  

In Greek, the word for coming is parousia. The city of Thessalonica was the capital city of the Roman province of Macedonia, and thereby a very politically important city. As such, the emperor cult, or worship of the Roman emperor, was also very important. By using the term parousia, Paul was employing a technical term used to describe the visit of a political dignitary. N.T. Wright notes that this language, which would have been well known in the ancient world, speaks of

“an emperor or other dignitary making a state visit to a city or province—or even, when the emperor had been elsewhere, his return to Rome. In fact, the Greek word parousia, which has become a technical term for the literalistic construct of an early Christian hope involving the end of the space-time world, with Jesus “coming down” in a “second coming” and believers flying upwards to meet him, is drawn, not from the Bible at all, but from the world of pagan usage, where it was almost a technical term for this kind of imperial “visitation.”[3]  

Here, Wright notes that this passage has often been misconstrued to speak of what is known in some modern protestant circles as the “rapture”, in which believers will all be swept up into a sort of non-material heaven and the world as we know it will pass away. Wright clarifies the confusion:…

“the point here is that the “meeting”—another almost technical term in the Greek—refers, not to a meeting after which all the participants stay in the meeting place, but to a meeting outside the city, after which the civic leaders escort the dignitary back to the city itself.”[4] 

In other words, when Jesus comes again, Paul says that we will all be caught up in the sky to meet him as he descends on the clouds–a clear reference to the coming of the Son of Man in Daniel 7–and then we will escort him back to earth where he will come to lay claim on all of creation. The world we will return to then, will not be the earth that we know now, but rather the “new earth” which has been transformed by grace, analogous to our own resurrected bodies.  

---

[1] Col 1:15; 18.

[2] 1 Cor 15:20-23

[3] N.T. Wright. The Resurrection of the Son of God. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) 217.

[4] Ibid, 217-218

 

Letters from the first book

For the last few days, the weather around our house here in Colorado has been gorgeous; a welcome relief from what has been one of the harsher Rocky Mountain winters in recent memory. This sunshine and warmth, along with an early arrival of daylight savings time have combined to make me deliriously happy this week. I awoke this morning however, hoping for a balmy morning run, to find the temperature quite chilly and the familiar feeling of snow in the air. This reality (that it’s really only mid-March, and not mid-May as the recent weather had suggested) reminded me of an important truth this time of year. Nature itself was reminding me that despite the feeling of spring that had permeated the latter part of the week, spring had not yet arrived. Not coincidentally, I needed a gentle nudge from mother nature to remind me likewise, that Easter had not yet arrived, and that we were, in fact, still dwelling in the relative darkness of lent.

There is a great deal of wisdom in the Church’s liturgical calendar. Vigen Guroian, a Armenian Orthodox theologian (and gardener–not coincidentally) muses about the apt chronological construction of the liturgical calendar. He says,

I have begun to understand the wisdom in the Armenian Church’s stubborn persistence in celebrating Jesus’ birth and baptism together on the sixth of January, as was the ancient practice. Jesus’ birth shines light into this darkling world and commences the death of Death itself. His baptism reveals this world’s true Maker and Ruler and the path of repentance, self-renunciation and sacrificial love that each of us must travel to inherit eternal life. In the same manner, by our personal baptism we not only receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and adoption as sons and daughters of God; we also recapitulate Jesus’ crucifixion, death burial and resurrection. (The Fragrance of God)

Likewise, St. Gregory of Nyssa reminds us that,

the Sun of Justice rose in this cruel winter, the spring came, the south wind dispelled that chill, and together with the rising of the sun’s rays warmed everything that lay in our path. Thus mankind, that had been chilled into stone, might become warm again through the Spirit, and receiving heat from the rays of the Word, might become again as water leaping up into eternal life. (From Glory to Glory)

Our disconnectedness from the created world confuses not only our senses but also our spiritual sensibilities. Could it be the Church understood that the rhythms God built into the earth actually serve as reminders of Him; signposts directing and constantly calling us back to Him? If the Fathers of the Church and the ancient rabbis were correct, then God really wrote two books of Scripture. The first, they claimed, was the book of creation itself; a book which actually teaches us how to better read the second book, that of the written Scriptures.  It’s no wonder then, that the Bible constantly evokes natural metaphors (“the just man is like a tree planted by water…” Psalm 1, “Consider the lilies of the field” Matthew 6:28, etc.).

So I’m grateful. As much as I’d like to go out for a long bike ride, or take my kayak out on the river today, I can’t. The time will come, but it’s not yet. We know indeed that just as surely as the leaves will return to the trees, the crocuses bloom with colorful buds, and the rivers run full again in April and May, that the same Christ who died on a cross on Good Friday, like a tree shedding its leaves and heading for its yearly death, will return renewed and glorious on Easter morning. Really, it seems that the brilliance of God’s created world is that everyone who has seen a tree which appears to die in the fall and knows that come spring, that tree will be resurrected to life once again, has been prepared for the mystery of the cross. Coincidence? I think not. As Jesus said, foreshadowing his own Eucharistic sacrifice, “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a grain of wheat.”