Counting Stars In a New Light

 

He (the Lord) took him (Abraham) outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” - Genesis 15:5

Ok that's a pretty well known quote and it often gets accompanied with images like my photo (above) of the Milky Way made while camping beside the red deer river. 

But a friend (Hi Richard) pointed out that in Genesis 15:12 we get the line:

As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep ...

There is nothing to indicate between Gen 15:5 and 15:12 that this wasn't all on the same day. What if it was daylight? Does that change how we read 15:5?  It is certainly absurd to ask Abraham to count the stars he can not see.

I think it renders 15:5 something like:

Your offspring that you can not see will be numerous like the unseen stars.

or

Your offspring, who are to come will be like the stars which are to come. 

And so after some ancient contract making, and some more prophecy only then can Abraham see the stars he can't hope to count.  For me it deepens the impact of that well known verse, emphasizing the need for trust.

- Peace

Accidental Eucharist Poetry

Rejoice, the Body of Christ broken for you.
Rejoice, the Blood of Christ shed for you.

I said these words while participating in the Eucharist at St. Bridgids.  St. Bridgids has a very inclusive approach to the table.  Anyone who is willing may come to the table.  Anyone who comes to the table is also a server.  The table is not a place of solitude, nor is it a place of hierarchy.  So as we began I asked the woman I'd be serving her name. Her answer "Rejoice".

Beauty - a Lenten poem

He had no form or comeliness That we should look at him, And no beauty that we should desire him. — Isaiah 53:2 

A whiff. A beagle for beauty I sniffed Monet’s haystacks, van Gogh’s sunflowers, 
Devoutly meditated Marilyn’s breasts, 
Watched kingfishers—lost the scent. 

Kiss the leper’s wound: taste honey. 
Touch the blind eye: learn Braille. 
Keep vigil at the cradle: change diapers.
Drink tears from the chalice: live eucharist. 

Happened on found things, found in gutters 
Found on a cross, found under a stone, 
Heard in the rustling grass, heard in 
A tongue stammering sabachthani. 
Found when I wasn’t looking, heard 
When I wasn’t listening. 
Found beauty.

- Beauty by Eugene Peterson

So far my favorite poem from Holy Luck by Eugene Person. Resonated with my understanding of Lent.  The giving up of what we normally seek so that beauty can find us.

- Peace

Where are the Men?

Chewing on the easter story for our Pre Sunrise Easter Hike; I heard part of the story in a new way.

from Mark 16

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so they could embalm him. Very early on Sunday morning, as the sun rose, they went to the tomb. They worried out loud to each other, “Who will roll back the stone from the tomb for us?”

In other words: "Where are the men? With them hiding in fear: Who will roll back the stone?"

And so it was that it was the women who first encountered the resurrection.  It was a woman who was the first commissioned evangelist of the good news. "Go to my brothers and tell them..."

- Peace

Armor and Sabbath

Reading Leap Over a Wall by Peterson again. Reading about David and Goliath going over the passage before the famous battle.

Saul answered David, “You can’t go and fight this Philistine. You’re too young and inexperienced—and he’s been at this fighting business since before you were born.”

David said, “I’ve been a shepherd, tending sheep for my father. Whenever a lion or bear came and took a lamb from the flock, I’d go after it, knock it down, and rescue the lamb. If it turned on me, I’d grab it by the throat, wring its neck, and kill it. Lion or bear, it made no difference—I killed it. And I’ll do the same to this Philistine pig who is taunting the troops of God-Alive. God, who delivered me from the teeth of the lion and the claws of the bear, will deliver me from this Philistine.”
Saul said, “Go. And God help you!”

Then Saul outfitted David as a soldier in armor. He put his bronze helmet on his head and belted his sword on him over the armor. David tried to walk but he could hardly budge.
David told Saul, “I can’t even move with all this stuff on me. I’m not used to this.” And he took it all off.

 from 1 Samuel 17 (The Message)

While pondering this passage it struck me that there are parallels in the Gospels.  From the end of Mark 2 for instance:

One Sabbath day he was walking through a field of ripe grain. As his disciples made a path, they pulled off heads of grain. The Pharisees told on them to Jesus: “Look, your disciples are breaking Sabbath rules!”
Jesus said, “Really? Haven’t you ever read what David did when he was hungry, along with those who were with him? How he entered the sanctuary and ate fresh bread off the altar, with the Chief Priest Abiathar right there watching—holy bread that no one but priests were allowed to eat—and handed it out to his companions?” Then Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made to serve us; we weren’t made to serve the Sabbath. The Son of Man is no lackey to the Sabbath. He’s in charge!”

Seems to me both Saul and the Pharisees were working out accepted wisdom, you needed armor to fight, you needed detailed rules to keep the Sabbath.   Yet both were subverting the thing that they were trying to protect.  David wouldn't have won in a traditional armor based fight.  The Pharisees had turned a blessing "take one day a week off -" into a curse.

Do our systems and traditions serve us or do we serve them?  Is Christmas a blessing or a curse?  Does the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution serve it's people or do they offer sacrifices to it?

Just what's running through my head.

 - Peace

O How the Mighty Have Fallen

I've been a fan of the Choir since 86 and out of the 18 albums I have O How the Mighty Have Fallen is one of their best.  It has their all time most sublime song: Mercy Will Prevail. It deeply embraces doubt and pain:

I wanna swear it's true but it's hard to defend it
I know it comes from You and I don't comprehend it
Love never fails
Mercy will prevail
I wanna swear it's true but it's hard to defend it

In the chill of a cruel word
In the nest of a wounded bird
In the shadow of doubt
In the smoke
In the smoke of a torch blown out

The final line of the song puts that raw pain and doubt into the context of incarnational faith in way that is simply stunning.  Best to listen to the song via the Noise Trade Widget embeded above, but reading the full lyrics works too.

I highly recommend giving them your email & postal code and downloading the album.

- Peace

Easter on Nose Hill

Lead a short Easter Liturgy for Calgary Church and some friend from Xalt on Nose Hill this morning.  Told a compressed version of Holy week in 4 stops pairing the stories with our progress on the path.

The ancient practice of going up to Jerusalem / at the trail head before the climb.
Jesus in the temple, washing of feat, last supper / at the stones near the top of nose hill.
Jesus death and Holy Saturday / bottom of valley
Waiting to recognize the Risen Jesus / The large erratic on the other side of the valley.

Took about 45 minutes.  We made it just in time to see the sun appear in the NE.

We followed it with a potluck breakfast at The House in Kensington.   Good food, good times.

Posted 8 shots to flickr.

- Peace

Who Are the Sinners Again?

Heard something new in Mark the other day and was surprised I hadn't heard it before.  Mark 14 is a dark passage, betrayal, denial and friends who can't do the simple things like stay awake.

In the middle of this Jesus says “Are you still sleeping and resting? Enough! The hour has come. Look, the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners.   Rise! Let us go! Here comes my betrayer!”

What caught my attention was the term sinners.  While most people know it as religious term,  used to insult people, it's not a term Jesus uses in that way most of the time.  In Mark the word only appears Mark 14 and Mark 2.


Here's how the term Sinners is used in Mark 2

Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them.  As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him.

While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. ¹⁶ When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

In Mark 2, the "teachers of the law" are up set that Jesus is eating with sinners, tax collectors being the worst kind of sinners for cooperating with Rome.  In Mark 14 it the "chief priests" who are coming to arrest Jesus.  The Gospel is often an inversion, the least being divine, the last being first.  In Mark 14 it's the religious leaders who protested Jesus eating with the wrong type of people, conspiring to commit murder. 

- Peace

Blue Like Jazz Trailer

Looks like they were able to Save Blue Like Jazz as there is now a trailer for the movie. Looks good. No idea if it will come to Calgary so I may have to wait for it to go to DVD.

- Peace

Over the Rhine in Calgary

Image Journal brought Over the Rhine to Calgary last week. Would have missed it, if not for a last minute email from Talitha, Thanks Talitha!

The Engineered Air Theater is a wonderfully intimate setting to see OtR, a great match for their music that sneaks up on you and pulls you into the story of everyone. The concert was followed up by a discussion panel on Faith and Art that included local artists.

I'm just getting to posting pictures from the event now. It was good to make contact with folk who are interested in the questions of art and faith.

- Peace

Dueling Beatitutdes

Dueling Beatitudes video via Empire Remixed.

- Peace

Drugs and Faith

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — At 12 tables, in front of 12 mirrors, a dozen people are fussing intently in raptures of self-absorption, like chorus line members applying makeup in a dressing room.

UNDER WATCHFUL EYES Lawrence Golden-Brooks, 43, at Insite. The injection center offers clean needles as well as tests and treatment for H.I.V.
But these people are drug addicts, injecting themselves with whatever they just bought on the street — under the eyes of a nurse here at Insite, the only “safe injection site” in North America.

...

Downtown Eastside is a shock even to someone familiar with the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s or the Tenderloin in San Francisco. Even on a balmy fall afternoon, having 5,000 addicts concentrated in a small neighborhood can make a walk feel like a visit to the set of a zombie movie. On its core blocks, dozens of people are shuffling or staggering, flinching with cocaine tics, scratching scabs. Except for the young women dressed to lure customers for sex, many are in dirt-streaked clothing that hangs from their emaciated frames. Drugs and cash are openly exchanged.

Insite [is] a safe haven supervised by nurses. ... About 800 injections take place there daily. However, officials think that is only 5 percent of the injections in the city and want permission from the national government to open more sites.

From the NYT: An H.I.V. Strategy Invites Addicts In

Saw the article in Meera Bai's twitter stream. Meera Will be speaking tomorrow night at Ambrose University College:

On Wednesday, February 9, 2011, at 7:30pm, we have invited Meera Bai to talk about her work with InSite, North America’s only clinic for supervised injection drug use.
InSite has aroused controversy over its practice of handing out clean needles and supervising drug use. Meera will thoughtfully address these concerns. She is in a unique position to provide a moral perspective on harm reduction, having worked as a registered nurse at InSite and other clinics in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the poorest postal code in North America. (You can preview Meera’s experience at InSite at ).

I'll be there.

- Peace

Playing God? Towards machines that deny their maker

Having enjoyed the questions of faith raised in Tron and the re-imagined Battle Star Galactica I was drawn toward the lecture title of Playing God? Towards machines that deny their maker by Prof Rosalind Picard of M.I.T.

Rosalind W. Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her current work includes developing systems that can read the emotional non verbal cues and translates them for people who have a hard time reading them for themselves. It's a fascinating lecture.



- Peace

Food Court Flash Mob, Hallelujah Chorus

Thanks to Andy K. for sending me this fantastic video. I wonder how many of the people were in on it to begin with and how many joined in? I would have joined in :)

- Peace

The Human Brain is Truly Awesome

Bad new for those looking forward to the singularity. Human brain has more switches than all computers on Earth. from the article:

The human brain is truly awesome.

A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.

- Peace

Shepherd Book and the Prayer of Saint Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

Had to look this up after reading it in a comic book, I was quite sure it was the Prayer of Saint Francis. While not credited, it is put to great use in The Shepherd's tale. The story by Joss & Zack Whedon exceeded my hopes for the mysterious story of Shepherd Book. I highly recommend it.

The Other Hitchens on Q

Peter Hitchens was on Q on Friday. Enjoyed the interview. Adding his book to my to read list. "The Rage Against God". Part-memoir, part-polemic, the book traces his personal journey from atheism to faith and challenges some of the atheist arguments in his brother Christopher's best-seller, "God Is Not Great."

- Peace

Science, Faith and Reduction

A number of articles seemed to echo one another recently. I'll blog them in reverse order to my reading them, so first or last is Breaking Things Down to Particles Blinds Scientists to Big Picture

Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

This resonated with me as I had just read John Stackhouse saying much the same thing about faith. From “All Religions Are the Same…” (except Where They’re Not)

What needs to be argued and not just asserted is that each of the major religions really does reduce down to moralism or mysticism without a loss to its essential character. And, in my view, most religions do not so reduce. Devotional (bhakti) Hinduism (the most popular form of Hinduism) doesn’t; Mahayana Buddhism (the most popular form of Buddhism) doesn’t; Judaism doesn’t; and Christianity and Islam, the most popular religions in the world, certainly don’t. (I recognize that there are moralistic and mystical varieties of each of the Abrahamic religions, but the majority of believers and of those religions’ formal traditions do not, I maintain, reduce their religions to mere moralism or mysticism.)

To get the full character of what he's saying you need to read the full post, it doesn't reduce to a quote particularly well.

Reduction of faith is often called Pluralism, though how you have many when everything is the same is lost on me. Brian J. Walsh touched on the idea of Principled Pluralism in Inclusive, Particular and Being Down and Out in Austin.

We need to acknowledge and affirm the plurality of worldviews in our society and find meaningful and respectful ways for various faith communities to make their contribution to the common good. Now I also happen to think, on anthropological grounds, that we are all members of faith communities, but that requires an expanded notion of faith that breaks through the religion/secular dualism that has been championed by Enlightenment modernity. I think that all people live their lives out of some foundational worldview or narrative that is, at heart, religious in character, even if that religion is self-consciously “secularist” or atheist.

...

So maybe what we need to talk about is just what do we mean by inclusiveness. If what we mean by inclusiveness is that we need to find ways to bridge the gap between various groups, whether Christian of various stripes, Muslim, Aboriginal, feminist, gay/lesbian, liberal or even neo-conservatives (a stretch likely for both of us!) to fight against poverty and to seek the common good, then of course, count me in.

But count me in as a Christian.

Let the various groups make their contribution – often on their own, but sometimes in coalition where that will be most effective – but let them make their contribution with their worldview clearly in the forefront, not hidden behind some veil of religious neutrality. That imposition of religious neutrality is, in fact, one of the oppressive legacies of the liberalism that I am opposing.

- Peace

Of Science, Faith and Blogging

Will be in Vancouver next week for two conferences. First up is Wonder and Devotion: Bringing Science and Faith Together for the Church at Regent. As that wraps up on Friday I'll head over for Northern Voice 2010: a two-day, non-profit personal blogging and social media conference. My guess, I'll be the only person at both conferences.

- Peace

If You Can Make God Bleed

"If you can make God bleed people will cease to believe in him." - Whiplash From the second Iron Man 2 trailer. Really? cause that's a big part of why I believe.

- Peace