The Wing-Beat

In a special preaching class at SBTS, around 1978, George Arthur Buttrick, then about 86, commented that certain passages left the preacher mute, they were beyond profound.  Deep calleth unto deep . . . .  Yes, in Psalm 42, opening Book 2, the psalmist limns deer, streams of water, the “I” and “my soul,” depression; but the LORD who gives loyal love and gives songs in the night, the living God, his mountain summit, his deliverer, is absent.  When will I be able to go and appear in God’s presence?  (v.2–see the face of God)  Not so his enemies, his mourning and depression.  My tears have become my food day and night.  (v.3)  But despite all the psalmist is undeterred:  I will again give thanks to my God for his saving intervention. (vv 5-11)  I can imagine the psalmist  driven to the high hills by enemies, separated from the community of Israel and temple worship, needing reunion, vindication, and the soul-quenching presence of the LORD.  Enemies say relentlessly Where is your God?  (vv 3, 10) There were the deer, drinking deeply at the mountain streams early and late, hiding in secure places at other times.  They, too, live in refuge and seek to replenish their souls.  O, to seek God early and late each day!  The promise is at mid-psalm:  One deep stream calls out to another at the sound of your waterfalls; all your billows and waves overwhelm me.  By day the LORD decrees his loyal love, and by night his song is with me, a prayer to the living God. (vv 7-8)  And twice the psalmist says to his soul Wait for God!  (vv 5, 11)  Meantime the psalmist knows the depth of his distress and the saving intervention of God–both at once?–as he is overwhelmed in the stream’s torrent.  This might be the place where the preacher knows only to choose the best understanding for the day.  The stream so desired appears ready for drinking, it announces love by day and songs by night, yet for the psalmist the promise of deeper replenishment is not fulfilled.  Hope remains, though, for one deep stream calls out to another — deep calleth unto deep — the human soul in bottomless need calls out to the LORD who is the endless resource.

I will add here that Psalm 43 following shows God’s holy hill where he lives as our psalmist’s desire.  In the mountains of Psalm 42, only promises, the true source is on a special hill.  See, too, Revelation 21:9–22:5.

Quotations from the NET Bible ; for superlative poetic value, try the Authorized or King James Version.

(Dr. Buttrick was visiting by special request by SBTS from Louisville Presbyterian Seminary where he was a guest lecturer.  He was among the most profound of preachers and lecturers.)

Copyright 2012 by Jerry Summers.

In his book, Real Presences, George Steiner asserts a “wager on transcendence.”  He is referring to

“the wager on the meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and response when one human voice addresses another, when we come face to face with the text and work of art or music, which is to say when we encounter the other in its condition of freedom, is a wager on transcendence.” (4)

He argues for that which is real or substantiated when people use language or create forms, when in making meaning they arrive at “meaningfulness.”  Now, all that is possible, Steiner argues, because God is present and is the transcendent reality that makes it possible for us to truly create art and to communicate.

We are talking about interpretation or hermeneutics in class.  Steiner writes that hermeneutics defines “the enactment of answerable understanding, of active apprehension.”  We may have to unpack that a bit in class . . . .

He also mentions three “principal senses” of interpretation:

An interpreter is:

• a decipherer and communicator of meanings;
• a translator between languages, between cultures and between performative conventions;
• in essence, an executant, one who “acts out” the material before him so as to give it intelligible life.

An actor interprets Agamemnon or Ophelia.  A dancer interprets Balanchine’s choreography.  A violinist a Bach partita.  In each of these instances, interpretation is understanding in action; it is the immediacy of translation. (8)

Interpretive response under pressure of enactment I shall, using a dated word, call answerability.  The authentic experience of understanding, when we are spoken to by another human being or by a poem, is one of responding responsibly.  We are answerable to the text, to the work of art, to the musical offering, in a very specific sense, at once moral, spiritual and psychological.  (8)

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) continues to challenge and engage me.  So, too, his mentor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973), the steel to Rosenzweig’s flint.  They escort me roughly out of the easy seats onto the stone seats of a contentious forum; there they bid me listen until I squirm, my butt on the hard limestone, my brain on their hard arguments.

Yet this I want to do, it’s worth the effort and discomfort.  Rosenzweig was the skeptical Jew converted to his own people’s religion; Rosenstock the acculturated Jew who was baptized a Christian in his teens, and who eviscerated Rosenzweig’s sloppy thinking about reality, forcing him to dare to face God.

Right now I am working through Judaism Despite Christianity and find in Rosenstock’s letter to Cynthia Harris in 1943 many stunning comments making a unified argument that prayer is an absolute necessity–and his definition of prayer encompasses the entire life of a people.  Nineteenth-century biblical scholars did not represent Jewish history accurately or fairly.  The missed the “No” of the Jews to idols–Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and God’s three “No’s”:  the Fall, the Great Flood, and the Exodus.  “‘Revelation’ is a knowledge of God’s will, after his ‘No’ to our will has become known.” (181)  But the “No” was necessary if Israel was to recognize “herself as God’s servant, merely a man in the face of God’s majesty.”  (181)  This is not just strong stuff, it is the basic stuff.  It undergirds everything else Rosenstock wrote in the letter to Cynthia Harris in 1943.

One example will be enough:

The Germans all knew in 1918 that the World War had been lost deservedly.  Faith accepted the defeat.  But it takes faith in God to accept defeat fully.  If there be no divine will, then our will must reign supreme.  Naturally the whisperers came–those all-knowing ones who cannot be named but who are always being quoted–those who said, “It was a stab in the back,” “It was this or that,” “It was unnecessary,” etc.  The reaction was inevitable:  “We shall undo the defeat.”  Whispering is unauthorized speech.  The devil is any person who does not wish to be quoted; and so he never attains the rank of a person.  For a person accepts God’s judgement over what he has said or done.  Thus can he come to know the truth.  The devil never receives his verdict because he whispers only and never speaks truly and confidently.

. . . The people who had believed only in science, and who could not distinguish between spell-binding magic and prayer, now fell for the stump speakers.

Rosenstock summarizes the German history of persecution and repression against Lutherans (after 1825) and Catholics (certainly after 1871) and identifies Hitler as “the third attempt to free the German nation from any check on its nationalistic conscience.  This time, the triangle Luther-Rome-Israel is attacked foremost at the Jewish corner.  Also, the attack is far more violent than the two former.”  The furor Teutonicus runs a system of hatred, and there are other arguments to illustrate, but I will finish this statement with a few more of Rosenstock’s sentences:

Hitler hates everything started by the Jews, including democracy and the Freemasons.  Why?  They all know of the insertion of God’s “No” into history as a vital element.  But a spellbinder must be sure that his spell will work under all circumstances.  This prevents him from admitting God’s “No” to the fabric of history.

Hitler’s will and his god’s will are nauseatingly one.  The great art of speech has made Hitler crazy.  Since he has the privilege of speaking, of inflaming the masses, he spellbinds.  And so he hovers as a ghost from the abyss of paganism, a ghost of the days before God touched Israel’s lips with his fiery coal:  ”My will, O mortal, not thine, be done.”

The specific character of biblical prayer explains the uniqueness of the Bible.  We can’t forget the Bible because the divine “No” was created, in our speech, during those thousand years of Jewish prayer.  And all the other departments of our linguistic faculty rest on this clear distinction between prayer, on the one side, and science, poetry, fiction, and law, on the other.  If we do not pray with Israel, we cannot retain our Greek mathematics or our Roman law.  This will sound arbitrary or exaggerated at first reading.  But it is simple truth. (183)

Rosenstock goes on to illustrate examples that bind ancient and modern paganisms together while they show biblical prayer (faith, religion, core of revelation) to be absolutely distinct from them.  It is the distinction and emphasis that energized the philosophical, faithful thinking and dialogue that Rosenstock and Rosenzweig conducted over many years — theirs was an astonishing interchange between Christian and Jew; it started a century ago and lasted until Rosenzweig died.  Rosenstock lived to write voluminously on themes that grew out of scholarship as — I would like to say this —  a form of prayer.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, letter to Cynthia Harris (in 1943 a freshman at Radcliffe College): “Hitler and Israel, or On Prayer,” first published in The Journal of Religion (University of Chicago Press, April 1945).  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed., Judaism Despite Christianity:  The 1916 Wartime Correspondence between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (with a new  foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr, a new preface by Harold Stahmer, and a new chronology by Michael Gormann-Thelen (Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 2011).

There is a Dear One who lives in Washington D.C. and who would move back to Texas but for a few things, two of them being “Texas has tornadoes” and “D.C. has lots to offer.”  True, very true.

Surely there are many delights for folk who live inside the Beltway.  But one of them, certainly, is simply that there are many delights Beyond the Beltway, in many most sociable and historic locales, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, just to start a list, one rather long as you know.

Far from the Beltway, perhaps far enough to gain treasured perspective about matters within and without the fabled, enchanted, fantastical Beltway, lies the Great State of Texas.  As Mr. Tubb used to sing, “There’s a Little Bit of Everything in Texas.”  Yes, more and more, I say, a little bit of everything for most everyone. Again, as Ernest Tubb put it, ” . . . and a little bit of Texas in me!”

And, yes, even tornadoes, twisters, cyclones, what have you.  But is there one for everyone?  I think not; no, not enough tornadoes for everyone.  Why, a fella or a gal might live to be ninety-nine in Texas and never see, or hear, a tornado, at least not “up close and personal” as some like to say.  It’s true most folk want to avoid that type of encounter.

The topic brings to memory a story about a Kansas girl swooshed up in a tornado to the land of Oz.  Oz was L. Frank Baum’s fantasiacal, allegorical double for the Good ‘Ol U.S.A., and the Emerald City for Washington, D.C., the enchanted capital where the Yellow Brick Road ended.  I refrain from recapitulating the adventures of Dorothy and her companions in Oz, and her disenchantment upon learning that the Wizard of Oz was just a man like any other.  Baum’s Wizard stood in for the Gilded Age American presidents, according to one interpretation.  I agree with it.

We have a love-hate relationship with our capital and the doings in the Capitol chambers, the presidential and congressional politics, and the profound weight of bureaucracy in service to our Republic.  Asked how much of the bureaucracy we would like to keep, we would have to admit that much of it seems to meet more than a few of our needs. And asked whether we would do away with our government, we might pause long enough to ask how we could replace it. We will settle for improvements.  And we will accept that our government is as humanly limited as any other institution, it’s just bigger.

From the founding of our republic, indeed before that, presidents, congressmen, civil servants, students, interns and others have come to the point in life’s journey when they know it is time to “go home,” to “come home.”  Their work is done, able to do no more, they leave what is yet to be done to others.

Dorothy, once delivered to OZ by tornado, finds her way home (after having helped others out in her sweet, Kansasy-American way) by clicking her silver shoes together (in Baum’s reference to the Silver Crusade of the late 180os).  In the cinematic version, her heart’s deepest desire does the real work while she clicks the heels of her ruby red slippers together; no balloon ride for her!  She wakens as from a dream and finds herself at home, among her loved ones.

Such is the allure of the Emerald City, but no match for the allure of home.  It cannot replace the thousands of other places that Americans call “home.” Yes, Dear One, Jen, there’s no place like home.  Home is where one’s “people” are.  That being so, the real question becomes who one’s people are, and the where can become secondary.  That’s more the truth among us Americans wherever we land in the world.  Or, as is the case, wherever  the peoples of the world land among us!  At the end of it all, we are all sojourners in far countries.  We may not actually be far from home, for even our home can be for someone else a foreign land, a far country.

In reflection on Jim and Cathy’s experiences lately, I have been reminded that our own communities hold and keep great distances between individuals.  Economic status, religious groupings, social identity, ethnicity, in-group traditions and settled attitudes make it seem as though our neighbors live great distances apart from us, and we from them.  There are all kinds of distances. Some of them we should be impatient to do away with; it should not be that way among all us locals.  These kinds of things make it hard to feel right at home.  What could be more important than that?

I follow up here on a previous posting with a challenging quotation that caught my eye — or should I say it caught me between the eyes?  Yes, it’s the Rosenzweig connection again, but it has to do with the struggle of the believer, certainly of Christian and Jew, and perhaps others.  The quotation is from the Koren Sacks Siddur 4th edition (citation below):

The prophets were critical of the sacrificial system. They reserved for it some of their most lacerating prose. Yet none proposed its abolition, because what they opposed was not the sacrificial act, but the ma’aseh without the kiyum, the outer act without the inner acknowledgement that gives the act its meaning and significance. The idea that God can be worshiped through externalities alone is pagan, and there is nothing worse than the intrusion of paganism into the domain of holiness itself. Then as now, the sign of paganism is the coexistence of religious worship with injustice and a lack of compassion in the dealings between the worshiper and the world.

O Dear Reader, check THAT out against the teaching of Jesus, and you will know why I have that pain between my eyes! “. . . the sign of paganism is the coexistence of religious worship with injustice and a lack of compassion . . . .” What did Jesus say? (Let us remember that the Christ was of the Jews and emphatically of the Father.) Let me make a blanket statement here in saying the “Sermon on the Mount” is a full-blown commentary on the believer’s tendency to paganism (but then, so is the Bible entire). For example, after providing examples of exterior religion and profession versus interior purity of response to God, Jesus exclaims that not all who claim him as Lord will enter his Kingdom, but only those who do the will of the heavenly Father. (Matthew 7:21) His simile of the wise man’s house built on the solid rock and comparison to the fool’s house built on sand sums up the difference between true belief and paganism. (Matt. 7:24-27) And then, to conclude the sermon section, Matthew’s Gospel reads, “When Jesus finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed by his teaching, because he taught them like one who had authority, not like the experts in the law.” (Matt. 7:28-29, NET Bible)

The Gospel accounts of Jesus illustrate and validate his identity as Son of God and Son of Man, and in him no hint of the divided mind, the selfish heart, the deceptive intention, the hidden agenda, the need to manipulate. He stands apart from all other human persons for he is holy, uniquely God’s Son, yet fully and honestly human, and so, human in the best way.

The old Christian hater, Saul of Tarsus cum Paul the Apostle, having met the glorified Christ en route to Damascus, certainly speaks from experience when he challenges the Jews, “. . . you who teach someone else, do you not teach yourself?” He questions whether, though they “rely on the law and boast of your relationship to God and know his will and approve the superior things because you receive instruction from the law, . . . ” and despite teaching these things to others, they actually put them into practice.  Paul quotes from Isaiah 52:5, for immediate effect, I think, but also with a much deeper allusion or implication in mind.  ”The name of God is being blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,” or, “my name is being constantly slandered.”  (See Romans 2:17-24) In Romans he moves immediately to discuss circumcision as a primary evidence of adherence to the Law.  In Isaiah 52, captive Zion (Judah, Jerusalem) is in exile at the hands of Cyrus of Persia, but the special servant of the Lord (call him Israel who can be understood as fully representing the Lord God) will complete the Lord’s will as redeemer and deliverer.  His activities fully match the presence, power, and glory of the LORD who is king, who consoles, who displays his power to all the earth, who goes before the people, just as he did when he led Israel from Egypt and through the wilderness. (Isaiah 52:7-12; compare Isaiah 42:1-7; and see 43:14-21)

These are only parts, but important parts, of the vision of Isaiah. But they proceed to the astonishing vision of Isaiah 53 (actually beginning with 52:13). We can hardly read that one without immediately projecting forward to the suffering servant, Messiah, Jesus Christ, so that we leave the immediate historical context behind. Yet that context is important because it suggests hope that the “ideal servant” sacrifices every desire, every prerogative and honor in order to be a healer and redeemer for the people and to serve the will of the Lord God completely.

Paul writes in the context of his example of circumcision, “For a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision something that is outward in the flesh, but someone is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision is of the heart by the Spirit and not by the written code. This person’s praise is not from people but from God.” (Romans 2:28-29, NET Bible. Compare Leviticus 26:41, Deuteronomy 10:16, Jeremiah 4:4, Ezekiel 44:9.)  The Romans letter takes us beyond the teachings of Jesus, yet only by illustrations suitable to the demands of the day and situation Paul addressed, not only to the Roman church, but to all of the churches of Christ. Jesus’ instruction holds firm as revealed truth. Elsewhere, in James and the Petrine letters for example, that instruction holds firm in its application in the earliest church. Paul writes out of a background that includes the prophets, Isaiah included here, who looked not to the sacrificial system or the outward trappings of religion, but to the heart of his people in Zion in response to the redemptive work of the sovereign king, through his servant Israel, but only that servant whose heart and intention was completely obedient to his will and intention; with that his name could be praised.

There is no praise in paganism, whether in superficial Jewish life and practice, or in skin-deep Christian life and practice, for there is in that superficial religion and worship no turning of the human heart, the core of God-given personhood, to the creator who alone is to be worshiped–as Jesus said, “in spirit and in truth.”

I think this connects with the Koren Sacks quotation in this way. If someone hurts, or needs, or suffers to the point of hopelessness, he or she does not want to hear from anyone who does not have a firm hold on a true source of hope. The hungry do not want to hear “bless you” while they are left with an empty bowl. The impoverished do not want to hear “Oh, you’ll work this out eventually,” because if they could have done so, then they would have already. Victims of injustice here and elsewhere cannot get the liberation and hope they need from others’ apathy and claims “there is nothing to be done.” Rarely is a person’s problem simply “a problem” but a complex of problems.  That is why the connection of life and worship is so important. It is why discussions about changing communities has been so important. It is also a good reason not to lose faith in our churches–that is, to lose our resolve to make, or keep, our churches significant in the right ways.

Citation: Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks (UK), “Understanding Jewish Prayer,” The Koren Siddur, 1st Hebrew/English ed., Jerusalem: Koren Publishers Jerusalem Ltd., 2009), xxxviii.

For such a little bird, it hit the plate glass with a surprisingly loud thud. I am thankful this one was only stunned and upright on the patio. I took her up, checked the wings, and neck, lofted her on finger and thumb, and after several minutes she flew–just fine.  An immature, female Hairy Woodpecker. She must have been in the yard for the sunflower seeds.

The best thinkers often are best, too, at prayer wherein they gain the choicest insights.  The burden for a nation expressed in prayer and thought needs also to be fulfilled in the act.  So it was in the life of Eberhard Arnold (d. 1935) who led the Rhoen Bruderhof in Germany, and whose best-known work (the fifth German edition) was hidden, buried in metal boxes, from the Nazis before its publication in 1936.  This morning’s words seem apt and are thus presented here:

     Every great and deep experience must lead to the deepest self-examination.  Then, from within, we will be equal to the onslaught of unaccustomed events.  War is a challenge to inwardness in the sense of self-examination because the developments that lead up to war lead us further and further away from the roots of all strength.  The increasing prosperity of any country and all the work that is achieved are significant outer blessings for which we cannot be thankful enough.  But they lose their value entirely and turn immediately into a ruinous curse as soon as they begin, like a top-heavy load, to crush the inner life.  With precipitous speed, we are being deprived of the inner blessing of our human calling by the outer blessing of our rapid development.  Our public life has lost its human character; and inwardness has been damaged as a result of the rush and hurry of all the work there is to do on the one hand, and on the other hand by the luxury, excess, and feverishly accelerated pleasure-snatching that has become part of life.

     He has more to say, of course, to bring a consistent message home:  in the inner land of man’s soul where God dwells there is peace, strength, security.  And so forth.  You can read his entire book online, or download it for free at http://www.plough.com/ebooks/innerland.html

The 2010 banquet on February 22 was a high point for me, and that was satisfying, but it was another great event for East Texas Baptist University.  We honored Madeleine Segal Hall with the first annual Sam B. Hall Jr. Civic Service Award, and I was glad the Hall family could enjoy the gratification from that recognition.  The citizens of Marshall, Texas, may not recognize it, but they should be gratified as well — and for as long as the award is presented, the Hall example of civic and public engagement will be remembered.  So, we start looking for next year’s awardee.

Dr. J. David Holcomb, Associate Professor of History and Political Science from Mary Hardin Baylor in Belton gave us an outstanding lecture–relevant, evocative, and erudite.  Thanks, David, for exemplifying the highest standard as we want it for the Lectureship.

Over 100 local and regional community leaders, citizens, public servants, students, and faculty were present for our exciting evening at ETBU.  The fellowship was marvelous!  We look forward to next year’s event.

Today’s headlines from Afghanistan bring to mind the association of fiction-science fiction-reality and the visualized apocalyptic fears and fascinations that animate so much of cinema and online gaming.  A new observation?  No, not for at least two generations now.  But who would think the USA would be raining destruction on an enemy using armed R-C aircraft, and with considerable success?  Right, these drones are but the latest generation of the concept and the reality.  Beyond that, the scale is different, but the objectives seem familiar, as when the USA’s massive Vietnam/Cambodia-era bombing campaigns brought insoluble complexity to Southeast Asia.  That was old-style — more like the World-War II bombings in Europe by the joint British and American bombing campaigns that destroyed German cities, or the US bombings of Tokyo.  The technology is less “direct” where instead of massive aircraft, pilots and bombardiers you find the drones get their directions from a marvelous fusion of technological and human resources.  It is less “direct” than the A-bomb deployments over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I do not like to think too much about the future prospects for the melding of hyper-destructive technologies with the drones.  I know others have, and that is more than a mere concern.  

Of far greater concern:  why does it seem there is so little faith in the prospects for solving international problems through new modes of diplomacy?  Diplomacy often fails, and “the reality of things” is that conflict will continue, but what would it take to diminish conflict?  How much development do we need?  How much are we engaging in?  Why are there no stronger plans?  Where are we putting our resources?  What attitudes are we developing among the newest generation?  What are our 100-year objectives?  Our investment in war — whether we voted for it or not — is no small thing among us, or among our enemies.  

I wonder whether a “public” form of international relations would serve better than a “political” form of international diplomacy?

So I’m up now, but not fully squared away! Thanks to some relative technical help, though, and this and another subdomain site will be more than I can handle, but I’m going to try.