A Cathedral of Hourglasses: Imagining time's fullness

In August 2010 I was finishing up my final week on internship at Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Salem, Oregon when the text from Galatians 4:4-7 came up in the lectionary. It goes something like this:


4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. 6 And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" 7 So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

And so I preached my final sermon in Oregon on this text--on the fullness of time and the entry of Jesus Christ into the world. In that end was a new beginning, just as in the end of my time in Oregon there was a beginning awaiting me back in St. Paul.

Now, sixteen months later, Paul's same words have come around again in the lectionary and it brought me back to a metaphor that strikes me as more apt now than ever. So, I share it with you today.

The Cathedral of Hourglasses


An hourglass uses gravity to drop sand from its upper chamber through a small opening and into the chamber at its base. When the bottom chamber is filled this is the fullness of time.

Now, I want you to imagine a vast cathedral full of hourglasses. Close your eyes if you have to. Picture a room as long and as wide as a football field filled with hourglasses of all different sizes. Each has a finite amount of sand, and each represents a very specific thing in your life. In a very small hourglass there is your time reading this blog post; that sand is moving very fast and soon it will be full. In another hourglass there is your work—for some of you that might take up a lot of space, for others not so much. Some of you might have several hourglasses already filled up with old jobs and tucked away in a dusty corner. Some of you might be missing that hourglass at the moment, and some of you will have retired that hourglass forever. You will have many other hourglasses—ones for all the things you own and ones for all the nuisances that take up time in your life.

Now notice the hourglasses of your friends and family. These are your relationships—some of these, too, have stopped falling—family has died, friends have moved away and you have lost touch. Some of these hourglasses take up huge parts of your cathedral and are hard to get around. Some you can hardly see at all, and some you’ve forgotten you ever had.

If you look around your cathedral, the first thing you will notice is that not a single grain of sand is moving up. Everything is falling; all your hourglasses are becoming fuller—some very fast, others very slowly—but whether in moments, or in decades, every hourglass is moving toward its fullness.

When an hourglass is filled you have a choice of what to do with it, and you have two options. The first is that you take that full hourglass and put it up on the altar of the cathedral and try with all your might to turn it upside down again. Should you try this approach, you will struggle and struggle but the sand will not budge. But while you are putting all your attention into that hourglass of things-gone-by all the other hourglasses will pour out faster and faster. The more you try to re-create what is gone, the more you miss what is happening now.

But you have another option. You can take that full hourglass, set it on the floor of your cathedral and use it as a base for every new hourglass that comes your way. This may seem at first like a poor memorial for the investment you made, but over time you will appreciate that a single hourglass is only a little base but many filled hourglasses--with many full memories--can strengthen every new experience in your life. Then, you will build your new life experiences upon the memories that have made you who you are. That is how ends make new beginnings—the old inspires the new, builds upon the new and eventually lifts the new to a place it could never have gone on its own. Your new hourglass will, quite literally, stand on the shoulders of giants.

This is what God does by sending us his Son not at the beginning of time but when time is at its fullest.

If our lives are the cathedrals, then they only work when our filled-up hourglasses are removed from the altar and in their place we put the big hourglass that is Christ come into the world. When we clog the altar not only do we miss the grains of sand falling behind us, but we also lose sight of the one that matters.

Things end. And they also begin.

Ask Mary. You think she didn’t believe it was the death of her when she found herself pregnant as a teenager in a society where adultery demanded capital punishment? Ask anybody who has experienced loss and come through the far side. When Christ came into the world it was the end—it was time’s fullness. All these losses we experience here are just sand succumbing to gravity. The promise we have in Christ is that when the last grain of sand falls in the last hourglass of our lives our cathedral will not lie dormant. Rather, we will find that the cathedral itself was an hourglass all along--an hourglass that Christ will turn on its head, setting our sand free from the rule of death to a place where gravity rules no more. Every loss—every end—is a new beginning, and we know this because it has already happened--in Bethlehem and wherever you sit right now. Christ has come to turn the whole mess of your Cathedral upside down and even gravity will lose its sway.

Hourglasses fill up. They are at this very moment. The hourglass that marks this post is ending, the hourglass that marks this year has only a few grains of sand to drop, and the hourglass that is our lives could simply run out at any moment. You are guaranteed nothing, except that our ends are not empty but full, and every one is a new beginning, a new opportunity, and the next great adventure of our lives.

Shatter Our Expectations

There are 364 days in the year that are not Christmas--unless you count the 12 days of the Christmas season and let's be real: nobody counts the 12 days of Christmas. The 25th of December is the one day we're interested in, the one that captures our imaginations. In part it's the presents--gifts and cards--boxes wrapped and tucked under a tree. In part it's family--meals and traditions, shared experience and relaxation. In part it's a beginning--new opportunities, a new year, new memories and stories. In part, it's Jesus.

Well, in theory it's all Jesus. "Jesus is the reason for the season," ya know? And still it sounds cheesy--a tad too ambitious and unrealistic. As much as we might even understand and enjoy the Christmas story, there seems to be so little on the line. At Easter, there's death and resurrection. Now that is something! There are trumpets. There's reason to be excited. Easter is the festival of festivals; it's the thing worth talking about. Christmas is cute; it's like Easter's little cousin that is all dressed up with frills. It's nice. It's fun. You'll take pictures of it and talk about all the sweet things it did, but you aren't taking seriously anything that it says. Someone will tell you that when Christmas grows up it's going to be Easter and you'll nod and agree, but you won't quite buy it. You'll want to enjoy Christmas while it lasts. You'll hang on those frills for all their worth.

Jesus is the reason for the season like the 4th of July is the cause of summer. It's incidental. Early Christians co-opted pagan holidays celebrating the winter solstice and here we are. Christmas Day could be any day. That is no reason not to celebrate but it's important to realize this nonetheless. While God came into the world in the Christ-child, God also comes every day in new and unexpected ways. But that's just it, isn't it? Our expectations--they're too low.

We know the story.
We've read the Gospel.
We sing the songs.

Is that what we expect? Is that all we expect? What will it take to make this day more than quaint? What will it take to make Christ real, as the child was in Mary's arms?

It's time to shatter our expectations. It's time to be blown away by the incarnation. It's time to listen to that frilly little Christmas day speak it's message and come to the slow and earth-bending realization that everything you have seen, everything you have experienced is no longer as it seemed. For when that frilly Christmas child was playing you took it for childishness when it was really joy, you took it for ignorance when instead it was wisdom, you took it for being meaningless when instead it was the crux of the story of our lives.

Christmas is here. May your expectations be shattered.

Blog re-focusing

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to take a moment to let you in on the scoop for the future of this blog. I have started writing for Land of 10,000 Losses, a group of friends blogging on Minnesota-sports-related stuff, which means a couple of things for this blog.

1. This blog will no longer have articles focusing on sports. I am planning on having this blog focus on issues of theology, philosophy, hiking, literature, pop culture, and all the other random stuff I wrote about before with the exception of sports. Maybe occasionally if there is something of interest regarding God and sports, for example my post on Tim Tebow, I may still post here but otherwise nope.

2. If you don't want to read about sports then you're in luck. You win.

3. If you do want to read what I have to say about sports you should do the following: Go to "Land of 10,000 Losses" on Facebook and "LIKE" us. Feel free to check out the blog as well and perhaps even follow us on Wordpress. All articles will be posted to Facebook on the L10KL page. However, they might not be posted to my personal Facebook, so keep that in mind!

Thanks to all for reading my thoughts and reflecting with me on all manner of issues. I look forward to writing more in the future!

Peace,
Frank

Why Intangibles Matter: The Tim Tebow Story

There are times in sports, as in life, when things are going great but you just can't shake the feeling that it's all going to turn out badly in the end. If you've watched the Minnesota Vikings play long enough you know this experience well. You know that no matter how good it looks there will be a Gary Anderson or Brett Favre moment and it's all going to come crashing down.

Conversely, there are times when despite what appear to be insurmountable odds you feel as if things will work out fine. You don't know why this is the case; you can't prove it statistically or with any known formula. Instead, you have an overwhelming sense of calm in the face of adversity. This, my friends, is the realm of Tim Tebow.

Every week the Broncos look over-matched, Tebow shows very little in the way of tangible football skills, and then, inexplicably, they rise from the ashes and win. All of this with a starting quarterback who is too genuine to be real--or so his disbelievers seem to think. He has never shown himself to be anything but modest, but many people seem to have a clear sense that this can't be all to the story. Chuck Klosterman wrote a great piece in which he explained why it would be easier to accept Tebow if he were the kind of guy who went out and partied and got himself arrested. Then he would be gritty or tough. Instead, we have this overtly devout, gosh-darn, team-promoting quarterback who nobody seems to know how to evaluate.

Tebow's mechanics are bad. He doesn't fit the mold for an NFL quarterback. He is elusive but not fast, has a mediocre arm, has good but not extraordinary understanding of the game, and doesn't really pass the "eye test" (the test that suggests you can look at a quarterback and simply see whether he looks for real or not). All of this is true.

The problem is that Tebow also keeps succeeding. He's 7-1 in eight starts this year. His winning percentage is second only to Aaron Rodgers. Moreover, he's doing it on a team that is, by all accounts, mediocre. The Broncos traded away their best receiving threat (Brandon Lloyd) at the same time that Tebow took over this year.

All of this is to say that this is startling and strange--hence the ubiquitous Tebow publicity. It's also gotten people wondering whether there is some divine intervention going on here. I'm about as skeptical as anybody when it comes to this, because--let's face it--very few people want to think about God making a difference in a football game and not doing a thing about rampant starvation and disease elsewhere in the world. Nobody really wants a God who influences football games but doesn't stop car crashes. But here's the thing: God's interaction one place does not preclude the other. And for the first time ever I've found myself wondering, "What if God did fog up Marion Barber's head and get him to run out of bounds?" "What if God did give a little kick in the butt to Matt Prater on that 59-yard field goal to send it to overtime?" "What if..."

The answer, I think, is probably not, and not just because I think God has better things to do than impact football games. I think this is a case of marked intangibles that the stat-driven football world does not understand. This is a case of a culture change in the Denver locker room. Whatever Tebow has, it's contagious. It could be God, yes, but it could also be determination borne out of the premise that this is just a football game; it doesn't matter that much; and yet, if the team works together there's no reason they can't win. And they just keep doing it.

Malcolm Gladwell writes in his book, Outliers, about the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. In Roseto there were virtually no cases of heart disease prior to the age of 55 during the mid-twentieth century. This was startling because heart disease was rampant in America during this time frame before the advent of cholesterol-lowering medication. More astonishing was that, as an investigation was launched of the town and its inhabitants, it was discovered that there was no tangible reason for this to be the case. The people of Roseto ate comparably to other people in America, they got comparable exercise and had no innate biological advantages. Finally, the researchers realized the only conceivable difference, and it was far more holistic than they could have imagined. The difference was stress. The people simply were not worried about life; they lived a casual, neighborly lifestyle. They were an outlier, not by any tangible definition that science could yet explain, but because of what was considered at that time an "intangible."

Now look at the Broncos and tell me that's not the same case. They are as low stress as you can get. They have a quarterback in Tim Tebow who doesn't feel measured by the world's standards, and amazingly enough, he's gotten everybody around him to buy into the same view. He might be one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL, but don't expect it to show up on the stat sheets. He's a lesson in intangibles. He might very well be the Roseto of the NFL. And I, for one, am loving every second of it.

Light, C.S. Lewis, and letting it burn.

John 1:6-8, "There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He was not himself the light, but he came to testify to the light. 

C.S. Lewis once said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” You can tell that Lewis was intimately aware of John’s Gospel, especially these verses. John the Baptist comes on to the stage, testifying to the light, and causing us to pause—as we should with any metaphor—to wonder, “Who (or what) is this light?” Our Sunday school answer tells us: Jesus. But what on earth does that mean?

Try explaining to Confirmation students that Jesus is the light, and he is also the Good Shepherd, and he is also the lamb… and, oh yeah, he’s the prince of peace… and watch as their eyes gloss over. Metaphors are rough. At their best they open up worlds of interpretation and get us to see things in new ways; at their worst they positively turn us off to everything that the story is saying. Take this light image: Jesus is the light, the true light, the light of the world.

You have undoubtedly heard that a thousand times. Now let’s unpack it. If Jesus is the light that means that it is through Jesus that we see the world. Without light your eyes are useless; try walking alone in the woods on a cloudy night with no moon and thick tree cover and that’s about as close as you can get. So, we could say that Jesus allows us to see, but that opens up further possibilities. Is Jesus the sun?

This would be, I suppose, taking him literally, but it doesn’t really tell us much about God—unless you believe that God is a flaming ball of fire… I hope you don’t. It seems to me that the best way to think about Jesus as light is to think of his immanent presence. Light is all around us but we can’t touch it and have only our eyes to tell us of its existence; we can’t smell it or taste it; it might give off heat but the light itself doesn’t feel like anything.

So the obvious answer to the riddle is that light surrounds us, and so does Jesus. This is a single layer, but a good metaphor like this begs us to go deeper. To do so let’s return for a moment to C.S. Lewis’ quote. Lewis connects Christ as light to the way we believe. There’s a well-known Bible passage from Hebrews 11 that reads, “Faith is the evidence of things unseen.” Pardon the pun but Lewis sheds new light on faith, suggesting that faith isn’t only evidence of things unseen; it is also the very act of seeing itself. Everything visible, everything that our eyes take in is an article of faith, because the light itself is Christ—giving us sight just as he gave sight to the blind.

One of my favorite books is Blindness by Jose Saramago, a story about a sweeping pandemic of white blindness that quickly envelopes a country. The story follow a group of diverse individuals who are never named, led by a single woman—given only the title, “the doctor’s wife”—who is the only person in the world that can still see. Without ruining the whole story—because I strongly recommend it—they encounter all the horrible means to which people go in a society completely devoid of sight. Near the end, the doctor’s wife reflects on the ordeal of blindness as the sun rises over the city with a quote that is as haunting as it is profound. She says,

“I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”

  

Life without Christ is to be “Blind people who can see, but do not see.” You can physically see the world, but the true light of it is missing. To see the world without Christ is to be blind but seeing. Light is Christ in and through us.

This is all well and good, and we can certainly feel good about ourselves for believing in a God who is light to the darkness of the world, but here’s the thing: if we live like the light we experience is merely light, then we too remain blind. If we take the metaphor and think, “Well isn’t that a nice image for Christ… well, isn’t that Advent candle a great ritual… well, isn’t that Christ candle or baptismal candle a wonderful ritual…” then we remain blind, because we are forgetting the nursery rhyme that we really have no excuse not to remember. You know the one: “This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine... Hide it under a bush, O no! I’m gonna let it shine.” It changes things when that light is Christ.

I imagine when you hear that song you think of holding a candle. Yet, I wonder if we’re not thinking big enough. Christ isn’t a puny little flame at the end of a wick; we don’t need to protect Christ from going out. Instead, Christ is everything that we see; not just the candle but the space in between us as we meet each other face to face. The candle is our faith, hanging tenuously on the end of that wick; it is ours, but not ours to keep. Our faith is to be shared with the world. The light that we hold is more powerful when it lights the wick of another.

Some peoples' approach to evangelism is to take their candle and drop it on the floor and let the whole place go up in flames. You see these people on TV with their altar calls, exorcisms and strong language of conversation. For them, faith is something shared by force; they don’t have candles as much as flame throwers to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The problem with this approach is that many will smell fire and bolt before they ever see Christ. The strong act of sharing their faith is off-putting to those standing by the exit in the first place.

We have a different problem up here in the northwest corner of Minnesota. We take our little lights and we hold them close, so close sometimes that no one else can see them. We hold them tightly because it is what we value, what we love, what we care about deeply. Our problem is not the depth of our devotion but our willingness to let it burn for the world to see.

So, here’s my hope this Advent season. We let it burn. We don’t need to burn the place down with our faith, but we should not be afraid to let it shine for the world to see. It’s the season of light. Let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine.

The art of NOT using a sermon illustration

I remember very plainly a time when a fellow seminarian explained her approach to the sermon illustration. She said that she was always looking for them and when a particularly striking one came around she would apply it the coming Sunday. From the start something about this struck me as funny. Instead of starting with scripture she was starting with an image or a metaphor borne out of her life experience. I can't deny that it had meaning to her, but I wasn't sure it would work well conveyed to an audience.

Four years later I find myself in much the same spot. The world is full of countless metaphors, some even that fit with the text for this week, and yet I have some serious reservations. Personal experience is both crucial and dangerous for proclamation. It's crucial because you need to live in the world to make any connection with the lives of the people to whom you are preaching. You can't sit at home and play Modern Warfare 3 all day, or sit in your office and read the Bible all day, and expect to speak a message that has both relevance and gravity. However, personal experience is dangerous because it often precludes the different and opposing personal experience of others. This is why I am cautious to use my life, or a symbol therein, to make a point. I am biased by my own experience, and I will never get away from that.

In my infinite wisdom--having served a parish now for a grand total of three weeks--I am learning how not to use a sermon illustration. I have a congregation of people who want to get to know me, so it's hard, but the end result is that I honor the message for what it is: God's word for the people. When Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed it is undoubtedly a great sermon illustration, but much of the appeal of Jesus' words is their timelessness. A sermon is not meant to be timeless--at least it rarely achieves that feat. A sermon is meant for a particular time and place, trusting in the Spirit to move in that moment with that people.

So excuse me if I don't use that illustration. If there's one thing I am sure of it's that it's not about me, and let's keep it that way.

The Luck Effect: Why fantasy football rules the world of geekdom

I invited a friend to join a fantasy football league that I started this year. The idea was to get a bunch of people with connections to Luther Seminary together and have a big ol' fantasy fun time. There was no money put on it, so competitiveness was at a low. Of the 16 of us, there were probably only 8 or 10 that were actually trying to win, which is pretty typical in the world of fantasy sports when money is not on the line.

As is also often the case in fantasy sports, several managers who tried early on gave up as the season went along. Heading into the final week of the season, six teams had risen to the top and had clinched all six of the playoff spots. To give some idea of the level of commitment of the managers who made the final six, I offer the number of roster moves they made over the course of the year. One made 25 moves, one 18, one 17, one 9, one a mere 4, and one.... none.

Wait, what?

You see my friend who I invited last into this league, actually didn't really care at all about being in the league. Not only did he not show up for the online draft, he never made a roster move the entire season. In football, this means that every player on his roster missed at least a single game for their bye week, and not only that he has players in Ahmad Bradshaw and Jay Cutler who have missed multiple weeks due to injury. They stayed in his lineup and scored big fat 0's. He not only made the playoffs... he won his division.

For those who don't understand anything I just said, here it is plainly: he never did anything, ever. He literally created a team, let Yahoo! assign him players and he never once changed a thing. He even has two kickers on his team, something that is laughable in fantasy circles.

But underlying all of this is the attraction of fantasy football: it's a tremendous amount of luck. Yes, there is skill in determining who are the best players and researching the best players to pick up from week to week. Yet, the game of football is so filled with injuries that in the end you can make all the "right" moves and still end up missing out on the prize. In this league I finished with the most points and yet I only just made the playoffs with the 6th seed.

The reality is that Fantasy Baseball is the toughest of the major sports, because the sheer number of games and players means that much of the injury luck factor is mitigated. Hockey too is a good fantasy sport. Basketball isn't bad. But football, with its small sample size and tremendous amount of injuries, is simply full of luck. Not that that's a bad thing. It is, I suppose, why it's so popular. You don't have to pay much attention; you don't have to know much; you just have to... enjoy the ride.

I look forward to the playoffs and hope I can get a shot at my friend, but something tells me this is not my year. I lost my star running back to injury this week, and anyway... I just don't have the luck.