I have this really beat up Bible
that for me has a hugely long story to it. It’s nothing all that special
really; it’s not like the Bible stopped a bullet.
It’s just a Bible with binding wrapped in duct tape, watermarked pages with curled
edges, highlighter and pen marks obscuring things. It’s a Bible that looks
probably like Bibles should by the time they are retired to dusty shelves.
I
purchased this particular Bible along with my first school books my first week
of college. It lived with me through those college years. Then, it went with me
to camp a couple different summers where it was beaten up in every way
imaginable by the elements, rambunctious kids and my own propensity for leaving
it places it shouldn’t have been. This last week
I pulled this old Bible out, having left my newer, crisper Bible at home, and I
realized something new about the "old" Bible. My old Bible smells.
It's not a bad smell. In fact, it smells like camp--like northern Idaho. I don’t know if it’s the
Ponderosa Pine, Lake Coeur d’Alene or something else, but for me the smell of
these pages is indistinguishable from Idaho.
Maybe you’ve heard it said before that smell is our sense tied most directly to memory. We've all had smells that cross our paths and cause our minds to drift to a
point in time long ago. This Bible does that me. It is a touch point to a past that has long since gone away. All I need to do is
open the pages and memories flood over me whether I want them to or not.
Now, I can't fault you if you don't see the immediate connections to Abraham, so let me help.
Abraham is a story
about telos. Telos is a Greek word which means something like "ultimate purpose.: Up until the Abraham there was no telos to the Biblical story and without a telos there was no arc to history. You see, in order for
there to be history there needs to be a reason to remember; there needs to be a
goal and groundedness. History is not only recounting things that have happened but
placing events into the arc and narrative of a purposeful life.
For a long time after the Garden of Eden, people wandered over the face
of the earth without a telos. We have stories about Cain and Abel, Noah and his
sons, the builders of Babel—all
of which lack a sense of ultimate purpose. If you’d never heard the story of
the Bible before and you started reading in Genesis 1 by the time you would have
come to Abraham you would be wondering what God is doing with these people.
There is no
redemption until Abraham. Until Abraham there is no purpose-driven life. Life requires a telos; the ground of which is set when God promises Abraham, #1: the land, and #2: descendents.
Still, I’m
assuming it’s not exactly clear what my Bible has to do with that.
Well, here
goes...
My old Bible recalls experiences that ground me. In the same way, the promise of land
and offspring from God to Abraham ground the Biblical story. Ever since we were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, the
path that we human beings walked was one of landlessness, without a telos. Abraham changes things or, rather, God changes things through
Abraham. We have a purpose; a reason to remember. Our memories recall
some part of a greater purpose; our lives mean something not just to us but to
the history of the world.
You see, from the
moment Abraham was given the land, we were given a place in this world and a reason to remember it. You cannot own the land, but you can be a
steward of it. It can—and it will—live in
your memory. While it may be our sense of smell that triggers memories, those
memories reside in particular places in our memory. You can sell the land that you
grew up on, but part of you will continue to live there. That can be a sad and
difficult thing, or it can be a moment to experience the widening of our roots;
it can in fact be joyful.
Each of us has
places we hold dear; places with memories we will never forget. The promise God
makes to Abraham is one that is evident every day of our lives. Our places
matter. Our world matters. There’s a purpose behind all of creation that drives
this life forward. We are not merely people who live on the land; we are people
of the land. Adam, the first man, is from the Hebrew “out of the
ground.” There’s a reason our memories remain so powerful and it’s not so that
we are tortured by our past. We are creatures who remember, because memory and
history remind us of our telos. God is redeeming this
whole world. He’s been at it since the time of Abraham, and just as surely as
Sarah was going to give birth to Isaac, so are we in the labor
pains of the new creation, so that whenever anything is lost it will be found
again, and when death comes life will have the last word.
No comments:
Post a Comment