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January 26 - February 13, 2024
We know who they are because they wear badges of what they experienced in history: Stephen’s
“The dance of the liturgy does not seek the dissolution of time into a static eternity that is at once pre-existent and co-existent. Instead, the liturgy of the Church unveils and celebrates the true eternity that, rather than being opposed to time, is revealed in the very heart of temporal existence.”1
The heaven “above” is also a future to come, a future that is now.
Christian spirituality is the original quantum theory.
Too many forms of Christianity merely endure the present as the price to be paid for reaching an atemporal eternity. As Olivier Clément observes, in the scriptural imagination almost the exact opposite is true:
“Man cannot open himself to the eternity of God by turning his back on temporal existence. The encounter with the eternal ripens in time, through the lived moments of hope, faith, and love.”4
The incarnation is the nexus of history and eternity. The collision of time and eternity in Christ has ripple effects for how we understand both,
The revelation of God “born of a woman” in “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4) makes history the arena for encountering God.
The incarnation is the fulcrum of the cosmos. Creation finds its fullness in the incarnate God. The enfleshment of God in “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4)
the God who arrives in history as Mary’s son in first-century Palestine is not looking merely for eyewitnesses; God is looking for followers, learners, disciples.
Historical proximity is not the same as an encounter with the God who arrives in history.
“then what is the advantage of being a contemporary?”10 None, in fact.
When this God arrives in history, the call isn’t merely for believers but followers.
It’s natural, says Kierkegaard, to imagine that the first generation surrounding Jesus enjoyed an advantage, a privileged access to transcendence—the fortunate ones “timely born,” as it were, who received the bread and wine from Jesus’s own hand. But the manifestation of God is not available in the way a billboard announcement is. The Creator of the cosmos comes at us slant. He shows up in a way that also hides. God’s self-communication, as Kierkegaard would put it, is always indirect, which means it takes more than ears and eyes to see and hear. God can come to the creation he made and yet
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“let no innkeeper or philosophy professor fancy that he is such a clever fellow that he can detect something if the god himself does not give the condition.”
In other words, there are ultimately no “followers at second hand,” because anyone who is going to encounter the paradox, whether in AD 33 or 1843 or 2023, needs the perceptual grace, granted by the same God, to see around corners, to catch what’s told slant.
The indirect communication that is the incarnation requires something we lack, an illumination only God can provide. And insofar as only God can provide that to each of us, each follower is in direct relation to the Absolute. Someone “who comes later must receive the condition from the god himself and cannot receive it at second hand.” And “if the one who comes later receives the condition from the god himself, then he is a contemporary, a genuine contemporary.”13 You could say there are no latecomers in the communion of the saints,
Thus Kierkegaard sees the God who grants the condition as the reconciler of all generations.
God is as near to the twenty-first-century disciple as to the medieval saint. And the medieval peasant is as near to God as the first-century apostle.
“She lived in an epilogue of wants,”
We are invited to inhabit time in such a way that we are there and then. When the last light is extinguished and the terrifying strepitus roars across the silent dark, we are bereft. A solo voice might then ask the time-bent question of the Black spiritual: “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” which, in a turn befitting El Greco, pivots to the present tense: “O sometimes it causes me to tremble!” There will be years when the “Hallelujahs!” of an Easter morn are not just reenactments of the past but fresh realizations of a soul that has spent a year in the pit, all too familiar with
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annual rehearsal of incarnation and passion is only “repetitive” in the Kierkegaardian sense of a repetition forward,
the Christian inhabits time as cyclical and linear.
Dr Sanders
the incarnation makes a decisive dent on the calendar—there is no going back once the Creator God has made himself a creature subject to the vicissitudes of time.
The midrashic notion that all future generations of Israel were already present as witnesses at Sinai
the people is imagined as a continuous entity, bearing responsibility through historical time as a collective moral agent.”
There is a real and significant continuity of a people constituted by the covenant. This binding of a people across time and generations is the same reality expressed in the communion of the saints. The later generation lives into specific possibilities because of what it has inherited from those who crossed the sea and wandered the wilderness. This continuity is real because of the enduring presence of the same God to whom all generations are connected, and also because habitualities are collective as well. Hopes are inherited; so are idolatries.
The Bible is riddled with second-person plural pronouns that situate us in a communal reality, and that community is continuous across time.
The present matters, but now is not only the present.
The generation of Israel standing on the shore of the Jordan is defined by that part of its “body” that wandered in the wilderness. The past generation’s experience is in them, a defining part of who they are as they embark on this possibility. And to be who they are called to be in the promised land, they must remember who they are.
There is no turning back the clock. Yet we do revisit those events in our now as a matter of orientation, resynchronizing our internal and collective clocks, so to speak—to remember when we are.
“We” are longer than our lifetime.
Following is not passive or automatic; it is its own creative act,
the leader is listening, but the follower is both listening and feeling
Imagine the church not like a railway timetable but as a dance hall. Every worship service is practice for dancing into the world. The bride of Christ is invited into the distinct, creative joy of following, attentive to the leader, listening for the music. Poised, attentive, attuned: What now? What next?
Now I understand that we are guaranteed nothing, that our days are always running out. That they have always, always been running out.1
receiving our mortality as a gift.
this is scary.
We are robbed by the brokenness of the Fall. But not everything that fades has been stolen. Not all passing away is an outworking of the curse.
I don't know
To resent mortality is a mark of hubris. When we resent our own mortality, we resent the fact that what is given is not eternal. Then, all too often, we try to fabricate eternity: we cling and dig in our claws, refusing to let go.
The trick is to live fully present to the moment without being defined by the Zeitgeist.
“Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come. In the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere else.”
There is no joy in music without the fugitive nature of sound; there is no delight in the song without the gift of ephemeral notes that rise, linger, then fade to make way for more.11
Human life is hebel (Pss. 39:4–11; 78:33; Job 7:16) because it is impermanent, because we change and ultimately die.”
“he’s not saying that everything is meaningless or pointless. He’s highlighting the elusiveness of the world, which slips through our fingers and escapes all our efforts to manage it.”
Leithart notes that Hebel “is the name of Adam’s second son, the first human to suffer death, the first to know the reality of life’s vaporousness
can “enjoy” what’s before me, who is with me, fleeting as their presence might be. The question isn’t whether we can escape this condition but how we will receive our mortality, how we will shepherd what’s fleeting yet given.
“a sense of beauty intensified by recognition of temporality.”
have no doubt this is why God gave us art—to cope with the mystery of our mortality,
Our mortality is fraught and the arts are a balm, not because they heal us of our mortality but because they absolve us of the need to control, to fix, to escape.
Because mortality in this fallen world is so bound up with wrenching heartbreak, we come to resent mortality itself. All decay seems like disaster. But to dwell mortally is to achieve a way of being in the world for which not all change is loss and not all loss is tragic—while at the same time naming and lamenting those losses that ought not to be.
