"Planting Weekend"

Memorial Day Weekend, here in the Upper Midwest, is for many gardeners the official start of the planting season.  There is a (fairly) good chance that we won’t have an overnight freeze until the late Fall, and the balance of sun and rain should be healthy for life. Memorial Day Weekend, around the United States, is for many, but sadly a dwindling number, a weekend to remember lives which have been sacrificed for the freedoms which our nation enjoys.  In the lexicon of Paul, bodies which are ‘planted’ in the ground are but seeds which will grow into new bodies. (I Corinthians 15:42,ff.) So Memorial Day Weekend is a time to hope in things planted, seeds that will grow into beautiful flowers and that from the ‘hallowed ground’ will grow miraculous bodies. It is a weekend to exercise our capacities to remember, to hope, to commune. It is a time to exercise our faith that seeds planted in faith do not die in vain.

Faith (by Karen S. Bard)

“…all things are less than

they are,

all are more”   -Paul Celan

Consider the seed.

Consider the flower containing the seed.

Consider the stem, that shy messenger, carrying the secrets

of the underworld into the daylight.

Consider the root, fingering its way down, intimate

with the stones, the amazed dirt-

consider the seed, the stem

within the seed, the root

within the seed, the flower

within the seed.

Consider your left palm, warm, familiar, cupped

around a handful of seeds.

Consider your faith.

The Music of Heaven

“Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty”. “Worthy is the Lamb”.  As you read these song lyrics a tune probably comes to your mind.  Music: melodies, harmonies, lyrics, rhythms, brings our minds to different places, creates memories of people (old flames, grandparents) or places (worship spaces, ballparks).

The lyrics above are taken from Revelation 4 and 5’s songs, the music of Heaven. These are the lyrics all of God’s children sing gathered around the Throne.  But, which notes should go with those words?  Did God give Handel a special revelation of what those notes should be, as captured in Handel’s Messiah?  Maybe Jesus prefers the Hebrew tunes he grew up with, the ones he sang in synagogue as a boy.  Perhaps the angels in charge of worship like to mix it up, ‘I’m a little bit country; I’m a little bit rock and roll.’  I don’t know how ‘Worthy is the Lamb’ would sound in a country twang, but there must be someone who has tried it and people who love it. And what of all of the millions assembled there whose memories are triggered not by organs and cymbals but by African drums, South American flutes, Canadian brass?

I join those who believe that Music was woven into the atmosphere of the Universe because God loves to be praised with music.  He set people free to pluck notes from the air, but God’s ‘middle C’ in Michigan sounds just like a ‘middle C’ in Madagascar.  It is all God’s music.  Just like God loves many languages, God loves many melodies.  Perhaps the songs around the Throne will be like modern churches: if you like hard rock worship tunes go to church X; if you like organ-accompanied 18^th century hymns go to church ‘Y’;  and so on.

We know the lyrics to the music of heaven. But we await the revelation of the melodies. I personally am hoping it sounds close to the final minutes of Mahler’s 2^nd, the Resurrection Symphony. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RONBzkthUjM

When you gather around the Throne I suspect that whatever style of music gets your motor running, you will be able to jam to it like there is no tomorrow.

Because, well, there will be no tomorrow.

“Let everything that has breath praise the LORD!” (Psalm 150) AMEN!

The Languages of Heaven

How many languages does Jesus speak?  On earth he spoke his local dialect, a version of Aramaic, and we can be quite sure he read and spoke Hebrew; maybe some Greek, a little Latin. (English, in case you are wondering, was still five centuries in the future.) 

Then, after his Resurrection, Jesus ascended into Heaven, and there he is, in his new body, surrounded by people from ‘every nation, tribe, people and language.’ (Rev. 7:9)  How does he communicate with them all? Well, Jesus is God, after all, so, we can imagine with some certainty that he knows every language.  But, what about the rest of the ‘great multitude.’  They praise God on the Throne with thousands upon thousands of voices in thousands of ancient and modern tongues. While the Father, Son and Holy Spirit can understand the cacophony of words and songs, can the people understand each other? Is there a language of heaven, or does everyone retain their own language which they knew on this Old Earth?

There is, as you know, this odd little story tucked in Genesis in which the LORD intentionally confuses the one language of the people of the earth into many languages. (Genesis 11:1-9) This in turn causes the people to scatter around the world.  The rest, as they say, is history.

We live in a world which has many ways to speak all sorts of threats, hate, war. Wars and rumors of war will never cease on this Old Earth. Even if we all understood each other’s languages, we will not all ‘understand’ each other, our fears, our anger, our territorialism.  We try, most of the time, to speak diplomatically, translating words as best we can to help us know what we are trying to say and why we are trying to say it, but we are not very good at it, speaking generally of the human race.

And yet, one day, there we will all be.  The people we mocked, detested, hated even, gathered around the Throne waving palm branches in our white robes.  And then, at last, while we may not be speaking the same languages, we will finally understand each other, why we each and all exist.

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Amen.