Day 373 - Waiting

The first Sunday after the first full Moon after the Vernal equinox.

I'm sitting in my favorite black leather chair in my living room listening to "Let your loss be my lesson" on the album "Raising Sand" by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss when I look through the window at the moon about 15 degrees over the horizon of the eastern sky.

I am reading Karl Barth, "Dogmatics in Outline" aka "Kitty Dogmatics", but then I had picked up The Bulletin of the Institute of Reformed Theology and was reading "The Artist and the Preacher: Can both proclaim the Word" by William Goettler of Yale Divinity School and thinking on the sad state of affairs of one of "preachers of the word and sacrament" who turn from preaching and to pursue ego-related activities of church organizations. It's amazing how many of them are about my age and should know better. The subject of the article is preaching parables to a lazy congregation on parables. Parables that demand our attention to their assailing our own behavior, or a carefully deaf ear lest we do see and understand.

Karl Barth lived through the Nazi Holocaust. As a German, he found himself intimately tied into it. While unbelievable verbose, he really grasps some significant elements of our belief. In his dissection of the Apostle's Creed, he remarks "Everything heavenly, like everything earthly, is ultimately self-conditioned. It may meet us like the messenger of a mighty king, whom we might regard with astonishment as a great and mighty man, in the face of whom, we still know he is only a messenger. We know there is something higher...We have experienced the most frightful things [in World War II in Germany], but man is not broken by the lords who are not the Lord. "

He is speaking, of course, about God's only Son, "The ultimate revelation of God Himself" who mysteriously appeared as a man and as the Jehovah of the Old Testament, a man like us in space and time who has all the properties of God and does not cease to be human and submits to accusation, condemnation and Crucifixion, this man who is the Jehovah of the Old Testament."

I contemplate this watching the moon rise through my window, two days before 14:58 GMT April 9, 2009, when early in the morning GMT, it becomes full on a young Maundy Thursday, a day of grief, joy, wonder, fear, helplessness, hope, hopelessness, the end of the past, the beginning of the future, humility, humiliation, the fulfilment of the covenant with Israel and the world, the day an invaluable debt was paid in advance.

Hopefully even those preachers who have forsaken their obligation, their prepaid debt and their calling by that God-Man-Spirit Mystery to preach will hear and understand, and turn away from their foolishness pursuing their ambition of worldly status and power while standing on and holding down those they have entered a covenant to help.

Shalom