The sun & the moon & the stars

And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.

There's something about Deuteronomy 4:19; I just can't get it out of my head. It puts me in mind of what Paul said at the Areopagus in Acts 17:26-28.

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for

‘In him we live and move and have our being;'
as even some of your own poets have said,
 ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’

Israel's particularity as God's chosen people (one of the major points of Deuteronomy 4, by the way) is sometimes taken as a sign of God's rejection of all other peoples. However, the Lord of Israel is simultaneously the Lord of Creation, and he has written signs in his creation, signs which we are unaccustomed to reading as such. We think time is a malleable social construct (Exhibit A: Daylight Savings Time) and national borders are arbitrary political constructs. But Paul, in his Acts 17 meditation on the aftermath of the Babel debacle (Genesis 11), argues that time and borders were made by God in order to channel our social relationships back into a search for him.

The sun and the moon and the stars, Genesis 1:14-19 tells us, tell us the days and hours and years are passing in ordered succession, and so the moment is arriving when we must reckon with their Creator. But instead of feeling our way toward him and finding him, the nations are drawn away and bow down to them. They turn these governors into idols, failing to recognize that theirs is merely a designated authority.

We who are now God's chosen people in the new Israel, his Church, are as prone as our ancient fathers to bow down to idols. Rather than worshiping the evident power of the sun and the moon and the stars to govern our lives, however, we, along with the nations of today, think we can claim and manipulate that power to our own ends. We are lords of time and space, displacing the Creator of space and time alike.

The particularity of God's chosen people isn't a sign he has rejected all other peoples. In his mercy, he has left us all allotted periods and boundaries so that we should seek him. In our sin, we are too readily and quickly satisfied instead with the sun and the moon and the stars, and, too often, with our infantile conviction we cannot be governed even by them. Because we cannot and will not find God, then, he came to be not far from each one of us.

For in him we live and move and have our being.

Learning from the priests & Levites

The priests and Levites who come to John the Baptist in John 1:19-28 are not interrogators, but inquirers. As servants of the Temple, they are experts in Biblical worship, and in John's practice of baptism, they recognize a new ritual. Notice that they don't challenge baptism's propriety or John's right to perform it; in fact, they seem to implicitly grant it. Instead, they want to understand what this ritual reveals about John's identity.

John the Baptist could be Elijah, who they thought would inaugurate the eschatological Day of the Lord (Malachi 4:5-6). He could be the Christ, who would defeat the enemies of God and his people and establish a reign of eternal peace (Psalms 2 & 45). He could be the Prophet like Moses who will bring a new, perfect and final Law (Deuteronomy 18:15-18). In other words, John the Baptist appears to be a, if not the, subject of prophecy who will inaugurate the eschaton precisely because he has introduced an new ritual which signifies citizenship in a kingdom and entrance into a new age.

Of course, John is merely the herald of that figure. But as he does not challenge the priests' & Levites' assumptions, he effectively affirms them. By so doing, he lets us know that we all could learn a lot from the liturgical expertise of the priests and Levites.

D.G. Myers on Cancer, Dying, and Living

In a recent Econtalk podcast, host Russ Roberts interviewed the literary critic D.G. Myers, who is dying from cancer and has been writing on the subject. They begin with a lovely discussion of the reality of death and dying, deconstruct some popular euphemisms for being afflicted with disease, and then turn to literature and the field of creative writing in the universities before concluding with the Deuteronomic imperative to choose life.

Recommended.