Lamentation for a Riven World
I invite you to join me alongside a man who stands in the midst of chaos. He is not Everyman. He belongs to one of those rare times when the world tilts, when the cracks of immense pressure start to appear, when things change in apparently unrecoverable ways. The world he once knew is falling apart around him, all in pieces, and this provokes a lamentation:
Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
This is the world’s condition now, and now
She that should all parts to reunion bow,
She that had all magnetic force alone,
To draw, and fasten sund’red parts in one;
She whom wise nature had invented then
When she observ’d that every sort of men
Did in their voyage in this world’s sea stray,
And needed a new compass for their way;
She that was best and first original
Of all fair copies, and the general
Steward to fate; she whose rich eyes and breast
Gilt the West Indies, and perfum’d the East;
Whose having breath’d in this world, did bestow
Spice on those Isles, and bade them still smell so,
And that rich India which doth gold inter,
Is but as single money, coin’d from her;
She to whom this world must it self refer,
As suburbs or the microcosm of her,
She, she is dead; she’s dead: when thou know’st this,
Thou know’st how lame a cripple this world is.
The rupture our man sees is as deep as it is wide, attacking everything and that which makes everything meaningful. The tissue, the sinews, the tendons that hold reality together, that provide its coherence? Gone. All those ordered relations which make human life meaningful—parenthood, siblings, citizenry and its leaders, man and woman? Abandoned. In favor of what? That fictitious liberty of self-determination in which everyone believes in his own utter uniqueness. That singularity, that individual authenticity, must be protected—no, promoted—and allowed to rise up in all its phoenix-like glory from the mire of the quotidian and the conventional.
This is how things are now, he says, mournfully. He is resigned to bearing witness to the end of the world as he knew it, the world that once made some sense. Why is it all falling apart? Because, he says, that one reality to which all things must bow in their ordered, meaning-inducing relations, that one gravitational center of the splendid many-ness of a world lush with life, that original of which all beautifully ordered things are but copies, that one referent of all created things—Wisdom? Dead. Wisdom no longer orders the world we inhabit. She is dead. Drink that in, he insists. Reckon with that soberly and honestly, for only then will you know just how “crippled” this world truly is.
A Crippled and Disrupted Order
Few words can rival these for solemnity and pathos and, sadly, for familiarity. While each line sounds like it is lifted from today’s news in which children stand before judges to be emancipated from their parents and men seek to become women, and women men, in fact these words echo into our time from a generation long before our own. Writing in the early decades of the seventeenth century, John Donne’s era was one of upheaval comparable to few in recorded history. In religion, politics, education, economics—just about everything—long standing assumptions about the way and order of things were being upturned at a pace that could not help but alarm observant inhabitants of the early modern world.
Donne penned these words in 1611 as an elegy for Elizabeth Drury, the daughter of his sometime patron, and in her death he perceived a moving figure for the death of the way of things. That she was a girl who died too young signified the “frailty and the decay of this whole World” and the “fragmentary rubbidge” of the earth, which led Donne to reflect on the bitter convergence of two tragedies of modern life: beautiful youth wasted, and the abandonment of Wisdom, traditionally a feminine figure. She? She is dead, Donne says, in arresting resignation.
The fulcrum of Donne’s vision is his traditional assumption that there is an intimate relationship between the order of the cosmos (of everything, maximally defined) and the ordering of human relations (our most intimate connection with reality). His lament, “’Tis all in pieces…” is thus immediately preceded by mention of the cosmos:
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
By 1621, three astronomical discoveries would disrupt longtime conventional assumptions about the skies. Tycho Brahe had demonstrated the emergence of a new star in Cassiopeia, Kepler had shown that the planets move at irregular speeds and not on circular but elliptical orbits, and Galileo used a telescope to prove that the moon is an imperfect sphere with contours and features. The public was being forced into a new way of thinking about everything they thought they knew, not only in the natural skies but also in the moral, political, and religious realms of life they believed to be microcosms of the cosmos. Disruption of confidence in one tied intricately and necessarily to disruption in all of them. The world, in every sense, was truly falling apart.
Inhabiting the World of Holy Scripture
It may be more conventional to speak of the Christian faith as things believed and confessed rather than a world inhabited. But Scripture itself pressures us to connect the two. The Lord of the word and of the world summons us from Genesis to Revelation to avoid thinking of Christian faith and life as merely doctrinal, an apple-skin surface of right affirmations bearing no relationship to the core and substance of things, to how things really are. Not only does Scripture point the way, however; in its faithful proclamation it is a means of grace, grace which re-orders us, by the Spirit, to reality as it is given to us in Jesus. And this work of Scripture, I suggest, provides a singular opportunity for the church to bring the gospel to the world as it has become and is becoming.
What is the world as it is? Many of us can sympathize with Donne’s alarm. So much of what we only recently took for granted, and thought beyond question, is being reconsidered, redefined, and rejected in our short lifetimes. In general, it is difficult to avoid the impression that, for many of our neighbors and friends, the familiar ties that bind bind no longer. Of course, many books have been written to describe and analyze the contemporary human condition, and many others seek to connect Scripture to the ills of modern life. In what follows, I hope only to add a few modest remarks to this rich and important discussion, and to suggest certain basic features of how the word of God is (or should be) the world the church inhabits in Christ and which the unbelieving world needs. We will do so in three movements. Firstly, we will consider briefly that there is such a thing as the world of the word of God which the church is called to inhabit, and that Jesus Christ is given in that world. Secondly, we will reckon with the (to many, curious and off-putting) book of Leviticus and its special place in that world. And lastly, we will return home with an example of how the world of God’s word connects with the impoverished conditions of contemporary life in a way that creates a rich opportunity for sharing the gospel: our relationship to time.
The World of the Word of God
We begin, of Christian necessity, with the relation of all things to God, the Creator, rather than the relation of things to other things. He is the triune God who is already “there,” in self-sufficient bountiful life, and who freely and lovingly “made the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). At the heart of the Christian doctrine of creation is our confession that all that is not God exists by the word of his power, not of necessity but for God’s pleasure and glory, and in relation to the special identity and purpose of the Son of God. From the perspective of the end of all things, especially as described in the closing movements of Revelation, creation exists at all because the Father loves the Son in the Spirit and determined to form a Bridal-Body-City for the Son that would be his glory. This end is disclosed already in our origins, including especially the formation of Eve fashioned from the side of, and after, Adam, and as his glory (Gen. 2:21–23; 1 Cor. 11:7). The church is the body and glory of the Son formed in and through history, and she too is formed from the side of, and after, the second and last Adam, so that our glorious end unveils our original
reason for existing at all (John 19:34; Eph. 5:25–32; Rev. 19:6–10; 21–22).
Sin is a kind of rebellious resistance to the order of reality.
Thus the Maker of all things has, in his creative and providential works, ordered all things, from the divisions and harmonies we read about in Genesis 1 (heaven/earth, light/darkness, water/land, creatures and their kinds, and so on) to the climactic distinction-in-harmony of man-and-then-woman. But sin has entered this world as the sinister principle of disorder, seeking to unravel all that the wise Creator has lovingly and meaningfully woven together. A more conspicuously Christian rendering of Donne’s image of disorder might therefore speak of the unraveling not merely of cosmic and natural relations but of all which God has bound together in his works of creation and providence. Sin is a kind of rebellious resistance to the order of reality.
But can we say more of this order of reality, biblically considered? And how does this relate to what God is doing in the church to reorder things? Recalling our brief mention of the special place of the Son of God may help us here. In his letter to the Colossians, the Apostle Paul points to Jesus Christ at the very deepest levels of how the church begins any serious reflection on whether and how reality is ordered:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross (Col. 1:15–20).
Paul’s affirmations are direct and all-encompassing. All that exists, he insists, is what it is only as Jesus Christ is “before” it, as he is creator of it, and—in powerful response to Donne’s panicked fear—as “all things hold together” in him. The harmonious order of reality is ultimately personal, not metaphysical or natural or theoretical or scientific. It is theological, and specifically Christological. Christ is to be imagined, suggests the Apostle, with arms outstretched holding together the strands of reality which sin seeks to wrest from his faithful hands, but which it cannot.
But this also means that to resist the peace and life gifted to us in his ordering of things is to resist him, just as the Apostle describes his glorious work of re-concilia-tion (re-peace-ing the deeply disturbed and disrupted world of disorder) carried out by his climactic self-offering at the cross as nothing less than the permanent re-weaving of those very things that sin would unravel.
Leviticus and the Son’s Body and World
That much is clear enough, but how does the word of God relate to the world of God? All of Holy Scripture orders the reality within which we live, but the Book of Leviticus has a special role in God’s ordering work.
This special role is due to two closely related truths. Firstly, as the centrally positioned book of the Torah preoccupied with matters of sacrifice and holiness in God’s presence, Leviticus, as ancient readers perceived, is a kind of catechism of reality. The Lord gave Leviticus, among other reasons, to catechize his people in how to interpret and inhabit his world, and to do so in polemical contrast to the competing visions of reality current among Israel’s ancient Near Eastern neighbors. This catechism of reality commends to Israel a vision of the real world according to three distinct but closely related facets: time (the sacred festivals of Leviticus 23), space (Lev. 1–17), and vocation (Lev. 18–22). These three facets are followed by discussions of how these matters of vertical harmony (God-humanity) find expression in horizontal life (humanity in relationship with one another) (Lev. 24–25), and how the sanctity of people and objects is established or disrupted within and across various lines of distinction (Lev. 26–27). Inhabiting God’s world as his covenant people, by means of the word he has given to faithfully describe and commend that real world, is a matter, at least, of being properly configured to what he says about real time, real space, and real human relations—three distinct but related commitments fiercely contested by the unbelieving world’s view of reality. On Scriptural terms, faithful apologetical engagement with the world of unbelief includes accounting for these three contested dimensions of God’s created reality.
Secondly, Leviticus serves God’s people in this way not apart from but precisely because of its relationship to Jesus Christ. We are familiar, I suspect, with the truth that Leviticus “points forward” to the life and work of Christ. But we may not be as familiar with the other (and more fundamental) side of this truth, namely, that the time-space-vocation world depicted in Leviticus derives its form from the form of the Son of God. With Paul in Colossians 1, we confess that the world is the way it is because of the Son, is made through and by the Son, and for the Son. And with Hebrews 1, we confess that this same Son sustains all things by his powerful word. From the outset, then, and not as a mere happy afterthought, Leviticus is spoken in and with a view to the Son, just as the coming of the Son in (later) history also recalls and
fills-full Leviticus.
The book of Hebrews helps us further here. In the sacred, intra-trinitarian “conversation” between the eternal Father and the eternal Son described in Hebrews 10:5, the Son says to the Father, “A body you have prepared for me,” itself a use of David’s words in Psalm 40. It is the Son who speaks these words to the Father, and for that reason David—a figure of the Son—speaks them in the psalm. That “body” the Father lovingly and wisely forms for his Son is, yes, the body of the unique incarnation. But that incarnate body—the Son who is Lord Jesus Christ in his person and work—is adumbrated in and traced out by the time-space-vocation contours and content of Leviticus. The realities of divine ordering of which Leviticus speaks derive their form from their original, from their archetype, the eternal Son. Hebrews, the one New Testament book with substantial interest in the text of Leviticus, teaches that the realities of Leviticus are found in the body of Jesus Christ. Leviticus is, to be sure, rightly interpreted by Jesus. But it is also true, even in a prior way, as Ephraim Radner says, that “Jesus is rightly interpreted by Leviticus, so that the actual meaning of what he does, what he teaches, and who he is is informed even by the details of, for example, the laws on bodily fluids, sexual relations, genealogy, and planting.”
Ah, but there is where we may suddenly feel lost: the fluids, the insects, the blood, the many peculiarities of Leviticus that challenge us at its front door. How do we discern the meaning of things for a distressed and unraveling world from a word so strange, so preoccupied with apparent arbitrariness, even absurdities? And how could this possibly relate not only to how things are but to how we must be, to matters of moral conformity to God’s word and ways? This is not unimportant; in fact, it touches on the very nature of how Christians think about what is right, which is to relate the moral words of Scripture to the world of Scripture, to the way things in fact are. The solution cannot be the one advanced by the old liberal critics of Scripture, to rip off the “husk” of Scripture’s particularities in favor of some eternal “truths” gleaned (away) from them. To exfoliate the world Leviticus commends, of its strange or offensive oddities in favor of disembodied ideas and doctrines, is to push the real world out of the body of Jesus given for and to us according to Hebrews, and puts us at great distance from that real world. The principal task of Christian ethics is to discern the moral universe within which Scripture’s ethical statements are located. In my years of teaching on this relationship of God’s world and his ethical words, I’ve yet to find a more succinct and useful point of departure—especially when it comes to strange Leviticus!—than these remarks by Richard Bauckham:
That biblical commands are not arbitrary decrees but correspond to the way the world is and will be is fully appreciable only as we inhabit the Bible’s narrative and appropriate its perspective on how the world is and will be. The point is important because it will by no means necessarily be evident within the worldviews of our society that biblical commands correspond to the way the world is. Theories of natural law that attempt to demonstrate this independently of the biblical narrative have a certain value, but they are never completely successful, and in a postmodern society are unlikely to carry much conviction at all. Recognizing the importance of the biblical metanarrative enables us to see that inhabiting it is learning to see the world significantly differently (though not of course in every respect differently) from the way the cultural tradition of our context sees it. Biblical laws that “make no sense” in relation to the world as those traditions portray it may do so in relation to the world as the biblical story portrays it…Neither what the Bible obliges us to believe nor what the Bible obliges us to do can be known from isolated texts, but requires their total context in the biblical metanarrative.
Biblical ethics is faith-and-life conformity to how God in his word portrays the real world to the eyes of faith. It is not accessible to people without faith, at least not in the life-bearing and life-saving ways that God gives in Scripture and of which Bauckham speaks here. There is no way to defend, explain, or commend the real world of Scripture as life and peace using the standards of what the world outside the word regards as sensible, compelling, and reasonable. The world of Scripture that Christians by faith joyfully inhabit is “explainable” only on its own terms in its relationship to Christ, of whom the Scriptures everywhere speak. He alone explains the reality of the Scriptural world, for he accounts for the world in the first place. He alone is the reason why there are no arbitrary commands, which is not to say we understand them all perfectly or any of them exhaustively. Without the Christ whose body accounts for the form of his words, the words cannot be made sense of. They
cannot be properly heard or received.
Faithful Reading and Living as Attention
However, returning now to our interest in our present cultural conditions, we must now admit that we are ill-equipped to inhabit that world in part because it requires a mode of attention and perception that does not fit the mode of modern life. This difference in modes of life belongs to the truly good news we can proclaim to the world, but it is a difference we must first know (and enjoy) ourselves. The ethical world of Scripture assumes we are pilgrims, travelers, “walkers” (recall how often the Bible describes our lives metaphorically as our “walk”), but while we travel great distances today, we no longer know what it is to journey there.
The famous adventurer, James Holman (1786–1857), known as the Blind Traveler, circumnavigated the world—among many other remarkable accomplishments—though he was sightless and solitary. Dependent on other senses, he felt, listened, tasted, smelled his way up and down hills, through streams and fields, over rocks and foliage, attentive to his environment not as he looked across the land but as the wind rushed over his face. Reflecting later in his life on his journeys, he once confessed that certain moments left him feeling more mute than blind, so overwhelming was the beauty and power of what he could discern of the world.
Reading about Holman recently, I could not help but notice the similarities to the greatest of all travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose genius was his perception and attention along the way, his effortlessly linked insights on this or that encountered city, countryside, bridge, building, or stranger. The modes of life captured by Holman’s sightless “perception” and Fermor’s “habitation”—or your dog’s experience of the walk around the block, in contrast to your own experience of the same walk—captivate us because they put on display a truth most travelers know, a truth fundamental to the human condition as the Scriptures reveal it, namely, that we are made by our Creator to be “sensory-rich.” Attention and perception along the way of life yields a rich grasp of the meaning of things, including ourselves, and thus—to put it in clearly anti-modern terms—journeys are less a matter of conquering distance than they are of conquering our habitual inattention.
This image helps us, I suggest, understand our difficulties with the odd particularity of Scripture, especially Leviticus, and also clarifies the work involved in hearing and receiving Scripture well. We are inclined to rush to the Christ-destination, without noticing how Christ is in fact given to us in all the biblical things we impatiently ignored along the way, especially perhaps the Levitical way. Holy Scripture requires a mode of life that is different, and sometimes flatly rejected, by the haste, the urgency, the inattention, of our lives today. Holy Scripture calls us to inhabit an ordered world of creation and providence that is sensory rich, but we suffer what we may regard as spiritual sensory deprivation. And the more we discover the depth, scope, and lush richness of the divinely ordered real world, the more we discover the impoverishment of the modern condition.
An Example: Time and the Gospel
Imagine, now, the apologetic and edification value of inhabiting the real world of Holy Scripture by singling out one of those three facets of reality according to Leviticus: time.
Again, we begin with the critically important basics. The church confesses, based upon Scripture, that time is not eternal. Time is not coexistent with God, a metaphysical reality that has always been “there” alongside the eternal God. No, all that is not God is created by God and has its meaning only in relation to God. Time belongs to creation as a created thing, and from the very beginning, when God installed the luminaries in the skies for times and for seasons and for years, time has served God’s end or purpose of creation by supplying a historical structure for it.
Journeys are less a matter of conquering distance than they are of conquering our habitual inattention.
In Scripture we encounter time references in at least two distinct but related forms. Some time references are “external” markers in which Scripture relates one event or person to other events or persons from the general world, from outside the specific interests of covenant history and revelation. For example, “in the days of Herod the king,” or “in the days of Uzziah, king of Judah,” and so on. These external time markers confirm that Scripture is speaking in space-time-historical terms, in terms of real events in “journalistic” history, so to speak. These external time markers have thus proven immensely valuable for the church in response to critical views of the Bible that deny that such biblical references enjoy journalistic historicity. This was a special, legitimate concern of the last few generations of Christian apologists when the objective historicity of the Bible was often under attack.
But Scripture also uses “internal” time markers by which one event, memorial, or rite is connected, theologically and usually liturgically, to another covenant-historical word or work of God. The purpose of these markers is not journalistic in the usual sense, but to forge a special relationship between events or memorials. “Internal” markers are of course not in conflict with the “external more journalistic time-markers, and in fact the external markers are certainly never empty of theological significance. But the internal markers primarily serve not to relate God’s people to the world and history in a general sense but to structure the church’s self-consciousness in terms of the words and works of God. The Festal Calendar of Leviticus 23 (and elsewhere) is the central example of how the times of observance for the various feasts of Israel were configured precisely to the specific features of God’s works of creation, the flood, and the Exodus as recorded in Genesis and Exodus. The configuration is so exact that it suggests that these historical accounts are given not only for our information regarding what happened but to order Israel’s relationship to daily, weekly, monthly, and annual time in terms of God’s own structuring of time through his word and works. In his exhaustive analysis of all such time-markers in the Pentateuch, Michael LeFebvre has argued that “dates are added to certain events for their liturgical remembrance, not as journalistic details... [but] to aid the needful worshiper...”
We cannot document all the examples of this in Scripture here, but we may move directly to the relationship of such internal time markers to Jesus Christ and his church. Scholars have demonstrated quite persuasively that the Gospel of John features a proclamation of Christ that is, yes, related to external historical realities, but is especially focused on internal markers, namely, Israel’s festal calendar. John’s Gospel, which in various ways authoritatively orders the worship of early Christian churches (among other purposes), preaches Christ not by leaving the festal annual calendar behind as a Levitical relic but by tracing the story of the life and work of Christ precisely as the story first (and still) told in the festal calendar. The form of the Son accounts for the form of the festal year, and to belong to the Son by faith is to belong to his time-fullness. As a guide to the church’s special relationship to time, our “believing in Jesus” (a central concern of John) would therefore seem to include relating to time (in this case the church’s year) the way God has long catechized his people to do so, namely, according to the (internal) markers which are the biographical contours of his Son, and not only in terms of cultural or historical (external) markers.
Sabbath as Resistance and Alternative
We ought to consider especially the focal point of the church’s relationship to time, which is also, without coincidence, the leading feast in Leviticus 23: the weekly sabbath day and its observance. Scripture’s internal time markers may answer compellingly to the current apologetic work of the church just as external markers have served that work in other contexts. The sabbath and its observance is likely the most compelling example of this promising possibility.
To say so, however, is perhaps already to lose those who feared a sinister aim in my interest in divine ordering and our conformity to it. The sabbath has unfortunate associations with a misunderstood Puritanism, legalism, moralism, and a range of life-rejecting practices. The way some well-intentioned Christians treat sabbath observance calls to mind Thackery’s satirical excoriation of his snobbish friend who cut his peas with a knife (leaving the horrified Thackery no choice but, as he put it perfectly, “to cut his acquaintance”). Worse, to be called a sabbatarian is ... well, in the words of George Santayana on what it means to call someone a snob, “a very vague description but a very clear insult.”
How far removed this is from the sabbath idea in the biblical world! And how impoverished, even oppressive, a life is without it. And how timely it is for us to recall this truth. For complex reasons including changing technologies and technological habits, the nature of work, and the frenetic pace of everyday existence, our families, friends, and neighbors belong to what one writer has called “the anxious generation.” Keeping sabbath is an act of resistance against the anxiety-cultivating conditions of contemporary life, and this is something we can be sure of from the pages of Scripture itself.
When Israel received the Sabbath command in Exodus 20, they had arrived at Mount Sinai after having departed not only the land of Pharaoh’s Egypt but particularly its exploitative mode of life. We must remember exactly what cry the God of Israel had heard and to which he responded with his great acts of miraculous deliverance. He brought them out of the land of Egypt, which he called “the house of slavery” (Exod. 20:2). The world of Egypt was indeed a world of bondage. Hebrew slavery took the form of Pharaoh’s heavy-handed demands, fueled in part by his own anxiety about food production. Insatiable quotas, worsening bricks-from-straw work conditions, and, most importantly for our purposes, the inhumanity of a no-rest culture of work all combined to crush the children of Abraham. “Why are you taking the people away from their work? Get to your labors!” (Exod. 5:4). “You want them to stop working!” (Exod. 5:5). “Let heavier work be laid on them; then they will labor at it and pay no attention to deceptive words [about rest]” (Exod. 5:9). “You are lazy; that is why you say ‘Let us go and sacrifice to the Lord.’ Go now, and work...” (Exod. 5:17–19). The rhetoric is as relentless as the work is: no rest, all work, and you are lazy if you don’t work constantly.
Now, that is awful enough. But there is more. What happens in a workaholic culture like Pharaoh’s? Everyone around you is necessarily a competitor, working to secure his own value in an economy which requires taking it from you. Survival of the workiest. What can you not have under such conditions? A neighbor, one who is not your competitor. Nor can you have festivity, at least not without guilt. And with neither a neighbor nor festivity, there can be no hospitality. The economy of ancient Egypt is eerily similar to what is increasingly true of our own time: life is work, you are a worker, and the other is your competitor. Life is a zero-sum game in which you have to get yours, and that must mean others do not get theirs.
Into such a world, into such an economy, comes God’s gift of sabbath, which interrupts the workflow of a week with a divine intrusion of rest and of worship. Because we may not work on his day, we are reminded that we have neighbors and not only competitors. Indeed, observing his sabbath gift, as the great act of resistance against any Pharaonic world order, creates the very possibility of a neighbor. And of hospitality. And of a meaning to my life beyond my work, by which I am reminded that I am more than my work, without becoming less than my work.
Holy Scripture calls us to inhabit an ordered world of creation and providence that is sensory rich, but we suffer what we may regard as spiritual sensory deprivation.
This is a part of the gospel our exhausted and exhausting world needs. It has apologetic value. But it also has value for us, who are called to the life conformed to Christ that inhabits his times and not this world’s times. In the church’s pulpit proclamation but also in her Sabbatarian mode of life, the world needs to hear the liberating words, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28–30).
All of which returns us to our earlier claim, namely, that the Christian witness to Christ in the world such as it is includes not only our clear affirmation, defense, and commendation of the doctrinal truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but also faithful dexterity in navigating our lives in this world as we live from within another world, the world given us in Christ. That dexterity, which the Scriptures call wisdom, includes our “by faith and not by sight” embrace of how the Lord of the word orders our relationships to time, space, and to one another. As the Holy Spirit carries out this work in the body of the Son (the church), the new city, the new creation, is being carved out of this anxious, frustrated, angry, and rebellious world as a microcosm, not of a universe seen at the end of a powerful telescope, but of the new creation which the incarnate Jesus Christ is in his righteousness, wisdom, and love.
Christ is to be imagined with arms outstretched holding together the strands of reality which sin seeks to wrest from his faithful hands, but which it cannot.
A daily morning and evening, a daily rhythm of labor and rest, a weekly Lord’s Day of worship and fellowship, and a year of fasting and festivity which traces the contours of the life, ministry, death, resurrection, ascension, Pentecostal generosity, and abiding care of Lord Jesus Christ—this is the fullness of our times as the overflow of our union with the One in whom the fullness of time has come. This is life at “Godspeed,” a word rooted in the Old English expression “God Spede,” meaning “God flourish you.” Life at Godspeed is an act of resistance to a world order driven by the commodification of our time, relationships, and personal meaning, and the openhanded offer to others of a glorious alternative.
In our day, it is easy to confuse the “speed” in “Godspeed” with haste. Two popular words (recently added to the Oxford Dictionary)—FOMO (fear of missing out, added in 2015) and YOLO (you only live once, added in 2016)—reflect the exhausting urgency of contemporary life, which holds out a counterfeit rest (of not “missing out,” of living once maximally). But this way of life is utterly unsustainable, and our neighbors, friends, and family members are predictably worn down in Pharaoh’s world. The church—if she is herself reordered to the biblical world as the real world, “sensory-rich” to the way of Christ—bears witness to the better way found only in the gospel. Within the biblical world, which we embrace by faith as a gift of our generous Maker, the fear of the Lord (including in our relationship to time, space, and vocation) rather than “missing out” is true life, and our present life in Christ is a foretaste of eternal life in a mode of endless bounty, rather than the “only once” life unbelievers live.
Centuries ago, Donne lamented the unraveling of the ordered world. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, too, famously complained that “the time is out of joint.” To be sure, sin seeks to unravel God’s beautiful tapestry of properly ordered time, space, and vocation. But God has acted in his Son Jesus Christ to reorder that which seems so splintered, and in his church he puts the alternative world on display: a community ordered to Christ in time, space, and vocation. The early church of the first centuries grew rapidly in part because they exerted a magnetic draw upon the watching world. That magnetic draw, that gravitational pull, was the church’s “otherness” in a world of economic and political anxiety. In the midst of rare chaos, she stood still, quietly confident in Christ, preoccupied with the worship of God at his appointed days and times, and with service to one another. In our time, conforming to the word’s revelation of the true order of things in Jesus Christ may be just what the world doesn’t know it’s looking for. And if we are accustomed to thinking of the Christian faith only as a matter of right ideas and occasional practices rather than as a new life ordered in Christ by the Spirit to matters of time, space, and vocation, it may also prove to be what we didn’t know we were looking for.