Sometimes things just take a while to take off . . .

I’m pretty happy about this. 

Back in 2005, I worked on a project called The Story. (I know, real original title.) Basically, it’s a 400-page abridgment of the Bible that’s formatted like . . . well, a normal book. In other words, no verse numbers. The text, which uses the TNIV, is divided into 31 chapters, which have names like “The Battle Begins” and “The King Who Had It All.” As opposed to, say, “2 Chronicles 14.” 

The goal was to help someone get an overview of the Bible while experiencing something that feels vaguely like reading a novel. We even thought churches might be able to use The Story to give people an introduction (or reintroduction, depending) to the Bible… sort of like a book-club-meets-small-group experience. 

The Story is one of those ideas that got off to a slow start. (Just ask the publisher’s sales team.) Then Willow Creek took notice, and we worked with them to develop a mid-week teaching series around it. The other day, someone told me that Oak Hills Church in San Antonio (author Max Lucado’s church) has launched a 9-month teaching series using The Story. They even came up with this. Pretty cool. 

Sometimes it may take a while, but the payoff is worth the wait. 

winter wonderland

Being stranded in the Pacific Northwest for Christmas has to have some benefits, like skiing in Canada for the weekend . . .

looking down 1427 feet from the world’s highest gondola

 

Porteau Cove Provincial Park

 

Howe Sound

 

Howe Sound, just off the Sea to Sky Highway

new site

Crashed hard drive + forgetting to back up a few key files = excuse to update your website finally. Same address as before . . .  www.benirwin.net

Genesis 4 – 6(ish)

So I just figured out that if I keep going at this rate, it’ll take roughly two years to work my way through the whole of Genesis. Well, at least I have an excuse… we’re busy getting ready to move back to the States at the end of the month. It’s been a fun few months in the UK, but it’ll be nice to be back.

Anyway, I got back into Genesis this morning. I don’t know exactly where I am, because the version I’m using doesn’t have chapter or verse numbers. (Which is kind of refreshing, reading the Bible like an actual book.)

This is where the story gets depressing for a while. Eviction from the garden is followed quickly by the world’s first murder, followed by more murder, followed by a list of people who seem to live for ridiculously long periods of time, followed by God finally throwing his hands in the air and deciding he’s had enough.

But at the beginning of Genesis 4, God hasn’t given up on creation. He’s still fighting for it. When Cain gets ticked over the whole prime-sheep-versus-leftover-fruit incident, God pulls him aside and gives what sounds vaguely like a coach delivering a halftime pep talk. God seems to think Cain can actually beat back the sinful impulse that wants to rule over him.

Cain doesn’t listen. He decides life would be better without his annoying little brother. Then God shows up and asks Cain where Abel is. Cain responds, famously, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Um, that would be a yes. Remember that whole “it is not good for the man to be alone” thing? If community and companionship are woven into the fabric of creation, then the whole thing hinges on whether we take responsibility for each other. Individualism and “each to their own” are poison to God’s creation.

Cain’s life becomes a story of what happens when we reject the idea that we are our brother’s (or sister’s) keeper. The alternative is a life of “restless wandering.” And that is Cain’s fate. He is driven out. Sent away.

Cain understands that he’s not being let off easy. He complains someone might kill him (kind of ironic, for a guy who probably hasn’t had time to wipe the blood off his hands). What surprises me is that God doesn’t go for the death penalty. Not only that, but he threatens to punish anyone who lays a finger on Cain.

Why? It’s not as if the capital punishment isn’t in the Bible. It’s mentioned as the penalty for a number of crimes — and not just murder. So whatever happened to justice? Retribution? Deterrence?

Apparently God already knows what we’ve yet to figure out after all these years. The only thing violence ever leads to is more violence. In the words of the great theologian, Commissioner Gordon from Batman Begins (I know, I know, he doesn’t get to be commissioner until the Dark Knight): “We start carrying semi-automatics; they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar; they buy armor-piercing rounds.”

Maybe God’s mercy on Cain is his attempt to short-circuit the escalation. Apparently, God still thinks we’re worth saving from our worst impulses.

Unfortunately, a few generations later, a guy called Lamech loses the plot. He seems to think being Cain’s descendant means he’s got a divine license to kill. What he doesn’t realize is that God’s protection of Cain was meant to stop the violence, not give his descendants free reign to wreak havoc without fear of reprisal.

Things are looking pretty bleak. But there are threads of hope. Which is exactly what you’d expect in a world filled with the “knowledge of good and evil.”

In some ways, Adam and Eve got exactly what they were promised when they ate the forbidden fruit. In Hebrew, to “know” can be a euphemism for intimacy… as in, “Adam knew his wife, and nine months later, out popped Cain.” Knowledge isn’t just intellectual awareness of something; it’s an experience of it.

Knowledge can also imply control over something, as in, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you” (Jeremiah 1). Which may explain why the thought of possessing the “knowledge of good and evil” was so tantalizing to Adam and Eve. It meant control. Power.

In reality, it meant engaging in an endless (and often losing) struggle against evil… as in, “Sin desires to have you, but you must master it” (Genesis 4).

But the good news is, if there’s knowledge of evil, then there must be knowledge of good, too. All is not lost. The ground still yields food. Women still give birth and perpetuate the human race. While some of Eve’s descendants, like Lamech, make violence; others make tools and musical instruments. Some even call on the name of God.

Even at its worst, God cannot bring himself to give up on the world. Not entirely, because there is still good to be found in it — in the person of Noah.

For me, the stories of Genesis 4-6 are a reminder that we’re meant to participate in the struggle between good and evil here and now, not sit and wait for it to be settled in some distant future apocalyptic event. It is this world that God cares about, and this world that he still hasn’t given up on.

Genesis 3

So this is where it all goes wrong.

Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up with this text, from flannelgraph to grad school, but I don’t think I’ve ever stopped to appreciate how bizarre this story really is.

Two trees — one gives life, one gives knowledge of good and evil. God sets just one rule: don’t eat from the tree that gives knowledge. A talking snake arrives and chats up the woman (who shows no sign that talking with snakes is unusual). The snake convinces her that God doesn’t want to share his powers and gets the woman and her husband to eat from the knowledge tree. While waiting to become like God (as promised by the snake), the man and woman realize their clothing-optional lifestyle has become a source of embarrassment and decide to cover up. God shows up for a game of cosmic hide-and-seek, followed up by the world’s first game of “not it” — man blames woman, woman blames snake, snake eats dust. God sentences the woman to painful childbirth and the man to perpetual yard work. To be followed by death for all. God then padlocks the Garden of Eden because it turns out the snake was partly right: the man and woman have become like God. So God decides to put a safe distance between humans and the tree of life, assigning some unfriendly cherubim (who’ve apparently traded in their diapers and cupid arrows for a giant flaming sword) to block the way.

Anyway, Eve gets a lot of flack for misquoting God’s command. She understates the positive. God said, “You are free to eat from any tree…” which Eve downgrades to, “We may eat fruit from the trees…” And she exaggerates the negative, saying that they may neither eat from nor touch the knowledge tree. (God never said anything about touching the tree.)

But I think we’re a bit hard on Eve. Let’s not forget — particularly if you read Genesis 1-3 as literal, play-by-play historical narrative — Eve wasn’t there when God gave the command. She must have heard it from Adam who, according to one ancient Jewish interpretation, deliberately exaggerated the command to deter Eve from going near the tree.

In any case, at least Eve had the right idea, even if she got some of the crucial details wrong. The snake willfully distorts what God said, turning a prohibition on one tree into blanket, garden-wide ban.

Under the circumstances, I sometimes wonder why God doesn’t show up sooner — not to make up Eve’s mind for her, but to set the record straight. To make sure he’s being quoted properly, if nothing else. After all, he’s the one who’s being mischaracterized as an overbearing tyrant.

But he doesn’t step in. He lets Adam, Eve, and the talking snake carry on. Which doesn’t turn out well for any of them.

The traditional interpretation is that the tree represents a test, a choice between doing things God’s way and doing them our way. Between letting him decide what’s best or pretending we know better.

But maybe there’s another element to the test. Maybe God doesn’t step in because he’s testing not just their faithfulness to him but to each other. If the ancient Jewish interpretation is right, then Eve depended on Adam to accurately convey what God had said — both the positive (you are free to eat your fill of any tree) and the negative (except the knowledge tree). Once Eve takes a munch of forbidden fruit, the text reveals that Adam was by her side the whole time. Which means even here at the decisive moment, he had one last chance to set the record straight. To offer an alternative to the snake’s view of things.

Adam and Eve didn’t just fail God; they failed each other. Just how badly is obvious in the aftermath of the fruit-eating incident, when Adam blames God for for creating the woman in the first place. The same woman to whom Adam once said, “At last! Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”

One last thing about this test. I’ve heard a lot of sermons on the importance of trusting God and how Adam and Eve failed to do so. I’ve only heard one sermon about God trusting us — and how much he risks to do so.

Think about it. To entrust his creation to us — a creation that’s better than good, it’s good seven times over. To put a tree that could ruin everything smack in the middle of it — a tree that gives the knowledge to become like God. Because that’s one point about which the snake apparently wasn’t lying. God himself says it: “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.”

We’ve come a long way, armed with this knowledge. We don’t have to wait long to read about the first murder (Genesis 4). Or the first war (Genesis 14).

In the last century, the phrase “mutually assured destruction” entered our vocabulary. It was an attempt to explain what kept the US and the Soviet Union from the brink during the Cold War: the understanding that a nuclear attack would lead to a series of escalating counterattacks, resulting in the total destruction of both countries and perhaps the entire planet.

God makes a world where we have the ability to destroy each other. Granted, he may intervene to keep the worst from happening, and maybe that’s the real reason the Cold War never went nuclear. Even so, we’ve shown ourselves capable of inflicting a lot of damage.

But if God gives us the ability to choose such a destructive path, then he must give us the option to choose another way, too. A path that leads away from the forbidden tree and toward all the other trees that are good to eat from. A path that leads away from violence and destruction and toward peace and life. A path that leads away from independence and autonomy (which is what Adam and Eve were after) and toward dependence and harmony with God, each other, and creation.

Attack of the Bostons…

Today we drove to Greenwich Park in London for a meetup with several Boston terriers and their owners… not to mention a few random whippets and a Red Bull Air Race thrown in for good measure. Here are some pictures of the madness that ensued…

Genesis 2 (creation remixed)

So there are not one but two creation stories in Genesis. And they’re very different. It’s like rewinding the film, zooming in on one bit, and changing the camera angle all at once.

Genesis 1 describes a creation where everything goes according to plan. Genesis 2 is a more intimate portrait of a creation that still needs work.

The sequence is different in Genesis 2. Again the writer arranges the details a certain way to make a point, but it’s a different point this time.

In Genesis 1, humans are created last and seemingly handed a ready-made world, formed and filled to perfection. In the Genesis 2 version, “no shrub had yet appeared and no plant had yet sprung up” when it says God gathers a handful of dust, breathes into it, and creates a man. What’s even more interesting is the apparent reason for this alternate sequence: “there was no one to work the ground.”

Genesis 1 describes a God powerful enough to create the universe all by himself. Genesis 2 suggests this same God creates Adam, the first man, so he can partner with God in the ongoing act of creation. God designs a world where he needs someone to work the ground. Otherwise, no shrubs. No plants.

This need for partnership and connection seems hardwired into the creation itself (…almost as if God prefers it this way!). In Genesis 1, everything is “good.” The writer can’t stop telling us how good it really is — seven times, as if he thinks we’re in danger of forgetting. In Genesis 2, it feels like someone has slammed on the brakes. Not only is there something “not good” about creation; it’s God himself who says so. And what is “not good,” according to God, is the man’s solitary state.

Adam needs a “helper” — you’d be forgiven for thinking the word suggests inferiority or subservience, but the fact is, elsewhere the Bible uses the exact same Hebrew word for God (Psalm 27:9, for example).

What Adam needs is a partner, a companion, an equal — as he realizes when he says, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” That word “now” could be translated “at last!” or “it’s about time!” Adam instantly recognizes that he and the woman were made for each other.

And this may be the thread that holds Genesis 1 and 2 together. Nearly everything about these stories seems different. Even God’s name changes. In Genesis 1, he is elohim, the supreme, all-powerful God. In Genesis 2, it is YHWH, the personal, covanental God who partners with people to shape and change the world. But the need for relationship is found in both stories.

In Genesis 2, creation is “not good” until Adam is no longer alone. Back in Genesis 1, we read that “God created human beings in his own image… male and female he created them.” Scholars have offered loads of theories on what it means to be made in God’s image. But the one I find most the most intruiging is actually the one that says I am not made in God’s image (not completely, anyway), but that we are made in God’s image.

By myself, I am an incomplete representation of the God who made me, because I was not made to exist in a vacuum. Not according to Genesis 2, which says a state of perpetual solitude is “not good.” And not according to Genesis 1, which says, “In the image of God… he created them.“

When we seek connection, partnership, relationship with each other, that’s when we experience the divine spark that God has apparently put in us.

The other thing both stories reveal together… In ancient times, to bear the “image” of the king or the emperor was to represent him to others, to show the king’s subjects who he was and what he was like.

As a male, I do not fully represent who God is or what he’s like. It’s only “male and female” together that, according to the text, represent the image of God.

While I intend to carry on praying to God my “Father,” the debate over whether God is essentially masculine or feminine ultimately misses the point. Without both male and female, we cannot possibly hope to understand God.

The God who is, according to Jesus, our Father is also the God who “gave birth” to the Israelites (Deuteronomy 32:18). The God who sent his Son to earth is also the God who comforts his people like a mother comforting her children (Isaiah 66:12-13). And I won’t even tell you what some scholars think the term el shaddai, one of the Bible’s many names for God, means.

Far from being an invitation for the PC police to purge our liturgy of masculine references and replace with them neutralizing alternatives, this leaves us free to go on calling God our Father (which, after all, is one of the most common characterizations of God in the Bible) because this communicates something essential about who God is — but it does not communicate the whole of it. That’s why the Bible is filled with all kinds of rich imagery to help us understand God.

That’s why he made human beings male and female… because it takes both to show the world something of who God is.

Genesis 1 (T.S. Eliot, ecology, and free-range birds)

For years I’ve been meaning to make my way through the whole Bible. Maybe even post some thoughts/questions/reactions as I go. It’s been done before, but if I’m going to write things down, why not here?

Then it hit me… the Bible is a really, really big book. Maybe I should start small, especially if I’m going to write about it here. So I’ll give it a go with the Torah, the first five books.

One thing that will be different… I’m using a new(ish) edition called The Books of the Bible. Developed by a couple of guys I know from my publishing days, it’s the same biblical text, just without chapter or verse numbers interrupting (they were added centuries after the text was written anyway). Oh, and the order of some books has been rearranged for literary and/or chronological purposes. I’ll still use chapter numbers to keep track of where I am, so let’s see how it goes.

Genesis 1

Reading Genesis 1 brings back fond childhood memories of listening to and occasionally joining in discussions (yes, I was and still am a nerd at heart) about the origins of the universe. Is the earth 6,000 years old or 6 billion? Are the “days” of Genesis 1 literal, 24-hour spans of time, or are they simply a literary device meant to hold the story together? The opening lines of the Bible have been dissected with scientific rigor and made to support one argument or the other.

But you wouldn’t use bunsen burners and microscopes to analyze Robert Frost or T.S. Eliot. And that’s what the opening lines of the Bible are. Genesis 1 reads more like poetry than prose — and definitely more like poetry than scientific text.

Which is pretty cool, really. For Jews and Christians, whatever else these words may be, they are in some way God revealing himself to us. God decides to start a conversation, and his first words take the form of a poem.

When I read Genesis 1, it hits me: the God behind these words is a God who values beauty. Not just beauty in what he creates (which the text calls “good” not once but seven times — very significant to Jewish readers); he values beauty in the description, too.

The first words of the Bible are not that concerned with the how of creation. They’re all about the who (God) and the why (for us). The details are carefully arranged not to make a scientific point but a theological one — about who God is and the way the world was meant to be.

(Although, if theology is the study of God and how he relates to the world, then a point about theology is a point about everything, really.)

God begins by creating a world that is formless and empty. It’s dark. Unfit for human (or any other) habitation. But his presence — the spirit hovering over the deep places of the world — changes everything.

The progression of creation is significant — again, not for scientific but theological reasons. The world is formless, so God starts off by giving it form and definition — light/dark, water/sky, sea/land. It’s also an empty world, so then he goes about filling with all kinds of living creatures — plants, birds, fish, wild animals. (You get the idea that God likes variety.)

The acts of creation are arranged in order of importance; the last thing created is the most important, the crowning achievement, the reason for everything else. Which, if you’re a woman, should make you feel pretty good about being created second in Genesis 2’s version of the story.

Back in Genesis 1, though, it’s not until human beings appear that the writer is able to say creation isn’t just “good.” It’s “very good.”

God is making a habitat suitable for humans. And then, like a landlord closing the deal with his tenants, he hands over the keys and tells Adam and Eve to take good care of the place.

Which is one of the things that fascinates me about this chapter. The Bible’s first command to humans, sometimes called the “cultural mandate,” is a command to look after the planet. Scholars will tell you that the Hebrew concepts of “subduing” and exercising “dominion” over the earth have more to do with stewardship than endless consumption. The image here, literally and figuratively, is one of cultivating a garden, not pouring concrete. (Not that I’m against concrete.) And cultivation is not just about what you take from something; it’s about what you put back into it, too.

So wherever we stand on the causes of climate change or the politics of environmental regulation, words like “eco-friendly” and “sustainable” are Genesis 1 ideas.

Something else fascinates me about Genesis 1, something I noticed for the first time when reading it this week. The very first blessing spoken by God in all of the Bible wasn’t given to humans. It was given to fish and to birds. It’s same word, barak, that appears a few lines later when God blesses human beings. Which has me thinking about something I saw on TV this weekend…

Channel 4 just finished re-airing Hugh’s Chicken Run, a documentary exposing the realities of intensive (battery) chicken farming. When it dawned on the presenter, a UK celebrity chef named Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (which is just fun to say), that intensive chicken farms weren’t about to open their doors to him and his film crew, he decided to build his own farm, raising intensive and free-range chickens side by side.

Intensive chicken farming isn’t pretty. Thousands of bird crammed into a windowless barn 24 hours a day, with practically no room to walk around and no opportunity to be outside in a chicken’s natural environment. They spend all day and night standing or sitting in their own feces — legs burned and bodies blistered by the ammonia.

Around 95 percent of the chicken we we eat is farmed this way.

Not long ago, this wouldn’t have bothered me in the least. My reaction would have been, “Who cares? They’re chickens. Food.”

But in Genesis 1, chickens get the first blessing. So maybe we ought to ask: is this how we were meant to treat a creature blessed by God?

I don’t consider myself an animal rights activist. I’m an enthusiastic meat eater. There’s a (free-range) chicken in the oven as I type this, and in the end, he met the exact same fate as his intensively farmed cousins. I’m OK with that. But many cultures before ours believed that it was important to respect the food they ate. When did that change?

Something about a chicken existing in its natural environment before it ends up on my dinner plate seems to fit the created order of Genesis 1 better. Maybe that’s because one of the lessons of Genesis 1 is that it matters how we treat the creation, how we treat other living things blessed by God — even if they were put on this earth for our benefit.

After all, this is God’s planet. And how we treat an object is an extension of how we treat the object’s creator or owner. What we do with this earth reveals what we think of its maker.

(They won’t all run this long, I promise.)

P.S. Another reason to eat free-range chickens? A side-by-side nutritional comparison with intensively farmed chicken showed that free-range birds have higher protein content and less fat.

Geneva

I was in Geneva (and a few neighboring French villages) for some meetings earlier this week. After the work was done, we had time to wander around this infamous city of neutrality and bureaucracy.

Our wanderings included a climb to the top of St. Pierre Cathedral, where the Protestant reformer John Calvin preached for nearly 30 years back in the 1500s. Calvin’s followers left their mark on the cathedral, stripping it of virtually all things aesthetic (with the exception of the stained glass windows), but it’s still an amazing sight today.

A good part of my faith journey was influenced by the lawyer-turned-theologian who preached in this cathedral, even if I’m no longer persuaded by the “five points of Calvinism” that were canonized by his followers at the Synod of Dort in the early 1600s. (I think the Calvinist notion of predestination depends on a far too individualistic reading of the scriptures.) But regardless, the older I get the more comfort I find in being part of a heritage that’s so much bigger than myself — John Calvin and all.

Anyway, here are some pictures.

Calvin’s cathedral

View of Geneva from the top of the cathedral

the Jet d’Eau and Mont Blanc

walking from Switzerland to France (ok, it wasn’t a long walk…)

By the way… should you ever find yourself in a restaurant where the menu is entirely in French, remember… just because the item “blah blah blah prosciutto blah blah blah” appears in the list of salads doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a salad with prosciutto on top. It may just be a giant plate full of nothing but… prosciutto.

“How about taking the elephant for a walk?”

I was a bit slow getting my camera out, but there he is. (Well, the rear of him anyway.) Just about to turn the corner…

Guess it’s not an average day in Bangkok till you’ve bumped into at least one elephant walking down the street.

P.S. It’s hot here.