LIFE IS SHORT; LIVE DEEP.

Monday, July 20, about 7am, the phone rang at our house. That’s a bit early, so it occurred to me that it might be bad news. It certainly was. Henry and Kathy, two of our dearest friends, were calling from Calgary to tell us that their eldest child, Arthur, had died the previous evening in a motorcycle accident. Though clearly devastated, they were relatively calm as they shared the details that they knew. God sustains his vulnerable children in times like these, comforting all who will receive his comfort, and providing the body’s natural shock response regardless. People generally function remarkably well in a crisis, doing what needs to be done immediately, and falling apart when the time is right. God is good.

All who knew and loved Arthur struggle to answer that age old question, “Why?”. The details of the accident help clarify what happened, but that’s “How?”, a much different question. “How?” is simple, and yields to investigation, eyewitness accounts, measurement. It’s physics and biology. And it’s very useful, revealing truths that are immediately transferable to all similar events. “Why?”, on the other hand, is something deeper, personal, mysterious. It concerns this one particular event, this life, this story, and its intersection with other stories, our stories, the story.

The loss of Arthur has ruptured the stories of all who loved him. For his wife, his parents, his sisters, it’s a monstrous wound, so cataclysmic that, for a while, their stories will lose focus and it will seem as though they’ll never quite make sense again. For his close friends and colleagues it will disrupt a major portion of their story. A character is suddenly missing; a character who had an important part to play. An element is gone, and the impact of this change is yet unclear. And for those of us who saw him only occasionally, our stories too are torn, both by the loss of Arthur and by the devastation in the lives of those who’s stories intersect ours more deeply or directly.

Arthur was a beautiful young man. When he was two years old, as I recall, he was a shy, retiring little guy, but as he grew he began to engage life in surprising ways. He cut lawns for spending money, as many kids do, but soon turned this activity into an independent business. He overcame his natural shyness to become a successful real estate agent. He loved people, and was generous with both time and money. And then there was the quality I enjoyed most about him, he asked questions; questions about life, and God, and death, and purpose. And he asked questions about the answers he got. In short, Arthur was one of these people who engage life deeply and, in the process, deepen all the lives around them.

And so I offer, as pastors often do, a benediction – a Latin word that simply means good word. A word about Arthur; a word about life.

Benediction

Today the searing pain of loss still fills our hearts.

But as the pain subsides, and mists of sorrow lift,

new vistas will appear.

And his brief life will sparkle once again in our brief lives.

And we will see that lives, all lives, are brief.

But, some are full of living.

And lives that are lived fully, are lived well.

The Magnificent House of Cards

Genesis 2:7-9 the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground — trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

It’s quite obvious to thoughtful people that the bodies of all creatures, both plants and animals, are composed of soil. Plants grow out of the soil, and animals grow by consuming plants, or by consuming one another. When plants and animals die they immediately begin to disintegrate and return to the soil; no great mystery here. The mystery is not, what we are made of, but how we are alive.

Life animates plants and animals, including human beings, and that life comes from somewhere. Some have believed it comes from the earth, in which case the earth may be thought of as our mother. Others have surmised that it comes from the sun. Consider how things spring to life when the sun returns in spring. – The Egyptians thought this way and identified the sun with Ra, their supreme god. – But for this Hebrew writer life comes from the LORD (Yahweh). He identifies this life with air, or more precisely with wind or breath, the movement of air. In chapter one we are told that the “ruach” or “wind” of God was moving over the waters. And now the “neshamah”, which is a little puff of wind, a breath or breeze, comes into this body of dust and brings life. It comes again and again, moment by moment. And, when a body dies, this little breeze or breath returns to God.

It is not said in this passage that the man received a soul of any kind, and certainly not an immortal soul. But rather, when life from God animated the dust of the ground, the man became a soul, or living being, a self.

The Hebrew word for man in this passage is “adam” from “adamah” which is the Hebrew word for soil, so there is a great complementarity here. The man is made to till the soil; from the ground, for the ground. Ecology may seem like a new idea to us but it is really the recovery of an old idea that is obvious to all pretechnical cultures. Things fit together and prosper by taking their part in a system that is far greater than they are. This dynamic harmony is the basic idea in the Hebrew word “shalom”, a word we inadequately translate as “peace”.

So we see that all living things, and particularly Adam (mankind) – who, at this point, quite literally contains woman – are dependent for life, moment by moment, on God, and that everything is interdependent with everything else. This means, of course, that all creation, and especially life, is relational and dynamic. It’s all about flow and movement together, community.

Now, this is all well and good, but let’s be frank, it’s a house of cards; every relational system is a house of cards. And, with human beings at the centre of it, this system is particularly vulnerable. So the question must inevitably arise, Does God know what he’s doing here? Well, not surprisingly, I think he does, and I think the story indicates that he does.

In the middle of the garden, we are told, were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Note, it isn’t knowledge. The man will be given lots of knowledge. It’s the knowledge of good and evil. This word “evil” (rah) is a very broad negative word applicable to almost anything that’s really bad in the sense of being disruptive; adversity, calamity, distress. This, of course, is the introduction of the concept of sin, which is much more than just the naughty things we do. It’s those things we do that destroy relationships, disrupt the flow of blessing, and make it hard for us to move together. It’s that grasping, self-centredness that is so at odds with nurture and community and, so, ultimately cuts us off from the tree of life.

THE CREATOR AND THE GARDENER

Genesis 2:4-7 When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens — and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground — the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

What is sometimes called the second account of creation is actually an account of the creation of human beings. This story is unself-consciously anthropocentric; mankind is at the centre of this account as the earth is at the centre of the first story. The modern scientific mind, which is hopelessly literalistic, may rebel at these notions, but in doing so it misses the point entirely. It’s “literally” true, of course, that the earth and mankind are not respectively the centres of the cosmos and life on earth, but “literally” is the only sense in which they are not. The earth is our only home, and probably the only home we’ll ever have; and mankind is our most central problem and concern, and probably always will be.

These are not “scientific” histories or inventories of the universe or the biosphere. They are neither cosmology nor ecology. They are poetic reflections on what it means to be human in a universe and world that we did not create and do not control. Where do we fit? How should we behave? To whom, if anyone, are we accountable. These are questions science can’t even ask, let alone answer. But they are the contextual questions in which science itself makes sense.

So, what do we see in these first few verses of the story of mankind?

On first reading we may get the impression that, as the story begins, nothing is growing on the earth, but if we read more carefully we note that it is the shrub and plant of the field that is missing. These are the plants for which you need rainfall and people. In other words, these are domesticated plants; plants of the farm and garden.

The writer’s focus is not on the creation of Homo erectus, or Homo sapiens, or Neanderthals, or any other “scientific” category of human beings with which we do not have to deal in our daily lives. The focus is on what a scientist might call Homo cultivatus, to coin a phrase. By this I mean the sort of human creatures that cultivate plants and till the soil; the sort who would live in a garden if they had the rain, and the land, and the security to do it; the kind that might even build a city if they really had to.

For this biblical writer human beings are in partnership with God, and we will see this idea developed as we go along. God sends the rain and the man tills the soil. This is a very high view of the place of human beings, but it is a strictly limited place. Human beings are dependent on God, but also necessary to him. If man is to have a creation he needs a creator; if God is to have a garden, he needs a gardener.

This is the view of mankind that George Eliot takes in her poem God Needs Antonio. In honest humility the great violin maker, Antonio Stradivari, calculates his place in the economy of God.

"When any master holds

'Twixt chin and hand a violin of mine,

He will be glad that Stradivari lived,

Made violins, and made them of the best

...For while God gives them skill

I give them instruments to play upon,

God choosing me to help Him.

...If my hand slacked

I should rob God -- since he is fullest good --

Leaving a blank instead of violins.

I say, not God himself can make man's best

Without best men to help him.

‘Tis God gives skill,

But not without men's hands: he could not make

Antonio Stradivari's violins

Without Antonio." – George Eliot