Dust and Breath

God,

I am a prideful fool. I desire to be seen by men. My prayers are catered toward eloquence and enviable articulacy. I am self-centered and selfish. The governing narrative in my own consciousness is that which is constituted by my own consciousness and no more. It began with dust and will end with dust. Such is the dusty world I live in which you created. But dust was not made after the fall. Man was made from the earth as a part of your morally perfect will. I am a God-ordained accumulation of dust. Accumulated by your will and for your glory. These muscles are dust. This mind is dust. Even these thoughts are dust (Not so for their referents and antecedents, but the thoughts are dust just the same). And so, sitting here in this existence of dust, there is only one thing which saves me from a meaningless existence. There is only one thing which prevents me from being consumed by the muddy moisture of anti-theism and self-exaltation which fertilizes the earth of this world. It is my second constituent part. Breath. The breath of God is in me. Your breath is in me.

This is my confession: I can’t see past the dust. All I see is earth. I look in the mirror and see a suffocating corpse. Breathing, yet breathless. Help me to feel your breath again. Let my lungs inhale to your exhale. Let my heart beat with your blood. And let my dust not be the dust of animals or grass or mud (as the materialist sees it), but of you. Dust like you. Dust in your image. And so as a desperate compound of dust and breath, I cannot seem to find a balance. I want to be with your Spirit perfectly and dust-free! Or my dust prohibits me from even acknowledging my dualistic constituency.

I must now realize that it is not I who decides my constitution. It was you who decided when you made Adam. And in making Adam in your omniscience and sovereignty, so also you made me. And so I am, because of your eternal presence, eternally present with you in Genesis 1. But that is where my story ends. I do not proceed into Genesis 3:6. I do not eat the fruit. I do not inherit the curse. Day after seemingly godless day, I believe the lie and seek after a selfish and (self-deceivingly unbeknownst to me) pejorative knowledge of good and evil. But I do not inherit eternal damnation. Rather, my story finds its continuation in Romans 5. In Adam first for death, and in you second for life, who became dust to redeem dust.

So I pray, oh Christ, fully dust and fully breath: help me to be dust as you are dust, and to breathe your breath. For my lungs gasp for your breath at all times. Therefore, help my desperation for you not cause me to foolishly and immaturely inhale dust, but rather, help me to truly realize in my own life and heart that the efficaciously immanent cadence of your inhalation guards my dust and steadies my breath through my union to you, Christ Jesus.

Amen.

Salvation, Time, Trinity, and Sacrament

Flesh and blood is given to you as bread and wine. It’s usually crackers and grape juice. The other day we used Saltines and Powerade (Trademarks Reserved…). In all of my interaction with evangelicalism, the weighty imperative to partake of the elements has long far been outweighed by the distracting fact that they are presented as signposts. Detached from actual reality, having their actuality stripped from them as Christ’s flesh was stripped from his bones when he was flogged. I hope to present an alternative to the transubstantial/consubstantial/transignificational trichotomy and instead offer a Trinitarian triptych, which will hopefully create within those reading this blog who are united with Christ a harmony with the Spirit inside of them, resulting in a resounding hunger and thirst for the body and blood of Christ.

First, Israel did not simply celebrate Passover. They reenacted it (Ex. 12:11). Each family slaughtered lambs…again…and again…each year. But reenactment is a weak word when understanding what it meant to those participating in it. The Passover reenactment was not done by Israel simply “in remembrance” of those God interacted with in the exodus narrative. When explaining the Passover to children, the parents would say, “It is the Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who…spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.” (Ex. 12:27) God spared our homes. It is not so much that we remember them, but that we remember that we are them. The exodus narrative was the central and controlling narrative of Israel’s theology and identity (Ex. 12:41; Josh. 2:10; 9:9; 1 Kings 8:53) Our identity is a participation in the salvific act of the Father.

Second, during the celebration of this very festival, Jesus says, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me…This is the cup of the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.” Here Jesus redefines the entire festival, not simply reenacting, but also furthering the story with a new Israel, but with the same God, namely, “me”. This festival which was “celebrated…to the LORD” does not change in its object, but redefined and fully revealed in “me”. To speak analogously, as we always do, the Lord’s supper functions rudimentarily in our relationship with God in the same way that his word does. Consider this, brothers and sisters: drinking the blood and eating the body as actions are acts of participation in Christ’s blood—death—and body—which is resurrected (1 Cor. 10:16). And not only so, but the supper acts as a standard for righteous living (1 Cor. 10:18-22). Our sanctification is a participation in the salvific act of the Son.

In what way then does the Eucharistic sacrament function that scripture itself does not? The very Word who made flesh (John 1:2) and became flesh (John 1:14) testifies about himself, saying, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” in response to the very question that all who hear the disconcerting dictation want to ask next, namely, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:53, 52) Another rapid response I have is to play my “sola-scriptura” sanction and assume that by “feed,” Jesus means something like “believe,” even though when talking about belief as a separate event 6 verses earlier, he uses “belief” language.

Third, to warrant Jesus’ further appropriation of his thought, saying, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.” (John 6:53-56), I must assume that he is setting forth a foundation for the physical union between my body and his, not implying that communion is necessary for salvation, but that it perpetuates my union (or “participation”—as Paul says in 1 Cor. 10) with Christ. This union is not only the hope of believers, but the hope of all of creation for its redemption (Rom. 8:19-22), for it is “in this hope that we are saved.” The foundation for the relevance this truth in the life of a believer, however, is being among those “who have the firstfruits of the Spirit,” (Rom. 8:23), which is to be among the saints for whom “the Spirit intercedes.” Our hope is a participation in the salvific acts of the Spirit.

A closing narrative. Remember with me now when Israel was waiting to enter the Promised Land. God had promised them that they would occupy the land as an agent of his redemptive plan of global recreation (Psalm 104:30). But before God began fulfilling his promises, Israel sent spies into the land. You know this story. They came back and reported, “We went into the land to which you sent us…Here is its fruit.” (Num. 13:27) Israel ate the fruit of the future promise of God still yet to be fulfilled, but which was in a sense more real and present than ever in the eating of that fruit. The future promise was literally present among them, and they ate it.

When you eat Christ’s flesh and blood, do not simply remember. Rather, acknowledge the fact that your identity, sanctification, and hope are being oriented heavenward as the past, present, and future collapse on you through the active participation of the Father, Son, and Spirit in your body. I will, as I try to grasp the (only by grace) believable truth that the one who knows the thoughts I have about him when I think them (Psalm 139:2) has flesh as corporeal and concrete as the loaf which I hold with my fleshly phalanges. I am subject to the world which is in bondage to decay, and praise be to him who destroyed the power of this bondage in humility (Rom. 8:21) by becoming subject to creation as well (Phil. 2:6-8). I am subject, and so is Christ.

The Narrative Aspect of Art

When did art achieve this simplified state called “expression”? I think I have noticed this in different peoples’ art created for the explicit end of expression. To the contextually unconscious artist, the piece he sets forth flows with logic, aesthetic rhythm, and at the very least, purpose. Unfortunately, from the outside, said simply systematized “expression” is either hidden by the lines of my subjective eyes as it is reformatted into an alien system of interpretive imposition or is lost and seen as no more than a regurgitation of semiotic seeds onto rocky soil. For example, I recently jotted down some poems onto the back of a few returned quizzes from a class when drawing abstract shapes and dots and connecting them with lines became boring. From that experience grew a desire to read other poetry, but rather than stumbling upon meaning, there was only pictures and figures of speech that I could on the one hand understand, and on the other make no sense of. I saw the semantic meaning, but was blind to the existential purpose.

Expression alone is a selfish monologue. Expression as communication is conversation. Expression as one voice in a conversation is a communion. It’s community. What does community require? Contextual humility. Understood within the context of communication, my role as an artist is no longer simply to express myself, but to forge a lens through which a particular individual (or group of individuals) might see reality. Firstly, I must have an object in mind which I want to communicate. Secondly, I must understand the story and context which brought me to the object in such a way as to compel me to communicate it again. Thirdly, I must recapitulate that narrative in new categories, however familiar to the original story they may be, in order that I might invite a particular contextually dependent person to participate in a fresh perspective on life. A new worldview. This is true contextualization. An invitation, not to try to make sense of objective expression, but to become subject to a story which has a role for those to whom the story is told.

I am reading a book right now called The Triune God by William Placher. In it, he talks about the incarnation as the ultimate speech act by communicating the incommunicable to the perpetually perplexed. In his first chapter, he surveys a variety of philosophers and their proofs for the existence of God, including Aquinas’s five ways, Anselm’s ontological argument, Descartes’s Cartesian foundationalism, Kirkegaard’s argument from the contrary, and more, tearing them apart one at a time by showing them to be internally inconsistent. The union between God and man in Christ was not simply an expression of the love of God to man, but an invitation for those who would never in a million years rightly understand reality from any of their many perspectives to an eye in the midst of the communicative storm of the redemptive story of God. One could even make the case that the incarnation was the prototype for the very paradigm of communication itself. The very paradigm for art. For community. For love. And the apex of this communicative act is not simply for us to recognize his expression, but to accept his invitation to subject ourselves to the very story of Christ himself. I participate in the most expressive art that not only exists, but provides the possibility for existence, by one narrative aspect of my personhood. Namely, I am subject.