This Made Me Laugh (which is pathetic because I wrote it)

Journal: Volunteering at Little Hands On the Farm
August 18, 2011 at 8:38pm

It’s called The Garden.  The instructions are to grab a seed and a shovel, plant the seed in the dirt, then walk to the end of the garden and harvest it.  In reality kids are grabbing round plastic tokens bearing the image of a vegetable, burying them, grabbing a decorative Styrofoam vegetable from a basket, and moving on to The Grainery.  My job is to dispense instructions where needed, and occasionally use a garden rake to find and gather the buried seed tokens.  It’s a beautiful sunny day with a light breeze, so I have no complaints with being outside for a four-hour shift on a well-beloved exhibit at the Iowa State Fair.  Also the seed-planting part is not open due to rain earlier in the day…that’s mainly why I have no complaints.

12:30  Sky is blue, people are happy, job is easy, tomatoes look real enough to eat….life is good.

12:35 Exhibit supervisor comes by and declares the garden dry enough for planting.  There goes easy.  But it’s still beautiful out, and my co-gardener is wearing a bandanna like Rambo, so I still have no complaints.

12:45 Raking seed tokens out of the dirt.  Families really love this exhibit!

1:00  It’s interesting talking to Rambo.  Turns out he tilled up his backyard and planted it with corn, to avoid further maintenance, and is raising thirteen meat rabbits because it sounded interesting.  He cleared up my confusion about two heavy elderly women who were watching us from a bench in the exhibit.  They caught my interest because they were wearing official tags, and because they’d moved our water cooler off the bench onto the ground to make room for themselves.  (It’s the kind of water cooler that has to be on a bench to be used).  “Security,” he explained.  Their widespread Fareway ads certainly look ferocious.

1:15  Raking again.  The hardest thing about this job is dodging family photos.

1:30  Rambo and I joke about the obviously-local band playing nearby.  Kids are getting confused because they dig up three or four pepper seeds in their attempt to bury one potato, so I grab the rake and get back to work.  Our security detail has fallen asleep.

1:45 Raking.  Again.

2:00  Good idea: They should make the seed chips metal, so we can search for them with metal detectors.

2:30 We can hear a tractor pull going on in the main grandstand.  It fills the silences when the death metal band next door is taking a breath.  (Really, who scheduled that next to a kid’s exhibit?)

2:45 Still raking.  I overhear a father encouraging his son to “bury it real deep!”

3:00  Better idea: they should make this a rotating exhibit:  A garden for half an hour, then an archeological dig for half an hour. 

3:30  The tractor pull is still going on; inky black smoke billows into the blue sky above the exhibit that teaches children how natural and healthy Iowa agriculture is.  It sounds like one of the monsters is charging toward us.  I wonder: Once it breaks into sight, how many kids can I toss out of its path before I get pulverized?

4:00  Best idea: They should make the seed chips radioactive, so we can search for them with Geiger counters. 

4:15  I swear some of the boy children coming through are growing mustaches. 

4:25  What’s your definition of insanity?  Mine is raking a dirt patch free of plastic tokens and sorting them into baskets, so kids can grab them out of the baskets and bury them in the freshly-raked dirt.

Hymns as Lullabies

Having a baby at home has motivated me to learn songs and hymns by heart so I can sing them to her throughout the day.  Melody and rhythm are excellent for stimulating those tiny synapses - DIY Baby Einstein, if you like. Memorizing hearty Christian lyrics stimulates my thinking on several levels, promoting meditation and preventing the total onset of "baby brain."  And, if God wills, as Aletheia grows these hymns will lead to gospel conversations and the development of her own devotional theology.

The hymn "Abide With Me" is our most recent acquisition.  This might seem like an odd lullaby for an infant since the lyrics, reproduced below, are really a prayerful end-of-life contemplation.  You could say it's a lullaby for the elderly.  But then, I appreciate the perspective this hymn provides on any stage of life.  It reminds me that my baby, like my grandparents, is facing "death and decay."  It reminds me that I need daily grace to "foil the tempter's pow'r."  It reminds me how urgent it is for the cross to be held up before her mind's eye as well as mine.  And when I look at her tiny baby form and sing on her behalf "Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me," I'm reminded that she is in the care of the sovereign God.


Abide With Me

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see—
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

I need Thy presence every passing hour;
What but Thy grace can foil the tempter’s pow’r?
Who, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies;
Heav’n’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

How the Introduction to Hebrews Does Its Job

When I memorized the book of Hebrews, I saved the first four verses for last – a sweet reward for many months of working through extended argument and exhortation. It’s such a rich and beautiful introduction to the sermon!  But as I studied it more closely, I became confused by the meaning.

The two main statements of the section seem to be “God…has spoken” and “(Christ) sat down.”  But what do they have to do with each other?  When you add them together, what do you get? 

“Speaking + Sitting = x.  Solve for x.”

Like any good communicator, the speaker-writer of Hebrews is using his introduction to flag his main themes.  These two concepts make sense together when you see how each one plays out in the rest of the sermon.

God Has Spoken

The writer keys into the concept of God speaking when he gives his first exhortation: “Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard” – that is, the message “declared at first by the Lord” (chapter 2).  It’s also prominent at the beginning of the main instructional territory, beginning with the quote “Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts” (chapter 3). And it’s used wrap up the main part of the sermon at the end of chapter 12: “See that you do not refuse him who is speaking.”

So in his introduction, the writer alerts to the fact that his entire message is one that originates from God Himself.

The Son Sat Down

Most notably, this second concept occurs at the climax of the speaker’s argument in chapter 10, just before he plunges into his most passionate plea: “when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God…for by a single sacrifice he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified”.  You can also find it referenced at the beginning of chapter 8, which highlights the infinite superiority of Christ’s priesthood; and the beginning of chapter 12, where the ending of Christ’s suffering compels us to endure until our suffering also ends.

So the message of Hebrews, encapsulated in the introduction, is this:  God has spoken authoritatively, revealing that Christ dealt with sin once and for all.  The only acceptable response is for us to place all our trust in him and live faithfully even through suffering and persecution.

Appendix (Enter At Your Own Risk)

Here’s how the original Greek grammar, represented as closely as possible in English, highlights the two main statements:

   Having spoken long ago, in many times and in many ways, to our fathers by the prophets,

In these last days God has spoken to us by his Son

    Whom he appointed the heir of all things

     Through whom also he made the worlds;                               

     Who, 

            being the radiance of his glory and the exact imprint of his nature,

            Upholding all things through the word of his power,

            After making purification for sins

                   (He) sat down at the right hand of the Majesty 

                       on high,

Having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

                               

*I relied on the ESV for the translation of the words, but modified it somewhat to show more of the structure as it appears in Greek.

                               

The highlighted lines are the two main independent clauses.  They stand on their own; the surrounding phrases serve to either introduce them or explain them.   Or to put it more technically, these two are independent clauses, while everything else is a relative clause (who/whom) or a participial phrase (“-ing”).

This section has a really cool pattern.  The first main statement is that God the Father has spoken, but the focus quickly centers on the messenger, His Son, using three relative clauses to give us the credentials of this Son.  The third relative clause then expands into three participial phrases which detail activities of the Son, leading up to the other main statement – that the Son ultimately sat down – with one last participial phrase creating a segue into the next section.

On another note, the concept of Christ sitting down is fascinating.  I most strongly associate it with the finality of Christ’s sacrifice, but Peter O’Brien (The Letter to the Hebrews [PNTC]) emphasizes that this theme identifies Christ as the king promised in the Davidic Covenant.  I believe that the two concepts are inherently related, and hereby call dibs on that topic for a doctoral thesis (if I ever get to write one).