Friday, April 17, 2009

His Sheep Follow Him

If the elders in Christ's church were like these sheep dogs, and if we were to obey them the way these sheep obey these sheep dogs, the church would be more beautiful and glorious in its life on earth as what you will see in this amazing display of synchronized shepherding.



We continue to unfold glories from God's creation, and parables of his kingdom.

The great chapter in which Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd is chapter 10 of The Gospel According to John.

"He who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice" (vv. 2-4 ESV).

"My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand" (vv. 27-28).

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The Sportsman and the Well Lived Life

These displays of upper body strength are a wonder to behold.





Amazing as they as, however, I wonder how important it is that they do not actually accomplish anything. The Guinness Book of World Records contains accounts of many things that in themselves are impressive but that more broadly considered are utterly pointless. Sitting on a pole for a very long time comes to mind. After initially admiring the record holder's stamina, or whatever, one cannot help but ask if this is the best use of the fellow's time.

Much of what passes for sports strikes me the same way. Much of modern athletic competition combines the awesome and the trivial--rare human ability combined with fruitless endeavor. But it has not always been so. Many athletic competitions have their origins in agriculture and warfare. Consider the Scottish highland games. Large men throwing things and pulling ropes are practicing competitively what they ordinarily they do on their farms. Consider also the Olympic Games. Traditionally, what do you see? Running. Throwing the javelin. Wrestling. Riding. Shooting. Each of these games, in its original conception, was a display of strength and skills in public competition that were useful in vitally important enterprises. The athletic achievement was not ultimately for its own sake but had reference to these larger, life-sustaining activities.

Those activities--subduing the earth by one's labor and subduing one's enemies in battle--face daunting challenges and so require awesome human accomplishments when done well. We celebrate those accomplishments, and thus also encourage them, by these competitions.

Athletics are healthy both physically and psychologically. I knew a man for whom golf was an antidote to depression. It keeps my parents young and limber. Athletics are also good for the character of the young, when done properly. Wrestling in high school impressed good habits of discipline in me. It is said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Athletics can be serious business.

But athletics becomes trivial when it becomes merely entertainment, amusement, diversion. Though baseball played at its best involves amazing feats of skill and strength, it is of no consequence whether the Yankees or the Red Sox wins the World Series. (Put aside your partisan passions and admit it.) The same is true of the the feats of upper body strength in this video. Yes, they are astounding, but to what end? It is true that they are beautiful, and that is good in itself. It brings out more fully the glory of God's creation. That's wonderful, but God calls us to put his marvelous creation to godly use.

Why do we celebrate these isolated acts of strength and skills without context? Perhaps we no longer believe in ends, but we still can't help be impressed by the means by which we once pursued those ends.

Athletics of this sort remind me of what has become of art. We have removed it from the churches and great houses because so many of us no longer believe in church and great families. So too, now that agriculture and war are mechanized, we can appreciate the yeoman and the warrior in isolation of what called forth the heights of their achievements. We can appreciate their virtuosity without their virtue.

Art has become abstract not only in its form, but also in its placement (if that's right way to put it). We deprive it of any meaningful setting. It goes straight from studio to gallery, unless one turns a living room into a gallery. Art used to serve a function. It used to communicate a story or remember a relative or a person of great accomplishment. It helped us see the special beauty of a landscape or even of a beggar child. What I'm questioning is the value of athletics when it becomes so self-referential, so self-sufficient that it becomes comparable to art-divorced-from-life.

Am I being overly pragmatic in all of this? Disgracefully utilitarian? What about beauty for its own sake? It is possible, however, to appreciate the aesthetic aspect of a beautiful act or artifact and still set it to work in something that has a larger meaning. It's not so much utility that I have in mind, as it is some larger meaning or narrative, or the affirmation of an important truth, as art does when it is done well.

Friday, April 10, 2009

Slow Down and Behold the Glory of God

"Densmore Shute Bends the Shaft, 1938"
Dr. Harold Edgerton,
the M.I.T. professor who pioneered the art of high-speed photography


Advances in technology have allowed us to observe a level of glorious detail in God's creation that has been previously hidden from us. Dr. Harold Edgerton at M.I.T. pioneered the art of high speed photography, allowing us to see the remarkable movements of the hummingbird, the golfer's swing, and a bullet's path of destruction through an apple.



Here is a marvelous video various slow motions we have the privilege of seeing, now even from the convenience of a home computer.



To top it off, you now have the privilege of doing the high speed photography easily with your own camera, as David Pogue of the New York Times demonstrates.



Now he tells us that Casio has reproduced the capability of that $1000 SLR camera in a pocket sized $350 camera ("Cameras With Time-Machine Powers").

It's not technology that's amazing, nor even we technologists, but God who made this wonderful world, the fullness of whose wonders we are far from exhausting.

O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When through the woods, and forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees.
When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur
And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

And when I think, that God, His Son not sparing;
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in;
That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow, in humble adoration,
And then proclaim: "My God, how great Thou art!"

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

"O Store Gud," written by Swedish pastor, Carl Gustaf Boberg (1859-1940) in 1891. Translated into English in 1949 by Stuart Hine, a missionary to Russia where he encountered the hymn.