Wednesday, May 28, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Breaths and beats
You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious.
Friends from Grace Covenant Church (80 of them) recently returned from a pilgrimage through Greece, following Paul’s walks into Turkey and finally to Athens. Other friends from Peoria are in Greece this very day, visiting the Parthenon and then Mykonos, surrounded by the blue waters of the Aegean Sea.
Many of us are not so religious in the 21st century, but Paul began his talk with the Athenian philosophers acknowledging their focus on God, or gods, and perhaps even their willingness to submit their own thoughts and behavior to divine approval. I remember a moment in the wonderful 1936 film Green Pastures, when Jehovah, troubled once again by the behavior of his people on earth, looked heavenward and said (as if to himself), “I ain’t heard nothin’ from You about this!” Omniscience isn’t what it used to be.
What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and all that is in it, gives to everyone life and breath and all things. He is not far from us, for “in him we live and move and have our being.”
Paul was referring to the writing of a Greek poet there at the end. Those words have always been some of my favorites in the Bible, whether or not they originated on a Greek poet’s page.
In him we live and move and have our being.
Our heart beats 100,000 times per day. Our lungs breathe 20,000 times each day. On their own. How can that be, when we are unaware of nearly all of these breaths and beats? In biology I learned these body behaviors are called “involuntary.” Thank God! I couldn’t keep track, let alone initiate, any more than just a few of those life-sustaining actions that take place inside me.
I often wish my life force were more unconscious, so I could live like other God-made beings without being pre-occupied by past memories and future plans, with more and more of my life “involuntary.”
We spent yesterday afternoon with Marc and Evie’s mom. Her stepdad Dave said, “You’re welcome anytime, as long as you bring Bear.” Bear is an endlessly lovable 44 pound, 18-week-old puppy, growing like a weed and friendly with everyone. At this small town home he has a deep back yard to rush around in, and after the rest of us are finished eating, he gets fed hot dogs and burgers off the grill. Bear’s instincts are strong, but he lives in the present without “thinking” about it. He doesn’t have to decide to Be Here Now.
And that’s what I want too. I meditate, pray, breathe deep breaths, walk slowly with no destination in mind. I sit and do no thing for 20 minutes often during my days and weeks. These quietings occasionally still my monkey mind, but soon it’s back to jumping from thought to thought as I live in the past and then the future, settling only now and then into the present.
God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent because he has established a day on which he will ‘judge the world with justice’ through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.
Toward the end of Green Pastures, Jehovah comes down to earth to talk with a few of his the men he created. A soldier tells him the people have found a new God, a God of mercy.
“But they’s only one God, and that’s me. I am the God of wrath!” Jehovah says. Then he stops to think. “How did you discover this new God of mercy?”
“Through suffering,” the soldier says.
As the angels look down over the parapets of heaven, they see a man carrying a cross up a high hill, and Jehovah, back from his trip to earth, hears them describing what they see. We see him smile suddenly, at last unworried, at last relaxed. “Yes!” he exclaims as his face brightens.
Paul must be smiling in his grave.
(Acts 17, Psalm 148, John 14, John 16)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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