Thursday, September 25, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Dylan, Haggai, Kierkegaard
Consider your ways!
Bob Dylan (born 5/24/1941) wrote and sang, “My money comes and goes, it rolls and flows through the holes in the pockets of my clothes. I’m walkin’ down the line.” Bobby Zimmerman (Dylan) attended Jewish summer camp and celebrated his bar mitzvah in Hibbing, Minnesota. And in his sixty years of songs, over and over he recognizes the futility of our own efforts and surrenders to the grace of God’s creative forgiveness. As does Haggai.
You have sown much, but have brought in little;
you have eaten, but have not been satisfied;
You have drunk, but have not been exhilarated;
have clothed yourselves, but not been warmed;
And whoever earned wages
earned them for a bag with holes in it.
Thus says the LORD of hosts:
Consider your ways!
Haggai shouts out the Lord’s words! What will God do with these short-sighted, selfish people? Yahweh commands his people to move out of their comfortable paneled houses and build a house for Him. Over and over God encourages them/us/me not to just remember where I come from, but decide to follow God’s path and not my own, ensuring my future like no insurance policy ever could.
Well my heart’s in the Highlands wherever I roam
That’s where I’ll be when I get called home
The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme
Well my heart’s in the Highlands
I can only get there one step at a time.
Many of us consider Bob Dylan a prophet. His song “Blowin’ in the Wind” amplifies his prophetic voice. Consider your ways! And in his eighties he claims the religious bent he has lived with all his life:
I never watch anything foul smelling or evil. Nothing disgusting; nothing dog ass. I’m a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it. My favorite music? Sacred music, church music, ensemble singing. I don’t watch much TV, but I like the Father Brown detective series on BBC.
Dylan’s songs referenced the Bible from the beginning. A compendium of those references exists as an online pdf simply titled Dylan and the Bible, put together by Damian Balassone.
Christopher Barnett brings Dylan (and I think, Haggai) into what Kierkegaard called the three existential spheres.
One of the focal points of Kierkegaard’s thought is the nature and the purpose of the self. As he sees it, the human being is a synthesis of dialectical elements—infinitude and finitude, possibility and necessity, eternality and temporality. Each person relates to these elements based on the existential “sphere” to which she belongs.
Kierkegaard theorizes that there are three such spheres, which he tends to situate in ascending order: the aesthetic involves a preference for immediate experience (construed in various ways); the ethical has to do with achieving a sense of personal identity by way of living for enduring commitments and values; the religious initially concerns the immanent human quest for eternal life but, according to Kierkegaard, ultimately comes to rest in God’s transcendent self-revelation in Jesus Christ.
My contention is that Kierkegaard’s theory of existential spheres gives us an illuminating way of approaching Dylan’s art.
So when I read the Bible I see it, as well, from these spheres: the beautiful, the good and the true. And as Kierkegaard believes, these illuminations of mine or yours or anyone’s “ultimately come to rest in God’s transcendent self-revelation in Jesus Christ.”
Looking again at Ezra’s words in yesterday’s lectionary and today at Haggai’s trumpet-call of the Lord’s plea to “consider my ways,” the three “existential spheres of Kierkegaard” point my prayers and understanding toward Jesus.
Seeing what God has to say through this lens focuses my understanding and clarifies my thoughts. And I hope it challenges and changes the way I live.
Consider your ways!
Go up into the hill country;
bring timber, and build the house
That I may take pleasure in it
and receive my glory, says the LORD.
 (Haggai 1, Psalm 149, John 14, Luke 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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