A mood makes manifest ‘how one is’ and ‘how one is faring’. In this ‘how one is’, having a mood brings Being to its There. (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 173)

However, the conditions under which we all operate – our individual ways of getting through the day – tend to require that we ignore moods as best we can. They are the kind of thing that we paper over or drown out as we busy ourselves in being the kind of person that others need us to be. Heidegger was particularly interested in what lies behind such human experiences as Anxiety, and Boredom. What do these experiences mean? What do they tell us about being human, and as such, what do they tell us about Being?

I think Weariness can be an experience, a ‘Mood’, that lets us lift the veil and glimpse something real.
There is a kind of weariness that fixes us in our being. It is the ‘pushing-back’ of the world against my exertions, the ‘Something’ that properly resists me, and thereby fixes me as a being with will, and desire, and goal. How good this is! It enables us to be creatures and to create – there is no music without friction It lets me be an individual. It lets me love – to find myself in finitude, with limited powers, and to trust, embrace, and depend upon the love of others. It is the kind of weariness that I imagine pouring through the arms of the First Man, after a day working the Garden, that led him to take pleasure in kicking his boots off and lying out full stretch in front of the fire.

But there is a kind of weariness that threatens to overwhelm. The bone-tired, aching weariness that flows from wrestling with a ‘Something’ that does not merely push back, rather it holds us in a death grip, dragging us down to Nothing, to be consumed and disintegrated.
For a while we might believe that this Weariness will not win out in the end: that it is not the truth of the world. We fool ourselves into thinking that if we only keep trying we can roll our boulder to the top of the hill, and not have it roll back down the other side. A myth.
There is no Rest here. There is no point in this world at which motion may cease. This is fundamental physics: if you do not move you will shiver, starve, be caught up, be dragged down, be eaten alive. Thou Shalt not Rest!

By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.
(Genesis 3:19 NIV)

‘Fatigue’ is how Engineers describe a weakness that develops in materials through repeated variations of stress. Weariness can sometimes be like this, a similar weakness induced through conflicting forces. To be weary can be to experience in ourselves the particular ‘There’, of Being in This World. A world riven by a multitude of opposing wills, conflicting desires. moving toward multiple goals, operating under both a Curse and a Blessing.
And in which, if there was no reconciliation, no proper administration, would eventually shake itself apart.

photo (which is brilliant) by
Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

I haven’t really set this out very well, or thought it through thoroughly because I don’t have time, but someone should.

tangent Just on a tangent for a moment, if anyone is moving to Sydney and looking for a new Church, give a thought to joining us at St Philip’s. We have more opportunities for the gospel than we can handle with our small team. Don’t settle for dogmatic slumbers in the suburbs – go to a Church on the mission field! Having said, that probably every Church feels the same way, and if you have better reasons to be somewhere else, I guess that’s ok…
still, we really need you. /tangent

I happened to hear a report on Kenya on the BBC world service last thing before I dropped off to sleep last night, and was deeply disturbed by one particular interview. I downloaded it and listened again this morning. It is completely heartwrenching.

I’ve extracted a portion of the audio (about 20secs) here.

You can listen to the whole report here:

A number of people were praying for Kenya this morning, we support some link missionaries over there. As we sat there in prayer, I had the realisation that all around the world at the moment there are Christian men and women petitioning God for the lives and safety of the people of that country. It’s very bad, very ugly over there, but I wonder what it would be without the prayers of the saints.
The little philosopher part of me gets anxious about stating propositions that have no conditions for falsification, but as a Christian I only know how grateful I am that He has left some salt in this world.

Until last century all the urban communities of the Western world were built around Churches. In Britain, before the 16th century a population centre would only be declared a city if it contained a Cathedral – the seat of a Bishop. But for increasingly secular societies Church no longer holds its place as the hub of urban life. The article goes on to examine some of the substitutes our societies have developed: Art Galleries, Museums, Sporting Grounds. But the secular shrine that has truly come to dominate the spiritual lives of modern suburbanites receives only a brief mention: the Shopping Mall.

It’s probably just my over-active imagination, but there are certain times when I walk into a shopping mall and am overcome with the sense that I’m in the heart of a pagan temple. As a Christian there is so much happening in a Mall that is antithetical to the heart of the Christian message and life. Don’t get me wrong, there are times when I really enjoy wondering ’round the Mall. I certainly take advantage of the convenience provided by having shops grouped together. But I think that the times when I’m repulsed are probably my saner moments. Buying and selling, the manipulation of thoughts and desires through advertising, the manipulation even of biology through the food courts and careful control of natural and artificial light – I feel like a battery hen.

All the windows in a shopping mall only look into shops, never into the landscape or city. It is impossible to know what time of day it is once you’re inside. Increasingly, it is becoming unnecessary to ever leave.

And yet, the mall is a profoundly dehumanising place. It takes People and makes them no more than cattle, consuming and producing. It justifies the manipulation of minds, hearts, and bodies in order to make this process more efficient. A shopping mall is a factory in which we are the product.

The change from Church to Mall is a massive exercise in Urban Idolatry. The substitution of human productions for the reality of God.
And it’s no wonder that this is dehumanising. Man-made gods always treat us like cattle. Idolatry is dehumanising.
We were created to worship God, the more we draw near to him in worship – the more human we become. Worshipping God is an essentially human activity, it is proper to no other species of creature. We are most human when we are act out our humanity towards God. And conversely, being truly godly is truly human. It’s an image thing. We have the identity and intentions of our creator pressed into our identity.
When we worship something other than God we are bending this out of shape. We stop acting in a properly human way. Even though genetic sequences don’t change, idolatry produces monsters – perversions of human identity. Sharing some of its features but twisted in upon itself.

A city is a collective individual. More than anything else humans produce, it is the concrete representation of our identity. When we substitute something other than God at the heart of the city, it also begins to lose its humanity. It loses its civility, its ‘civicness’. It is no longer a community of citizens bonded together for their mutual good. It becomes truly ‘sub-urban’ a disparate herd of individuals isolated from one other, angry and suspicious, quitely ignoring each other, while seeking to beat each other to whatever bargain is now on offer. A city with no soul.

The gospel of the Lordship of Jesus means that we must speak out against the false worship in a city – calling people to give their loyalty to the Christ.
And it also means calling people back to their humanity.
And calling cities back to their foundations.

LORD, lead me in Your righteousness,
because of my adversaries;
make Your way straight before me.
(Psalm 5:8 HCSB)

I really think the Psalms come alive when you read them with a Samuel L. Jackson accent – Particularly Psalm 5.

I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable with the idea of giving God a list of reasons why he should help us when we pray. It gets fairly well drummed in to us that we are saved by grace, sustained by grace, and we have nothing to offer God that isn’t automatically his by right.

We aren’t in a bargaining position.

David’s prayers don’t really sound like this. David is completely comfortable with giving God long lists of reasons for action.

Psalm 5 is full of great examples but verse 8 has got to be the most audacious.

“Lead me in your righteousness because of my adversaries.”

Are you struggling with prayer? Feeling that your prayers just bounce off the ceiling? that God doesn’t hear?
The tele-evangelists have got it all wrong, you don’t need more faith.
You need more enemies!

It’s an interesting strategy…

But David’s prayer isn’t just based on the fact that he has enemies. In fact, the whole Psalm is essentially a reminder to God of who God is, who David is, and who David’s enemies are.

God is good:

“For You are not a God who delights in wickedness;
evil cannot lodge with You.
The boastful cannot stand in Your presence;
You hate all evildoers.
You destroy those who tell lies;
the Lord abhors a man of bloodshed and treachery.”
(Psa 5:4-6 HCSB)

There is a thorough going consistency to God’s actions – he is utterly reliable. And he hates all evildoers.
(incidentally, that doesn’t leave much room for ‘hate the sin and love the sinner’ does it?)

God has never given up on his good plans for creation. He has never had the failure of imagination that leads us to accept less than perfection in our world and our selves. God’s endless creativity and endless love of goodness means that he cannot tolerate evil.
Our willingness to do so continually makes us complicit with it.

But David has the nerve to remind God that he hates all evil-doers, that God isn’t at home with evil.
This is the bloke who coveted his neighbour’s wife, lied, engaged in conspiracy to murder, and committed adultery. That’s four of the ten commandments right there. It certainly sounds like “bloodshed and treachery.”

Yet David can say:

“But I enter Your house by the abundance of Your faithful love;
I bow down toward Your holy temple in reverential awe of You.
Lord, lead me in Your righteousness,
because of my adversaries;
make Your way straight before me.”
(Psa 5:7-8 HCSB)

David, clearly a doer of some substantial evils, has entrance to God’s house.
He is not there on the basis of merit but because of God’s love for him. (This definitely presents a bit of a problem, how can God be just and justify the wicked? Isn’t God now complicit with evil? Stay tuned for the New Testament…)
David is God’s man.
Without disregarding his failure and sin, he remains someone who’s life, identity, future, and loyalty are all wrapped up with God. So much so that there is a total identification between God’s enemies and his.
David’s enemies are God’s enemies.
God’s enemies are David’s enemies.

Look at David’s description of these people:

“For there is nothing reliable in what they say;
destruction is within them;
their throat is an open grave;
they flatter with their tongues.
Punish them, God;
let them fall by their own schemes.
Drive them out because of their many crimes,
for they rebel against You.”
(Psa 5:9-10 HCSB)

David’s enemies are those who rebel against God.
It’s strong language. It probably makes you feel a little uncomfortable. (I wouldn’t be suprised if there is now a file on you, stored somewhere in an office in Canberra, flagging that you visit extremist websites…)

Would you be willing to say that your enemies are any and all who rebel against God?

We generally imbibe the cultural assumption that, ‘everyone ok with me as long as they don’t hurt anyone.’
We’re not real comfortable with the idea of having enemies. And we are very uncomfortable with the idea of having specfic enemies, particularly when that includes everyone who isn’t a Christian. That’s a lot of enemies…

But it really comes down to how firmly your interests are bound up with God’s.
If you have half a million dollars sitting in a superannuation fund, I imagine that you take a reasonable interest in the stock market. If something is preventing your Super Fund from getting you the best return, you get cranky.
How much have I got invested with God?

Is it enough to make God’s enemies your enemies?
Enough to make any opposition to God’s plans direct interference with your interests?

I get angry when I see people dropping cigarette butts. They show reckless disregard for our world, how angry should I be at someone who opposes the good plans of God to create a new heaven and a new earth?

We should have enemies.
If we don’t we haven’t really understood faith in God.

And if we don’t have enemies, these words don’t make any sense:

““You have heard that it was said, Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. For He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Matt 5:43-45 HCSB)

“Shakespeare pictures the potential depravity of a godless world. I think it’s no accident that the gods are referred to that number of times.

“The other prediction that’s made in the play is ‘if the gods don’t come down and intervene then it must come, humanity will prey upon itself like monsters of the deep’.

“We are at the moment daily aware of the seemingly limitless possibilities of human cruelty, of human certainty that gods are on their side and therefore any amount of human sacrifice is permissible in the name of the gods.

Trevor Nunn quoted in Sydney Morning Herald.

One of the deeply troubling aspects of Lear is that human cruelty appears to win the day. The continual appeal to the gods is met only with a bronzed silence. Within the world of the play either there is no God, or, there is no just God.

(or, one might conceivably say that the play demonstrates the terrible justice of God – a justice which is demonstrated in the pile of bodies at the end – after all, none of the characters are particularly morally upright…)

‘if the gods don’t come down and intervene then it must come, humanity will prey upon itself like monsters of the deep’.

This is an appeal for divine intervention, for a divine act of revelation and justice tied together – what we call ‘theodicy’. It is an appeal for God to do justice for humanity and thereby to vindicate himself.

In the world of the play, the appeal to the blank face of heaven is haunting, it plays upon a deep fear we all feel, it lends Lear incredible power.

And it is a good appeal – God save us from ourselves!
It is an appeal that relies on the character of God.
What does it mean for an appeal like that to go unanswered?
What would that mean for God?

The truth of Nunn’s observation that we are, ‘daily aware of the seemingly limitless possibilities of human cruelty’ is easily proved from a reading of the rest of the pages of the newspaper.

Nunn appears to agree with Shakespeare on the ‘potential depravity of a godless world’ and indeed, to believe that this is no longer a potential, but the reality of the world we inhabit.
Who could argue?

But Bard never fails to see more clearly than his interpreters – even those as brilliant as Trevor Nunn.

(I think it must be the combination of Shakespeare’s careful ambiguity and the incredible freedom of play within his language which leaves ample room for the reader to be read into the text.)

What would an intervention from God look like? How would God act to do justice for humanity?

Well, if the world is as Nunn describes it – full of the ‘seemingly limitless possibilities of human cruelty’, a possibility that finds some refuge in every human heart, and some expression to a greater or lesser extent – I wonder very much if the kind of intervention for which we appeal might not end up looking something very like the end of King Lear?

…Blindness, Bodies, and Madness…

That’s what we would properly expect.
That’s the natural narrative trajectory and there isn’t anyone with a better ear for narrative than Shakespeare.

Which is why the gospel is a NewsFlash. A piece of information that breaks into the storyline, coming from outside, interrupting, changing completely the natural progression.

The gospel is the twist in the story which makes our world something other than the world of King Lear.
(sadly, it is possible that for Trevor Nunn our world is nothing other than the world of Lear)

The coming of God in Jesus knocks the human narrative off its rails. God acts to do justice for humanity by condemning human depravity in the person of one man – he takes our position at the end of the play.

‘If humanity is made for the knowledge of God, why is it that many people do not feel the need of this knowledge, or seek God out?’
Original Post

We need to step back again for a moment. It seems at this point every step forward needs careful prodding with the toes first to make sure we are on firm ground.

To say ‘I know’, could equally be a statement about facts or about relationships.
“I know how many elephants live in the zoo” and “I know Bob the Elephant keeper” are two different forms of knowledge.

In the Biblical world view (and increasingly in the post-modern world view) both these forms of knowledge are bound together. There aren’t any such things as ‘Facts’ bare, naked, and objective. There are only interpreted facts, given in relationships, through testimonies, and in the context of experiences.

Our lack of knowledge of the ugliness and evil of sin, and of our dire need for restoration to friendship with God, is an ignorance of certain primary facts about the world and it is ignorance of our primary relationship.

In every sense our knowing is broken.

How did this come about? How did knowledge get broken?

If Christ is the self-evident Word of God, [the way in which God is known] why do so many people reject him? The answer lies in original sin, that original rejection of God’s word by Adam in which the whole human race is involved.
Graeme Goldsworthy, According to Plan, p. 60

It is interesting to note that the first time Knowledge is mentioned in the Bible it is not in the context of the relationship between Humanity and God. It is in the description of the forbidden tree as ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’.

(What a strange plant, was it a weed?)

It certainly wasn’t an Apple Tree – this tree has no species, it is unique – named for its unique fruit. This is the tree – the fruit of which gives knowledge of good and evil.

As Adam stretched out his hand to take and eat he was wreaking a change upon the world that was profoundly to do with knowledge. Human rebellion against the word of God had fundamental consequences for our knowledge because, at this one point above all others, our knowledge-as-facts and our knowledge-in-relationship was intimately bound together.

There is a long history of speculation about what it means to have the ‘knowledge of good and evil’. Some have understood this to mean factual knowledge, i.e., what good and evil are, (what the rules are). Others have taken this knowledge to be experiential, having the first hand experience of good and evil. Still others have taken this to have some sort of sexual referent.

The difficulty for all these understandings is that later in the Genesis narrative we hear God saying,

“Since man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:22 HCSB)

The forbidden knowledge at the heart of human rebellion seems to be, knowing good and evil, as God knows them.
What is God’s knowledge of good and evil?
God’s knowledge is autonomous knowledge. It is not knowledge of what is good and what is evil as defined by ‘the moral law’, it is not experience of good and evil (God has no evil in him).
God’s knowledge of good and evil is the knowledge that defines good and evil.
God knows good and evil because he decides what good is, and what evil is.

For Adam and Eve to eat this deathly fruit was an arrogant grasping at the prerogative of God.
Rather than to continuing to know God (and through knowing God to know the world)
Adam and Eve sought to know like God.
Humanity sought to decide for itself what good is, and what evil is.
They did this, first, by deciding that it was good for humanity to eat a fruit of which God had said, ‘don’t eat!’

The knowledge of good and evil is a colossal thing. It is fundamentally a narrative, a system of meanings that locate our identity and purpose. This narrative had begun with the First Word,
“Let there Be…”
…And there was.”
God had given us identity and purpose. He told us the story into which he had placed us.

But in the Fall, Adam substitutes his own story, a new framework of meanings, and thereby deafens himself to the word of God.

The conclusion of this long answer is that our darkened understanding of who we are (that we are fallen) is a consequence of our grasp for moral autonomy. We have so thoroughly substituted our own definitions of good and evil, which is to say, our own fundamental narrative, that we cannot correctly identify our state from God’s perspective.

And all this is a very long winded way of restating Paul’s conclusion in Romans 1.

“For though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became nonsense, and their senseless minds were darkened.” (Rom 1:21 HCSB)

Which finally, wearied I’m sure, and very much overdue, brings us back to the really important question:
How do I show my friend that our rebellion against God is horrifying, evil, and disgusting – not just intellectually credible? And how do I do it with humility and gentleness?

We live faithfully, in faith, with faithfulness.

We trust and remain loyal to the Creator who is alone able to utter those decisive creative words that can utterly alter our thinking.
This trusting of God is expressed in speech, life, and prayer.

No actions on our part alone can bring a fellow human to knowledge of God,
but they are the vehicles through which the Creator God has chosen to express himself.

So we trust God through speaking the truth, which is ultimately the true story, the gospel announcement of the Death and Resurrection of God’s King through which the God’s Kingdom has come, meaning that the hour of judgement is at hand, though there is salvation for those who seek it.
Already it is an incomprehensible story.

And in the light of this story we will live incomprehensibly. As the Christian begins to comprehend the world and our place within God’s future, our values and priorities are derailed from the tracks in which they used to run. Certain things which appear to others as insane sacrifices are now ‘worth it’ for the Christian. The shape of our thinking is changed, the centre of our hope moves forward.
For the person who is not a Christian, watching as these lives are lived, they do not make sense, the Christian life will be simply incomprehensible.

And we pray. This sounds like such a weak answer after such a long build up. However, I’m more and more convinced, through reflecting on God’s word and seeing my own perversity, that unless God acts to change something in our perception of the world we can never see him. Our minds really are darkened – this is not just a nice turn of phrase.
Unless God gives us the interpretive key, this world-of-a-text remains a mystery, indecipherably encoded.

No one comes to know the truth about God or themselves without God taking a prior action to give this knowledge. The individual is powerless. In fact, all the individuals involved, other than God, are powerless. We are as equally powerless to stir up another person from their blind danger as that person is themselves.

Which is why we are to be humble and gentle in our prayers, and in our speech and action.

In our humble prayers we admit before God that we are unable to save the people that we love but that we trust that he can and that he desires to do so.

It’s size makes it a sublime object, something that mixes beauty and terror. It is easily the largest man-made structure I have ever seen, the awareness of which is heightened by an ability to see all of it at once from many points around the Harbour. It so surpasses the scale of any individual human being that it becomes difficult to comprehend it as a human object, that is, as our creation.
The viewer almost wants perceive the Bridge as a natural phenomenon, a force of nature. Yet, it is so obviously a human construction. The steel, the riveting, the angular lines, all make any retreat from its human origin impossible.

I find that a part of me is always left thinking, “What have we done?” And I feel winded, like I’ve been punched with a double-combination-fist-full of Amazement and Terror.

I’m amazed at human creativity and power, I’m terrified because, even in our comfortable and protected lives, we know more than enough about the human capacity for evil. These two things don’t make for a happy prospect, as the history of the 20th Century eloquently gives testimony.

The Harbour Bridge was built during the Great Depression by men who had been through the horror of World War One, and then the shame of being unable to provide for their families as the economy crumbled. It stood then as a potent symbol of human achievement in the face of adversity and played its role in the optimistic ‘Modern’ story about Scientific Progress, with humanity as the central character.

Now we live in an age of undreamt prosperity…
… and pessimism.
The optimistic story of ‘onward and upward’ proved to be a rationalist fairytale.
The greater our technological achievements became, the greater our capacity to destroy, and in our depravity, to enjoy the spectacle of destruction.

The Bridge is a Steel Rainbow hung in the sky as a reminder of our inherent power, given from the Creator. But unlike the Creator’s Rainbow that reminds us that he will be faithful to his creation, our Steel Rainbow gives no such assurance. As humanity we are always a moment away from another betrayal of the creation, of our own role in that creation, and ultimately of our God who created us.

And the greater we develop our power and creativity the more terrifying the scope and potential of that betrayal becomes.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported a little bit of Governor Marie Bashir’s speech at the ribbon cutting ceremony. She described the bridge as a “sermon in steel” which showed what Australia could do.
“It will never date, never grow old,”
“It has become a structure for all time.”

It is a Sermon in Steel, the kind of sermon that rightly leaves the hearer deeply troubled.

But the Good News is that it is emphatically not a structure for all time. There will come a time when the Sermon in Steel, the word of our glory and disgrace, will be silent.

The New Creation may well have Bridges, but they will be testimonies to the Creator’s Spirit, not to any ‘human spirit’.

And so, the Sydney Harbour Bridge is 75 Years Old, but it is not a structure for all time.

It is a structure for our time.

The truth is, that when people have something to say, they often do say it with a T-Shirt. I can’t think the number of different T-Shirts I have worn for Christian organisations, all with some little thought provoking message. Campus fellowship groups should band together and start a screen printing company.

That’s all intro to an interesting experience I had a couple of days ago.

I sat down at a table to chat with a bloke, he looked me up and down and said “that’s a bit pretentious”. He was referring to my T-Shirt.
I was wearing an Oxford T-Shirt, it has a great big golden Oxford Logo on the front. I’ve never been to Oxford, let alone studied there. The t-shirt is a gift from my parents-in-law on their last visit. From the muffled groan when I unwrapped it, to this conversation, the T-Shirt has caused me nothing but grief. Not that I don’t like it, it’s just that I can’t wear it without feeling like a goose. Anyway, in this particular situation the rebuke wasn’t warranted.
But the truth is, I’m a pretentious person so the words weren’t wasted.
I name-drop with the best, I show off and compete.

That’s not my point.

It’s this, after our conversation I found myself standing in a large group of Christians singing the words from On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand. I burnt with shame, and then we sang the lines
No merit of my own I claim,
But wholly lean on Jesus name.
I was ready to tear the offensive thing off my chest and put a match to it. I could have sworn that the T-Shirt was constructed from woven Uranium and was burning into my skin. I felt every eye in the rows behind burrowing into my back, and every mind whispering ‘sinner’. I was covered with shame…
I honestly felt something like this, although in the calm light of reality, I know that it was all just in my head. No one else really cares that much.

During that song I discovered a little of what it would be like to walk around with your sins published to the whole world. Imagine condensing your sinfulness for a day and screen-printing it on a shirt. Covering yourself with shame, without any way to avoid the glances of the people you encounter. Some people have to live like that…

Actually, all of us live like that before God. There aren’t any frills or fabric that can stop his gaze from penetrating our hearts. He sees my sin as clear as if I wore it on my chest. Wearing that T-Shirt at that moment just made me more fully aware of the way I’m clothed before God all the time.

Or would be, if not for the clothes swap I did with Jesus.

“For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” (Gal 3:27 HCSB)

I can’t begin to say how great a comfort it is to know that God doesn’t look at me and say ‘pretentious’.
He has every right.

Instead I’ve got the t-shirt printed ‘righteous’, and the label which reads ‘made on Calvary’.