A Theological Phrasebook entry.

Let’s circle back to Moses’ ancestor Abraham for a moment. One day God, the great I Am, decides to visit Abraham (Genesis 18). Abraham is taking a nap in the midday heat when three men show up at his door. Abraham wakes from his drowsy stupor, sees who it is (somehow he seems to have some inkling that it’s God), and leaps up and starts rushing around, giving orders, getting bread baked and livestock slaughtered, before finally standing off to the side like an attentive innkeeper while his guests eat.

It is a funny scene. God, creator of the universe, sitting in the heat, while sweaty Abraham scurries around yelling at his wife and servants. It takes time to slaughter and cook a calf. Time to bake bread. What are the three guests talking about, as they sit in the shade of Abraham’s tent?

God eats his fill and then turns to Abraham and makes a promise: “I will surely return to you about this time next year and Sarah your wife will have a son.” God had already made this promise to Abraham the chapter before but he now commits himself to a timeline and makes sure Sarah can hear it. And Sarah, who is “old and advanced in years … past the age of childbearing” responds the same way Abraham did in chapter 17: she laughs.

A Theological Phrasebook entry.

You may be familiar with the story of Moses. In exile in the desert he encounters God as a burning bush. God says, “Hey, guess what, I’m going to bring Israel out of Egypt, and you are the man to make it happen.” And Moses says, “Um, I’m most definitely not, please send someone else.” And God says, “I’m going to be with you, the fact that you’re not particularly impressive is actually kind of part of a larger point I’m trying to make, so let’s get going.” And Moses says, “No really, please, send someone else, I not only don’t want to go, I’m bad at public speaking.” And God says, “I insist.”

And, off Moses goes, and there is the “Let my people go” and plagues and crossing of the Red Sea stuff and it’s easy to see why it gets presented in a Hollywood hero sort of way, what with the plucky underdog facing off against the god-among-men-pharaoh, and the raising of staffs in dramatic moments and whatnot. But, there is a strange little story tucked into Exodus 4 that I have spent a lot of time thinking about in the course of my Christian life.

A Theological Phrasebook entry.

There are many paths that can be traced across the map of theology. They diverge and intersect in different ways, trying to describe the indescribable landscape of God and his relationship to his creation. God will always exceed our capacity to describe him. If God is perfectly captured by our understanding we have reached a point where what we are exploring is no longer God.

Creation is the affirmation that the universe contains music and not just noise (or at least that was how I described it in my earlier riff on Proverbs 8). But there are other ways of trying to describe creation. In the first chapters of Genesis, we are told a story of a garden, of a good world spoken into being, but also a specific place: “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.” Genesis presents both God-all-powerful creating by speech alone, and God-the-gardener planting trees and shaping human beings from the mud of the earth.

The garden of Eden is a place marked by abundance. It is a place where there is enough – where hunger is satisfied. There is food, there is intimacy, there is purpose, there is ultimately God, the source of this abundance, walking and talking with human beings in the cool of the evening. As already mentioned, this happy state of affairs ends. Adam and Eve disobey God’s command and are made to leave the garden. They no longer experience a life marked by abundance but are made to toil in a world marked by scarcity and division. It is not purely a material loss. Adam and Eve lose access to the garden and to the intimacy with one another and with God that they previously enjoyed. They hide from one another and from God. They become never-enough creatures.

A Theological Phrasebook entry.

One of the best illustrated books I discovered when I had children was John Burningham’s Mr. Gumpy’s Outing. The story starts with a man who decides to take trip down a river in his boat. As he floats along he begins to collect passengers. Two children, a rabbit, a cat, a dog etc. Each passenger receives a warning as they board Mr. Gumpy’s (increasingly full) boat, a limit they are told they cannot transgress. The limit is specific to each passenger. So, the children are told they can come for a ride as long as they “don’t squabble”; the rabbit can come as long as it doesn’t “hop about”; the cat, provided it does not chase the rabbit, etc.

You know how this story is going to end, don’t you? Of course you do.

Mr. Gumpy’s boat travels lazily down the river under the summer sun with its crew of children and animals and,

For a little while they all went along happily but then …
The goat kicked
The calf trampled
The chickens flapped
The sheep bleated
The pig mucked about
The dog teased the cat
The cat chased the rabbit
The rabbit hopped
The children squabbled
The boat tipped
And into the water they fell.

When reading this to my children, I would always punctuate the picture of Mr. Gumpy’s fall into the river with a dramatic “SPLAAAAAAAASHHH!” (For the concerned reader: things turn out ok for Mr. Gumpy and crew in the end – they climb out, dry off in the sun on the walk home, and have tea at Mr. Gumpy’s house).

A Theological Phrasebook entry.

A thump in the night and I am awake, staring at the glowing digits of the bedside alarm clock: 3:17AM. I roll over in the quiet but my mind is already vibrating with the dissonance of the coming day. It is unlikely that I am going to be able to navigate back towards sleep. Nothing unusual here, just considering the state of things, the various paths I have walked down that have brought me to this moment, 3:17AM, in the dark.

At different times in my life there have been moments of crisis in these early morning hours: a particular source of suffering elbowing me sharply in the ribs. But, I have been fortunate, with crises few and far between. More common is a mix of the mundane and existential: a concern about whether or not I filtered the duplicate data in that spreadsheet yesterday bumping up against a question of life purpose. How did I end up here, clicking imaginary Excel cells in the middle of the night? At 3:17AM I don’t have the ability to parry the inquiries, my defenses are down, my mind too loud and the world too silent.

The language of digital alarm clocks and Excel spreadsheets may somehow imply that this is a uniquely modern sort of thing. We might like to think so, it would make us feel special: the brave modern, facing the dark, where the ancients huddled under the comforting cloak of ritual and tradition. But, some ancient near eastern poet, thousands of years ago reminds us that there is nothing new in the anxieties of 3:17AM: “in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; my soul refuses to be comforted … You hold my eyelids open; I am so troubled I cannot speak” (Psalm 77). There is some difference here, I admit, the psalmist is considerably more engaged with something, with Someone (that “You”), than I usually am in contemplating the emptiness of the night. But we recognize each other across the years.

There is something deeply human about the dark hour of 3:17AM, that moment of trying to make sense of things (and usually failing). Human beings are the “praying animal,” said the American theologian, Robert Jenson, and this is something of what he meant, I think. We are a creature that wants to understand things as a whole, that wants to make sense of things. To be a praying animal is to wake at 3am and be turned outwards to the night, to ask questions of it that it can never quite answer to our satisfaction.

Further exploration:

• Psalm 77
• Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (Walker Percy)
• Dag Solstad’s T. Singer