The beginning of the end has come. I have delivered my final chapel at the College, and now am finishing up final assignments, and thinking about exams. When I am less busy (in three weeks) I will also have more time to think about the fact that I am almost done (and then will be done) my final year of school (that I am aware of as of now). It's been a long haul. If I count kindergarten, then I have been in school for 24 of my (almost) 29 years. This year is my 10th year of post-secondary education, and my third degree (which I won't officially receive until next September).
Anyways, since I am in the midst of working on a paper on Open Theism, I will simply post the text of my final chapel for your enjoyment. It is inspired by and uses heavily C. S. Lewis' short work (of only 3 pages) Meditations in a Toolshed, which is an excellent piece to read. Go read it now. In connection with this chapel, I read 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:5.
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‘Swan song’ chapels, in my experience, generally follow the same theme. It seems that finals chapels in some way make mention of the fact that the speaker’s time at this institution is coming to an end, and then reflect on what has been learned and what is looming in the near future. We are, in a sense, standing with our feet in two ages. One foot is planted in the past, looking back on what has been learned, what has been experienced, and trying to put this into words that convey to those still in the midst of it a bit of wisdom gained. The other foot, however, is planted in the future, but not so firmly since we are looking ahead with some measure of uncertainty to what life will bring in the near and not-so near future. And in this we are not trying to impart wisdom gained from our experiences but somehow gain some perspective for the next step in our lives. In a way, it is imparting wisdom gained through experience, but it is a little more selfish, we ourselves are working through these things. At least, in my case it is so. Perhaps Rolf and Cornelis are more altruistic.
Having been thinking about the future and the years I spent studying (here at the College and elsewhere), a meditation by C.S. Lewis kept arising in my thoughts. I have been a fan of C.S. Lewis for a long time now. I first heard of him when my teacher in grades 3 and 4 read the Chronicles of Narnia (or as many as she could get through) to us while we ate lunch. In university I rediscovered him while studying philosophy and read all that I could get my hands on so that I had a more Christian perspective. One of his writings that continued with me through the years is a short meditation of only 3 or so pages. It was entitled “Meditations in a Toolshed,” and it begins like this:
I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.
Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, ninety-odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.
Lewis uses this image in a meditation concerning knowledge and perception. He argues that the modern mindset that the scientific view of things is the best and ‘true’ understanding has become the norm, and that the experience of the thing itself—the looking along the beam—has been ‘brow-beaten’ out of scientific circles. Looking at the beam gives one a truer picture of the thing than looking along it. He enforces this image by giving some easily grasped illustrations, the best of which, in my estimation, is this one:
The girl cries over her broken doll and feels that she has lost a real friend; the psychologist says that her nascent maternal instinct has been temporarily lavished on a bit of shaped and coloured wax.
In this way, the emotional experience of the young girl is dissected by the psychologist and made less real than the explanation of it. What the girl experiences and what the scientist sees are two very different things. I won’t go into much detail about this, since I am going to use this image of looking at and looking along for a different purpose. I am, in fact, stealing it for my own purposes.
You might ask ‘what does this image have to do with 1 Corinthians 1?’ And I would answer, ‘not much.’ The idea that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing but the power of God to those who are being saved is similar, perhaps, to the idea of two ways of looking. Those who are perishing look at the gospel and see it as foolish—God became man, died a shameful death, and in this way the power of death and Satan are destroyed? Ridiculous! But those who are being saved look along the gospel, and they see God. They see God in his justice, his mercy, his love—they see in the gospel an expression of the nature of God. They see, in effect, where the gospel points, and not just the contents of the gospel itself.
To me, this is the task of a minister. As Rolf spoke about on Monday, we are to be unashamed workmen, correctly handling the word of truth. And correctly handling this word is not simply a matter of parsing every verb properly, understanding the clauses and their grammar, and putting it all together in a neat package. Correctly handling this word of truth is using the contents to point at where they originate. Correctly handling the word of truth means that we are to try our best to take what the Lord has given to us in his revelation and not simply look at it, although this is part of what needs to be done, but also to look along it to see God as he has revealed himself.
And precisely here is where I can see the task of a minister, much like the task of a student or a professor, becoming difficult. With our study of God’s word, our mind so often contemplating the finer points of grammar (or in my case desperately trying to understand the minor points of grammar before Prof. Van Dam asks me about them), and in academically studying the contents of scripture it can easily happen that we cease looking along these things and only look at them. It becomes an academic exercise rather than coming to know our Lord more and more.
Having studied for some time now, I think most of us know that there is a huge difference between studying something academically and studying something devotionally, for lack of a better word. There are scholars who know the bible better than perhaps most of us do, and yet don’t believe a word of it. I think it’s Prof. Van Dam who likes to tell the story of Rudolph Bultmann who did not believe in a historical resurrection, and yet could preach an Easter sermon that drove the congregation to tears. To many, the gospel has become foolishness because they have ceased looking along it, and have only looked at it. Studying God’s word does not, in itself, guarantee that our minds will remain fixed on heavenly things, only the Holy Spirit can do that. But an almost certain way of sidetracking our minds is by forgetting that there is something more than simply looking at the text, we are too look along it, and looking at the text is to serve this looking along it.
However, this is more than just a distinction that has personal ramifications. I can’t help but feel unequal to the pastoral task precisely because I cannot simply get people to look at whichever text it is that I am preaching on, but must lead them as well as I can to look along the text to see the God to whom it points. The only consolation I have is that it is not me that is going to be doing this. All I can do is to fulfill my responsibility as best as I can, making sure that I point myself and those who listen both at and along the text. Beyond this, it is the Holy Spirit who works it in their hearts and mine as well. This does not take away any of my responsibility, but at least it makes the thought of such responsibility bearable.
On a practical side, it is only by looking along scripture as well as at it that we can truly work with it at all as God’s word. In his meditation, Lewis concludes that we must look both at and along things—both types of knowledge are necessary. In our context, looking at scripture is a necessary corrective for some of the not-so-grounded ideas we may have of God when we look along scripture. And the same can be said for our work in a congregation. By being trained to look at scripture in a deep way, we are in a good position to point our listeners properly along scripture to see where it rightly ends. Both types of looking correct each other. Looking at is corrected, filled out, given substance by looking along, while looking along is corrected, given foundation, moored and anchored by looking at. There is no such thing as total objectivity (except in the case of God), but we can at least be aware of our subjectivity and work in ways that broaden its scope.
The gospel is foolishness to those who can only look at it, whereas it is the power of God to those who know how to look along it as well.
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