What does it mean to live?  What, really, does it mean to live as a human being on this planet, in this life, in this reality?
     These are big questions, questions we cannot answer in one, two, or even five blogs.  However, I draw your attention to what I believe to be a reasonable encapsulation of an answer.  Let's look at the twenty-eighth chapter of the book of Job in the Hebrew Bible.
     Perhaps you know the story of Job.  If not, I will briefly summarize it.  When the book opens, Job is one of the wealthiest people of his day--and one of the most devout, too.  From all appearances, Job seems to have it all together:  wealth, family, respect, alignment with his creator.  One day, however, for reasons that Job (and we), even to the final chapter of the book, never really learn with perfect clarity, God allows severe misfortune to come upon Job.  In a very short time, through a set of excruciating and painful circumstances, Job loses his family, his health, and a good part of his vast resources.  He emerges a broken man.
     Yet Job remains loyal to God, insisting that, whatever has happened, he will continue to believe in God, and that he will continue to see God as the greatest meaning of his existence.  So we come to chapter 28, set roughly halfway in the course of his lengthy laments, complaints, rejoinders, and meditations.  This chapter is a rumination about wisdom.
     Humanity, says Job as he opens the chapter, is born "to put an end to darkness,' to seek and search out his limits, to grapple with all the material challenges of existence, to "hew out channels from the rocks," to bring what is hidden into the light.  Humans are made to take on the world and all the adventures, opportunities, and insights it brings.  This is their work, this is their calling (verses 1-11).
     And it is this work that becomes the content of history.  History is the story of humanity striving to come to grips with and make sense of the world into which it, through no choice or fault of its own, is born.  Every era, every event, every discovery, every illumination comes out of this quest to understand and, in a larger sense, to "be" as human beings.  This is our destiny, mine, yours, everyone's:  we are here to leap into the joys and challenges of existence.  It is our richest hope, our deepest vision, a hope and vision that undergirds all others.
     However, as Job subsequently points out, despite all this laudable (and essential and inevitable) striving and achievement, there is one thing that humans will not find in the material work of this life:  wisdom or, put another way, the key to and measure of existence.  Though we conquer the world, though we may learn everything there is to be learned about space and time, though we may solve every engineering puzzle, we will never, in its fullness, find what existence means.  We will never find what is most important and true.
     Why is this?  We will not find it because, as Job states in the final verse (v. 28), "it is the reverence (the respect of, the attention on, the focus upon, the investment in) of God that is wisdom."  It is a humble faith in God that produces true wisdom and understanding.  Yes, we are born to be and take on our lives.  But we are also born, Job is saying, to recognize that, even though we may deconstruct every riddle on the planet, we will never fully understand what it all means.  We remain thoroughly and completely human, forever trapped in insuperable boundaries and unassailable limits on our grasp of what is most real and true.  We will never fully comprehend life's meaning on our own.
     This is why Job said what he did.  He knew, knew intimately and well, that, in the big picture, it is God from whom we find the meaning of history and our existence.  It is from God that we find the wisdom to fathom who we are and what we mean.   It is in God that we will understand our hope and vision as human beings.
     We are born to live.  That is our calling.  But we are also born to realize that we will never be able to live fully unless we recognize that we need God to step beyond our materials limits, the felt strictures of our finitude, to find out what everything--what we do, who we are--means.
     What does it mean to live?  It means to explore and understand everything we possibly can, yet it is also to recognize that we need God to know what anything we may do and find really and most means.

      As the nation charges toward the presidential election in November, too many people of faith forget that whoever emerges victorious the night of November 6 will not be victorious of their own accord.  He will be victorious because, for reasons many, sundry, and mostly unknown to us, now and in the years to come, God allowed him to be so.  Within the grand design of history, time, and eternity, whoever is elected president will be elected only by the permission and intentions of God.  He will be the president solely because God has deigned, again, for reasons entirely his own, that he should be so.
     So what if the new American president turns out to be a fraud?  Or what if the president or, alternately, a dictator of another nation, a nation here or in the immediate or distant historical past, is the most repugnant ruler the world has ever seen?  Is this, too, by the hand of God?  Does God really want such people to rule the people he created?
     It is unlikely that God wants such people to rule, that he wants them to inflict untold hardship and heartache on millions of human beings.  But God allows the world to run along as it will, pain and suffering and oppression and all--yet he is always working in it to effect his eternal (and forever good) intention and purpose.  In the end, what God wants to happen will indeed happen.  Regardless of how we may see the might and harm of rulers, God sees them as pawns, mere highly evanescent pawns in a much larger adventure of his making--not theirs.  As the prophet Daniel said long ago, "It is God who changes the times and the epochs; he removes kings and establishes kings; he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those of understanding" (Daniel 2:21).  While we may mourn and despise the actions of those who rule, be it today or many millennia ago, we should always remind ourselves that despite what we may understand or see, God sees and understands more.  As hard as it may be to believe, God always knows what he is doing.  In the end, his good, his absolutely good purpose will prevail.
     And in this we can rejoice, not because things are wonderful, because they rarely are, but because God is working through things to, in the end, make them more wonderful than we can possibly imagine.
     "Relax" and let go of November 6:  it's in God's hands (Psalm 46:10).

     Have you ever prayed?  Have you ever--ever at all--called out to whoever or whatever you thought or imagined was beyond you for help?  If you are human, chances are that, at some point in your life, even if it was very early in your life, you have.  Regardless of how we may feel about the existence of God, today or in our early years, we almost inevitably, when caught in an extraordinarly dire situation, tend to cry out to some idea or personnage of the divine.
     When we do so, whether or not we really believe in the reality of this "divine," we, even if we do not intend to, implicitly endorse, in some form, its existence.
     The writer of Psalm 116 understand this very well.  "I believed when I said," he wrote, "I am greatly afflicted."  The writer knew, knew implicitly that when he told God that he was in immense pain, he was, in effect, telling God that he believed he was there and, more importantly, that he was fully capable of helping him.
     So pray, pray fervently and constantly, and believe, with the writer of Psalm 116 (and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews) that, "God is, and that he responds to those who seek him" (Hebrews 11:6).
     Think about it:  if you do not believe, why would you bother to pray?

     If you have seen the movie "Chariots of Fire," you may recall a scene in which Eric Liddle, one of the two runners on whose life the movie is based, spoke in a church the Sunday morning on which he had declined to race (he believed that he should not run on the Sabbath).  He based his message on a portion of chapter 40 of the prophet Isaiah.  In this passage, the prophet, after underscoring the painfully transient power of the many rulers of the earth (verses 23-24), then goes on, in verses 27 to 31, to laud the way that, in his great and inscrutable sovereign power, God gives power to the weary, that those who in faith call on God for help and strength will receive it, in abundance.  As the omnipotent creator who controls every aspect of the universe, God will happily give hope and relief to the many people (maybe you are one of them) who, every day and for countless reasons, find themselves at the end of their rope, unable and, in some instances, unwilling, to go on.
     All they need do is ask.
     Over the weekend, I completed a half ironman triathlon, swimming 1.2 miles, bicycling 56 miles, and running 13.1 miles, one event after the other, burning through about six hours of an otherwise beautiful day in the northern stretches of the American midwest.  As I came to the close of the bike segment, I passed a woman who, as I moved by her, called out to me, "Hallelujah, praise the Lord, we're almost finished!"  To which I replied, "Yes:  praise God!"  And we both knew why:  true to form, in perfect sync with the words he spoke through Isaiah, God had indeed given us the strength we needed to finish that part of the race.  As surely as he moves the heavens and earth and set the cosmos into motion, so was God moving in our bodies, our trained and conditioned, though at that point greatly challenged bodies, to keep us going and, in the words of Isaiah, enabling us to "rise up with wings like eagles, to run and not get tired or weary."
     All we had to do was ask.

     What if God didn't speak?  Would we hear anything?  Would we be anything?  In creating the apophatic (hidden) God, modernity, though it succeeded in removing divine oversight from the human adventure, it also, intentionally or not, made us the origin of all things, made us the ones who speak to ourselves, from ourselves, in a world that we insist is from ourselves--even though, ironically enough, we will never control what we have made.
     If we really want to hear, if we really want to be, we must listen to the one who was and heard first.

     Friedrich Nietzsche once observed that, "As the circle of science grows larger, it touches paradox at more places."  Though Nietzsche wrote these words in the late nineteenth century, well before the rise of quantum mechanics and relativity and their gradual unbending of physical and chronological certainty in our perception of reality, he was remarkably prescient.  Modern science has indeed demonstrated to us that we must learn to live with paradox in formulating our conclusions about reality, that although we remain perceptual beings, we can not necessarily be certain of how we are seeing what we see, and that we must learn to live with unfinished truths about the way the cosmos works and has (to quote Aratus) "its being".  To live is to live with paradox.
     This brings us to another equally important point about science and us.  Although science is very good at bringing us explanations, even if they often end in unsettling paradox, for how our world and the universe it inhabits process and move about, it is, oddly enough, unable to tell us what these explanations, and the paradoxes on which they often depend, mean.  Put another way, science cannot tell us why.  Why is the world the way it is?  Why is it here?  Why are we here?  And why is paradox the only way that we can understand reality?  Science cannot tell us.
     But God, the God who created reality and the science that explains it, can.  God, the living and active God who, many centuries ago, actually visited and lived in this reality, this reality he himself made, can tell us why we and the world are here.  And though God often seems rife with paradox as well (more on this later), we can nonetheless be assured that God knows, beyond any doubt, what everything uultimately means.  And if, day in and day out, we continue to look, in all things, to God in faith, one day, in an extraordinarily marvelous way, we will know, too.  We will understand.
     And we will never need to ask why again.

     One of the last lines in "Here the Birds' Journey Ends," a poem written by Mahmoud Darwish, reads, "And we will etch on the final rocks, 'Long live life, long live life.'" That's quite a wish.  On the one hand, we know that, unless something extraordinary happens on earth, none of us will live indefinitely on this planet.  One day, we all will die.  As much as we may treasure life, this life we live in this present moment, we know that we will not be able to enjoy it forever.  Eventually, it will end.
     On the other hand, we know that our lives are but one manifestation of the life that grounds the lives that all of us live, that undergirding and fueling our individual lives is life, the life that animates and enlivens us all.  Without this life, none of us would be here.  That we are born, live, and die is the fruit, the outward and visible individuated expression of this "life" that pervades the planet.  We live because there is life, because life exists, exists not just as a concept but as papable and concrete reality.  Without this life, we would have no reality.
     So, yes, indeed, may life live.  May we always be part of and experience this vast bios, this teeming movement of existence that gestates and ripples across the universe and, specifically for us, sweeps and pervades planet Earth.  May life always be, may life always be here to birth us, grow us, enlighten us, even, sadly enough, end us.  May life always be here for us.
     One day, however, even this "life" will end.  The laws of physics demand it.  Nothing lasts forever, not even this bios which we--and everyone who has ever lived or will live--enjoy.
     Or does it?  If this "life" came about through evolution and circumstance, then, yes, we would expect it, like all other things, to end.  That's just the way things are.  We are born, we live, we die, then other people are born, live, and die, and so on until the bios in which we all find existence dies, too.  Tragic, perhaps, but it's reality.
     But it also leaves us without any meaning:  what, really, was the point of anything?
     What if, however, if life is not the product of random variation and circumstance, but the work of God?  What if God is the author of life, this vast and remarkable bios (and our individual expressions of it) we enjoy?  What if God created life, intended for it to be, thus endowing it with meaning and purpose?  What if life has a reason to be here?
     If God created life, then, yes, let life continue to live--even if we one day die.  Why?  If God created life, then it follows that God can create it again.  And again.  And again.  God brings life to be.  Hence, even if we lose this present life, as we one day will, we will live again.  An eternal God who creates a finite existence can also create an eternal one.  Life will continue to live, but it will be lived forever.
     So, yes, long live life, long live this present existence.  Who really wants to die?  But long live even more life beyond it, long live an eternal life (the life) created by an eternal God.  Long live the present, yet long live the future, a future only possible because an eternal God creates it, a future only possible because an intentionally caring God has endowed life with a meaning beyond itself, a meaning rooted in the absolute meaningfulness of an eternal and purposeful creator.
     Long live life:  God's life for us.
    

     Toward the close of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus compared how two kinds of people, the wise and the foolish, build their houses.  The wise person, he said, builds his house upon a sturdy foundation, one that is hewn from stone and rock.  His house will withstand any storm that comes upon it.

     But the foolish person, he said, builds his house on a foundation of dirt and sand.  His house will vanish with the first storm of the season, gone as quickly as it appeared.

     What do Jesus' metaphors mean?  Let's think about something Jesus said to the Jewish leader Nicodemus toward the beginning of his ministry in Galilee.  As the third chapter of John recounts the episode, Nicodemus admitted to Jesus that the only way that he could have done what he had been doing would be if he had come from God.  Immediately sensing that Nicodemus understood something pivotal to grasping the essence of his ministry, Jesus replied, "Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

     If you really want to understand and know me, Nicodemus, Jesus was saying, you must become a new person, an absolutely and completely new person.  But, he was also saying, Nicodemus, you will never be able to do this on your own.  You're a captive of the passing sands of your earthly existence.  Nicodemus, you must find your rebirth in God.  You must make God the core of your spiritual genesis and beginning; you must entrust your spiritual journey to God, the rock that withstands all attempts to undermine it.

     When we find our spiritual rebirth in God, we are genuinely and permanently "born again."  We find a uniquely new life, a uniquely new way of being, a joyfully rich beingness that did not come from us but from the only one who can give it to us:  God.  We build our lives on the only foundation that lasts, the foundation in which all things have their origin and meaning.

     And we make the starting points of our life steadfast and sure, our vision clear and true.  We root our lives in a solid footing, a firm escarpment of rebirth and renewal that is rooted in the ultimate truth of creation.  Our lives will hold up under any storms that come our way, our purview supports us through any trial we endure.  Our soul stays fresh, constantly challenged, refined, and encouraged and enabled to become one step better than it is now.  Life becomes an exciting new journey, for it has a new beginning.  Why should it not?  It’s now rooted in God.

     God is a personal God, a profoundly personal God.  And because, as Genesis 1 tells us, he, this personal God created humans--you and me--in his image, we are personal, too, richly personal beings living on a personal planet set into a personal universe.
     And God is a covenantal God, a God of commitment, intentionality and, perhaps most important, promise.  God is a God who remembers, who considers, and who acts, eternally, on behalf of those whom he loves.  God is unfailingly concerned and devoted to the eternal well being of those who long for and call upon him.  It is in God as promise that we find our hope, it is in God as promise we find our meaning.  It is in God as promise that we see the measure of all things.

     Nearly three weeks ago, my wife's uncle, the only surviving member of her parents' generation, died after a brief--he was gone barely a month after he received the diagnosis--battle with pancreatic cancer.  Athough Carol was there, she unfortunately missed his last breath, coming as it did around 1:30 in the morning.  But Ralph had a good life and we were thankful that at 85 he had done everything he had ever wanted to do, even, after living over fifty years in San Antonio, Texas, moving his wife and himself to Grand Junction, Colorado a little over a year before.
     More broadly speaking, Ralph's passing, as should every human passing, gives us pause at the enormity and inevitability of death.  No one can avoid it.  It also serves to remind us, again, of the powerful wisdom expressed in Ecclesiastes 12:13 that, "above all else, fear God and keep his commandments."
     Though we can define the fear of God in a number of ways (the Hebrew word being used here is also translated in other passages as "reverence"), what we want to take away most from this is the fact of God and the moral structure which he implanted in the universe.  If God did not create the world with a moral structure--commandments and moral order--the world simply could not exist, for even to exist is a moral condition.
     Moreover, God's morality is one with his love.  God loves us, God endows us with morality and moral purpose.  Ralph died in God's love, a love of crystal clear moral vision, a vision that, rooted as it is in God, holds all things together with meaning, substance, and purpose.
     We miss you, Ralph, but we are grateful that you died in the compass of the beatific moral vision.

     According to Genesis 11, God (speaking as a triune entity), when he observed that the people living on the earth had gathered together on the plain of Shinar (probably near ancient Babylon, in modern day Iraq) to build a tower to the heavens, resolved to go "down" to the earth and confuse (literally, "mix") their languages (literally, "lips").  Why would God do such a thing?  Why would God not want humans to speak the same language?  Why would he not want people to understand each other?
     Consider the context.  After the fall (Genesis 3), any hope of humanity getting along with itself had vanished.  And after the flood, as Genesis 10 makes clear, humanity began to migrate and diversify, spreading throughout the world, rippling into many, many different tribes and nations, and developing just as many, if not more, different languages.  Though the people in the plain of Shinar were together in intention and speech, even if God had not confused their language, they would have split eventually apart anyway:  a fallen humanity cannot keep itself in constant comraderie and unity.  God knew what had come before and, more importantly, what would yet occur as human history began to play itself out across the landscapes of the planet.  He knew that diversity, though inevitable and entirely human, was, at that time, a reflection, not of divine design, but an unplanned and unconsidered product of human sin.
     But all was not lost.  Think about the day of Pentecost, the day when, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the people who were gathered in a room in Jerusalem began to speak in a multiplicity of languages, languages from all over the known world and, amazingly enough, regardless of the language, could all understand each other.  In an odd sort of way, diversity had now become oneness.  Diversity was now design!  What was God doing?
     What God was doing, in this instance was to, after seeing and grieving over millennia of human fracturing and antimony, in the person and work of his son Jesus, bring the diversity of his human creations back together.  He was bringing people into a new community, a new gathering, a new assembly of life, love, and unity under the heavens.  In the advent of his Son, God was transforming diversity and difference and linguistic variation from points and results of contention and friction into pillars of a community that lauds and celebrates them as visible expressions of the creativity of God.  In the reconciling work of Christ, God ensured that diversity and difference would become, not the random outgrowth of fallenness and sin, but the fully ordained and truest picture of whom God made people to be:  nearly infinite variations, conformed to the image of Jesus Christ and bound in eternal community, of the generative work of a God who desires for them to be with him forever.

     In chapter seven of his enigmatic work, the writer of Ecclesiastes advises, "Do not say, 'Why is it that the former days were better than these?  For it is not from wisdom that you ask about this.'"  When life becomes difficult and full of seemingly insuperable challenges, we are often tempted to look back at other days, other times, and wonder whether we would not be happier living in them instead of the turmoil in which we find ourselves at the present moment.  Or when we attend a reunion, be it high school or college, see our old friends and acquaintances, and relive the halcyon days of our past, those days when responsibilities were few and fun was ever available and present, those days when the world seemed to be always smiling on us and our antics and frivolity, and we then reflect on where we are now and the many obstacles it presents t us, we may wonder why it must be this way, may wonder why we cannot continue to live in such unfettered bliss.  Sometimes the former days really do seem better than the present moment.
     And perhaps from one standpoint they are.  Being young can be very fun (but so can being old!)!  On the other hand, I think the writer is making an important point about God.  He is telling us that although God indeed exists eternally, he is a God not of the past, but a God of the present and, we can be grateful, the future.  While God uses our past in nummerable ways, he is more interested in building upon it to create a better present and, eventually, future for us.  Don't look back, he tells us, but look ahead.  Look ahead to what I still have for you, look ahead to the wonders I have yet to unfold in your life.  I have much more for you.  Remember your past, yes, for that is where you have come from, that is what has made you who you are today, but embrace the future, the future that I, the eternal God has for you.  Rejoice in what I am about to do!
     So does God speak through the prophet Isaiah that, "behold, I will do something new, now it will spring forth; will you not be aware of it?"  Indeed:  open your heart to the newness of God.