Showing items filed under “The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin”

When God Does His Laundry

In the beginning, O LORD, you laid the foundation of the earth, * and the heavens are the work of your hands.

They shall perish, but you will endure; they all shall wear out like a garment; * as clothing you will change them, and they shall be changed.

These verses are from Psalm 102. Praising God for his work “in the beginning,” the psalm invokes the first verse of the Bible: “In the beginning God created.” Here the Psalmist describes God’s beginning work as laying “the foundation of the earth.” We think of foundation, first, as something that’s underneath a structure—the foundation of a house, for instance. If the foundation is well-laid, the house may well stand. With regard to the earth, of course, there is nothing “under” it—we know that it is round (and many ancients did too), not a flat thing that we could picture standing on something else. 

Perhaps it is better to think of the earth’s “foundation” as natural laws, such as the law of gravity. The late Anglican scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne spoke of the laws that govern matter as being remarkably well-constructed: over billions of years, these laws undergirded an evolving universe that ultimately produced creatures capable of thinking about the universe. Gravity, for instance, is just strong enough to keep things together but not so powerful as to cause things to collapse into each other. 

We can praise God for laying the foundation of the universe in the natural laws that underlie the workings of the cosmos.

God, Psalm 102 says, from the beginning laid these foundations and also fashioned with his (metaphorical) hands the heavens. When we think of “heaven and earth” we are thinking as expansively as it is possible for humans to think about the whole cosmos, extending to the most distant galaxies. Human beings, by contrast, are tiny, vulnerable creatures; we are buffeted about and ultimately die; the universe, “heaven and earth” as a whole, seems by comparison the very picture of permanence.

But the psalmist says, as science also knows, it ain’t so. The earth and the heavens “shall perish.” In the poetry of Psalm 102, they shall “wear out like a garment.” The earth, our familiar zillion-pound complex sphere with a lava core and a 25,000-mile circumference, is going to wear out. It is going to be no better than that threadbare coat in your closet that does no good. What a powerful put-down: the universe itself will be nothing more than a worn-out garment!

And God will take care of it. As if earth and heavens were mere clothing, God “will change them.” This doesn’t mean that the physical universe is connected to God like clothing is connected to the person who wears it; it doesn’t mean that when this created world wears out God will replace it with new clothes. It means something rather surprising. God will “change” the worn-out heaven and earth “and they shall be changed.” God is not, as it were, changing out the contents of his closet, tossing the old clothes and buying new ones. No, at the end, God will transform (and not replace!) the old heavens and earth. They won’t be thrown away. He “will change them, and they shall be changed.”

There are Latin prepositional phrases to mark this distinction. The first creation was ex nihilo, “out of nothing.” God creates everything without tools and without raw material. But the new heavens and new earth, which are to come at the end and are seen by St. John the Divine at the end of Revelation: they are created ex vetere, “out of the old.” 

Which means, I think we can say, that at the end of all things God will do his laundry. The worn-out creation will be, who knows? Washed? Mended? Resurrected? Transformed? We can’t know, we can’t even picture this, but we can wait for it with grateful anticipation.

For God’s character is not to lose anything that can be saved. He will not break even a bruised reed, as Jesus says. He watches over our world with a tender care that nothing be lost.

— 

A Note on Good Books & Good Talk. This fall we will have a series of four seminars on Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. This is perhaps the greatest novel to have arisen from a Christian heart and mind—some say the greatest novel ever, period. Yet, in part because of its length, many people have never read it. This is your chance to do so, and to enjoy doing so with other Christians. Any translation will do, but I recommend a reputable publisher (Penguin, FSG, Modern Library, etc.) rather than a cheap word-dump printing. For the first session read Part One, which includes three “books” (each book is further divided into chapters). This is about 150 or 200 pages in most printings. 

I’ll be writing more about this through the summer, including hints for people reading a Russian novel for the first time.

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The Depths of "Now the Day Is Over"

The hymn that begins “Now the day is over” is a favorite for many of us, although you are not likely to hear it in a morning service at church. I think I have sung it at Evensong a hundred times, but I was fortunate to spend a decade of my life at a church that had choral evensong many times each week. It’s in the Hymnal 1982 at #42. But if you don’t have that book you might make the acquaintance of hymnody.org, a website that has it and many other hymnals. Just search for the first line. Or go to YouTube and search for it sung to the tune Merrial.

    The author, Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), was a priest of the Church of England. His original version had eight stanzas. The Hymnal 1982 has six (some other hymnals have fewer).

    This deceptively simple hymn looks like a child’s prayer. Its words are simple and its stanzas brief, yet underneath them lie profundities.

    The first three stanzas:

    (1) Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh, / shadows of the evening steal across the sky.

    (2) Jesus, give the weary calm and sweet repose; / with thy tenderest blessing may our eyelids close.

    (3) Grant to little children visions bright of thee; / guard the sailors tossing on the deep, blue sea.

    About the child-like character, note the words from the second stanza: “Jesus . . . with thy tenderest blessing may our eyelids close.” The third stanza then begins, “Grant to little children visions bright of thee.” Yet from the start the calm childhood world is confronted with dark forces creeping through the night: “shadows of the evening steal across the sky.” “Shadows” become things that act in their own right, and their manner of acting is to “steal,” which is to say to creep or encroach upon.

    Piled upon these shadowy forces is danger. Sailors “tossing on the deep, blue sea” need to be guarded. The singer herself needs protection through the night, a night which has “watches,” hours in which someone must stay awake to ward off danger. Thus the fourth and fifth stanzas: 

    (4) Comfort every sufferer watching late in pain; / those who plan some evil from their sin restrain. 

    (5) Through the long night watches may thine angels spread / their white wings above me, watching round my bed. 

    The fifth stanza mixes the purity of a child, calling for angels to spread their white wings over her, with the realism of the need for watches, the need for wings of protection.

    And there is deep realism about sin. Sin is real and there are people who plan to commit it, to do evil—all of which is packed into a single line, the second half of the fourth stanza: “Those who plan some evil, from their sin restrain.” People do plan to do evil deeds, to commit sin in the night: the hymn prays that God “restrain” them “from their sin.” As we dig further into the meaning of this hymn, we might ask if there are particular evils that characterize sin in the night.

    Consider again the whole hymn from its opening to its final, sixth stanza. 

    (6) When the morning wakens, then may I arise / pure, and fresh, and sinless in thy holy eyes.

    The first stanza sets the scene: The day is over. Night is drawing nigh. There are shadows stealing across the sky. The final stanza sets the outcome. It begins with morning awakening, and asks that the singer may “arise” in a certain state: “pure, and fresh, and sinless” in God’s eyes. Here, I deem, is the deepest unspoken truth of this hymn. It was not a child lying down to sleep, but an adult full of, and wearied by, the characteristics of human life in this as-yet-unredeemed world. The key here is that word “sinless.” What makes this night a night that ends with the sleeper awakening free of sin? Perhaps because she was indeed restrained from any evil; perhaps, among those who would do evil in the night, she included herself.

    What might be the evil of the night? Two answers arise, neither of them complete yet each a part of the truth. The first arises from the remembrance that it was “night” into which Judas went when he betrayed Jesus. The prototypical sin of the night is to betray Jesus. 

    Which leads to the second answer. The evil of the night is to fall into sin at the end of life. The day that is over, the day that is yielding to the shadows that creep, is the day of our life. The singer is approaching her end. And she is tempted to do “some evil.”

    In our day, one particular temptation is to cut short our life deliberately, a temptation increasingly available with medical assistance in various places. “Those who plan some evil” might well be planning that in particular, though night evils also include all the well-worn sins that people have ever planned. Whatever the evil might be, it seems to me the singer imagines herself, perhaps from sheer weariness, as a potential perpetrator.

    But the singer prays God’s restraint upon evil, even as she prays to awaken “pure, and fresh, and sinless” in her resurrected body in the presence of God. There, please God, we will give thanks for every day we lived, and for Jesus who closed our eyelids with his “tenderest blessing,” who comforts all who suffer including us in our sufferings, whose Father sent angels to watch over us every day and night of our lives, and who, at the end, would waken us to himself, “pure, and fresh, and sinless.”

— 

    Out & About. Sunday, June 21, I am to preach at St. John the Apostle church in Pottsboro, one of our northmost congregations in the diocese of Dallas. The service is at 10 a.m.

 

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The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: 

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