Eternity

Eternity is not endless time or the opposite of time. It is the essence of time.

If you spin a pinwheel fast enough, all its colors blend into a single colorwhitewhich is the essence of all the colors of the spectrum combined.

If you spin time fast enough, time-past, time-present, and time-to-come all blend into a single timelessness or eternity, which is the essence of all times combined.

As human beings we know time as a passing of unrepeatable events in the course of which everything passes awayincluding ourselves. As human beings, we also know occasions when we stand outside the passing of events and glimpse their meaning. Sometimes an event occurs in our lives (a birth, a death, a marriage  some event of unusual beauty, pain, joy) through which we catch a glimpse of what our lives are all about and maybe even what life itself is all about, and this glimpse of what "it's all about" involves not just the present, but the past and future too.

Inhabitants of time that we are, we stand on such occasions with one foot in eternity. God, as Isaiah says (57:15), "inhabiteth eternity," but stands with one foot in time. The part of time where he stands most particularly is Christ, and thus in Christ we catch a glimpse of what eternity is all about, what God is all about, and what we ourselves are all about too.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Ethiopian Eunuch

The name of the Ethiopian eunuch isn't given, but he was Secretary of the Treasury under Queen Candace of Ethiopia, and he had been to Jerusalem on a religious pilgrimage. It was on his way home that the high point of the trip occurred.

He was cruising along in his chariot reading out loud to himself from the book of Isaiah when the apostle Philip happened to overhear him and asked if he understood what the words were all about. The eunuch said he could use some help on one passage in particular, and this was the passage:

As a sheep led to the slaughter or a lamb before its shearers is dumb so he opens not his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken up from the earth.

(Acts 8:32-33; compare Isaiah 53:7-8)

Who in the world was Isaiah talking about? the eunuch wanted to know, and Philip said it was Jesus. Jesus was the one who was gentle as a sheep and innocent as a lamb. He was the one who had been unjustly humiliated and slaughtered and hadn't let out so much as a peep to save himself. As for describing his generation, his time, all you could say was that he belonged to all time and every generation because his life wasn't bound to the earth anymore. His life was everywhere, and any of us could live it for ourselves or let it live itself in us as easily as a fish circulates around in the water and the water circulates around in a fish.

The way things happened, a pond turned up by the side of the road as they traveled along, and the eunuch asked why he shouldn't give the thing a try right then and there and let Philip baptize him in it. So Philip baptized him, and when that black and mutilated potentate bobbed back to the surface, he was so carried away he couldn't even speak. The sounds of his joy were like the sounds of a brook rattling over pebbles, and Philip never saw him again and never had to.

Acts 8:26-39

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Eutychus

"Sermonettes make Christianettes," the saying goes, so Saint Paul kept talking till midnight to make sure they all got the word. Then he thought of a few things he'd left out and went on a while longer. He was so caught up in his own eloquence that he didn't hear the bumblebee sounds that were emerging from a young man with his eyes more or less closed and his mouth more or less open who sat slumped over in the third-story window. It was only a woman's scream that alerted him to the fact that the boy had fallen asleep, and out, more or less simultaneously. When Paul asked his name, they told him it was Eutychus.

Everybody thought Eutychus was dead, but Paul said he'd see about that. Then he went back upstairs where, after a snack, he ran over his major points once more just to make sure. When he finally left on the early bus, they found Eutychus sitting up in bed asking for two over light and a toasted English.

This miraculous recovery, plus the fact that by then the saint was already well on his way to the next county, made them decide to throw a double celebration. Presumably somebody had the sense to suggest that this time they use the ground floor.

Acts 20:9-12

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Eve

Like Adam, Eve spent the rest of her days convincing herself that it had all worked out for the best. Their new life didn't turn out to be as bad as had been predicted, and somehow their marriage weathered the change. If they had moments of terrible bitterness over what had happened, they had other moments when it became more of a bridge than an abyss between them and when the question of which of them was to blame got lost in the question of how both of them were to survive. One son died an ugly, senseless death, and another went through life as disfigured by remorse as by a cleft palate. But all in all things didn't go too badly. When the last child left home, it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to be alone again with a man who, after his third martini, might still lash out at her as a snake in the grass and a bad apple, but at least they still had their independence and their principles, which as nearly as she could remember were what they'd given everything up for. They stood, however grimly at times, on their own feet.

It was only once in a while at night, just as she was going off to sleep with all her usual defenses down, that her mind drifted back to the days when, because there was nothing especially important to do, everything was especially important; when too good not to be true hadn't yet turned into too good to be true; when being alone was never the same as being lonely. Then sad and beautiful dreams overtook her, which she would wake up from homesick for a home she could no longer even name, to make something not quite love with a man whose face she could not quite see in the darkness at her side.

Genesis 3:1-4:16

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Evil

 God is all-powerful.

 God is all-good.

 Terrible things happen.

You can reconcile any two of these propositions with each other, but you can't reconcile all three. The problem of evil is perhaps the greatest single problem for religious faith.

There have been numerous theological and philosophical attempts to solve it, but when it comes down to the reality of evil itself, they are none of them worth much. When a child is raped and murdered, the parents are not apt to take much comfort from the explanation (better than most) that since God wants us to love him, we must be free to love or not to love and thus free to rape and murder a child if we take a notion to.

Christian Science solves the problem of evil by saying that it does not exist except as an illusion of mortal mind. Buddhism solves it in terms of reincarnation and an inexorable law of cause and effect whereby the raped child is merely reaping the consequences of evil deeds she committed in another life.

Christianity, on the other hand, ultimately offers no theoretical solution at all. It merely points to the cross and says that, practically speaking, there is no evil so dark and so obscenenot even thisbut that God can turn it to good.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

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