Good Morning Church –
This week’s assignment for a men’s early morning discussion was to bring readings – but not from Scripture – that have meant something to you or stayed with you over the years.
What was brought by we five? Excerpts from: The Brothers Karamazov, lyrics to a modern worship song, The Book Thief (novel), Into Thin Air (about a disastrous Everest expedition), this, a devastating Robert Frost poem, book on C. Columbus’ failed second journey to America, a chapter on salvation assurance, a fable from Aesop…
Here’s what I brought from Jack London’s “Call of the Wild” –
At the mouth of the Tahkeena, one night after supper, Dub turned up a snowshoe rabbit, blundered it, and missed. In a second the whole team was in full cry. A hundred yards away was a camp of the Northwest Police, with fifty dogs, huskies all, who joined the chase. The rabbit sped down the river, turned off into a small creek, up the frozen bed of which it held steadily. It ran lightly on the surface of the snow, while the dogs ploughed through by main strength. Buck led the pack, sixty strong, around bend after bend, but he could not gain. He lay down low to the race, whining eagerly, his splendid body flashing forward, leap by leap, in the wan white moonlight. And leap by leap, like some pale frost wraith, the snowshoe rabbit flashed on ahead.
All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to kill–all this was Buck’s, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm blood.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.
Reading this stuff with churchmen who have the Spirit and who interspersed the reading with a few comments, some godly… …. well, something emerged from our time together: the vast range of Christ the Creator and Upholder. There is no subject from which we cannot find our way back to our Lord, because He stands and rules at the center.
And we should find our way back! By Christ’s blood we’ve been remade priests before God – – so it becomes our renewed calling to bring heaven and earth together! It is our duty and privilege and delight to take the so-called “secular” and seeming disparate stuff and – implicitly or explicitly – point out their connection to Christ… who in His person is God-man, the One of Heaven and Earth…
…“In whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2: 3)…
…“[Who] is before all things and by him all things hold together (Colossians 1: 17).
But, again, not just keeps things together, but RULES THEM. Which means: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!'” (Bavinck). Over all – Everest, Dostoyevsky, Buck the Husky, Christopher Columbus…
And – final step, this is why our time together “worked” – in Christ all things are ours.
1 Corinthians 3:21b-23: For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.
Most of our meetings are more explicitly Christian. We’ve discussed “hope,” “the Bible and trees,” “duties to our siblings,” “spiritual insights that we think have changed us.” At our next meeting we’ll talk over “what makes a business Christian?”
But every once in a while, it’s good to experience that when Christians come together to discuss anything, the Spirit will inevitably lead them back to Jesus Christ. And that will usually be a short journey.
Colin
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