Summer Musings

Hello Members and Friends of Head of Christiana,

As you may know, we were blessed to spend a week in Rehoboth Beach for our vacation this summer, arriving the evening of Sunday, July 5th, just in time for the fireworks on the beach marking the city’s 4th of July celebrations. We eagerly set up our blanket in the sand some fifteen minutes before the display expecting a spectacle, which is precisely what we got, though not in the way you might expect. Something must have gone wrong in the set-up, because as the fireworks started, the beach immediately filled with smoke. The display itself was truly something to behold, at least from our vantage point facing south. About half of the fireworks, on the ocean-side, were visible, but the shore-side half of the display was completely obscured by a thick and ever-thickening column of smoke. My understanding is that, viewed from town of further inland, all you could see was the smoke. It was undoubtedly the most bizarre and comically amusing fireworks shows I’ve ever seen. Jokes abounded from the crowd. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” one spectator cried, quoting the film Apocalypse Now. “More Smoke! More Smoke! More Smoke!” cheered another onlooker. The general atmosphere was not one of disappointment so much as the sense of watching someone fall on their face (albeit harmlessly) in real-time.

Then my brother, who was able to visit a couple of days with us, turned to me and said, “well, Reverend, is that your pillar of fire and pillar of smoke?,” referencing God’s leading Moses and the Israelites out of Egypt. It was meant as a joke, and I took it as such, but reflecting back on it led me to consider something rather profound. Namely, the phenomenon wherein God’s revelation is paradoxically wrapped up in God’s mystery. The pillar of fire found within—but not contained by—the pillar of cloud, the smoke of thick darkness.

We as Christians are of course grateful for God’s self-revelation in scripture, and we affirm and meditate on the historic creeds of our tradition, and rightly so. Yet when we rest too secure in the familiar, in the scripted, in the doctrinal, we run the risk of letting our certainty drive out mystery, and in so doing, we strip God of his transcendent majesty in an awkward attempt to tame him. As I’ve often said, a God that I could put in a box and fully understand wouldn’t be much of a God worth believing in. Perhaps those smoked-over fireworks provide a perfect metaphor for how we should approach our knowledge of God, at least on this side of eternity: wholly other, obscured by clouds, as it were, yet somehow breaking through the mystery and across the transcendent divide to be made known to the world, most sublimely through putting on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. In leaving a little space in our systems of thought and practices for the mystery of God, we honor God’s total freedom to be truly sovereign. In doing so, we just might also be freeing up space in our worldviews to be surprised by the unending goodness of our uncontainable, untamable God.

Pastor Myles

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:
Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
1 Corinthians 13:12