Occasionally the fit takes me...

And suddenly I am not in this old blue stuffed leather chair in Dallas, watching the late hours unwind in a outspread city that hauls itself wearily through the dog days of August. I am in an Israeli cafe in Taipei, eating hummus and pitas while a tired-eyed woman sits nearby with her small white dog and smokes a cigarette. The moisture-laden street air wanders inside to hear The Doors playing on tiny speakers affixed above photos of the Masada and the Dead Sea. Now it's Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, and a scooter passes by. Life flows on here, slowly to the muffled hum of traffic and pedestrians and the sounds of preparing food. I am aware of its passing, as the afternoon sun beats down on a faded awning outside.

And now it is night. The sky an amber glow of light pollution, the blurry air ablaze with store signs and neon, the asphalt damp and shining. Countless people throng the bright and narrow streets, their conversations rising to the upper building floors looking down on them from either side. One cannot lose one's self in that crowd, for to plunge into it is to join it, become another unique piece of it. Smells assault from all sides, sharp and pungent, strong and savory. The senses are fully engaged. To be at rest is to walk, moving slowly along the streets which will not clear for many hours yet, for here the night is also alive.

Wheels of Fire

Was fascinated by the book of Ezekiel today. Why do I hear so little of the awe-inspiring Biblical imagery used in sermons today? Perhaps in lives carefully insulated from surprises or risk, something so transcendent is irrelevant to us, we want 'practical' messages which do not require mental distillation in order to apply directly to our lives.

Or perhaps in our modern 'enlightened' understanding of the world, we are embarrassed by the more 'outre' supernaturalism in the Bible. That explains why we can handle Jesus changing water to wine, but not stopping the sun in Joshua. Water to wine requires less suspension of disbelief, because it is "smaller", though both turn the known laws of physics on their head. Had the miracle recounted Jesus changing the Sea of Galilee from water to wine, doubtless many in the church would be working out how to explain it in terms of a algae bloom or other means. How strange that our reasoning should be so flawed. The very term supernatural means
something beyond nature. If the supernatural is possible, it is inherently not limited to small examples. If Jesus could change stones into bread, He could have changed the moon into bread by the same principle. And yes, maintained preservation of momentum too. He is God.

If we actually believe that the existence of the entire universe is continuously maintained by our Creator God, our worldview should reflect that. The western church today (in general) appears to accept this proposition as valid, but without it making much of a difference in their day to day lives. This is not the same as disbelief, but neither is it faith in a Biblical sense.

Perhaps the medieval church had something we need today. Without the 'benefit' of a post-enlightenment view of the world, they did not find it hard to believe in the miraculous, because they understood that we live in that kind of world.
And we still do live in that kind of world. Cynical Westerners (or Easterners) need but travel to numerous places around the world to receive severe challenges to their faith in the impossibility of the scientifically inexplicable.

Let us meditate on the reality of the universe in which we find ourselves; one in which the supernatural is indeed possible, for the universe itself is not eternal, but has been created by One from outside it, Who was before it. The world is then by definition a supernatural one, indeed the purely natural can only exist in contrast to the supernatural, otherwise the natural is merely 'what is'. But we know that the natural can not include all that is.
Therefore let us not act as if the unabashedly supernatural perspective of Scripture were an overexuberant and slightly embarrassing tendency which we can effectively gloss over as exceptional. The whole of Scripture is infused with this recognition of the nature of reality. Let us allow Scripture to adjust our worldviews accordingly, and not vice versa.