Perhaps we might consider the ways in which, during Advent, its not so much that the branches are hung on the church, but rather that the church hangs on them —hangs our hopes, corporate and personal, on the promises of the Branch-King Jesus.

Under the yoke of bondage in Egypt the House of Israel groaned. And Yahweh heard them and set them free from the house of slavery. Out of their pain they raised a loud cry. Understand: they made their pain eloquent; they gave it voice.

But what, one might wonder, if Pharaoh had had at his disposal, the entertainment-media and pharmacological industries we boast of in the west? What would have become of the groaning of Israel in Egypt?

Kimbell Kornu cites Jonathan Edwards to the effect that, “One alone, without any reference to any more, cannot be excellent” (Edwards 1980, 337; as quoted by Kornu, 2014, 46). Which is to say that the goodness of the Unity of God (his oneness) is mutually dependent upon his plurality, (his trinity). His Unity is a real unity of persons, and not a mere abstract formula that could be summarized: “x=1”. The God of the Bible, the One surpasses the parameters of the Platonic One, is therefore necessarily a unity of plural excellency; a primordial agreement of Persons so eternally unified that even the numeric value ascribed to “1” is too inaccurate an evaluation. He is more fully Unified than “x=1”. And yet, the plurality must be maintained or else the One ceases to be the Good. For it is is not good to be alone.

Death is a scary feature of human life. Especially in modernity where we have been almost-but-not-quite-promised that we can escape it. Through various forms of control, artifice, or prosthesis, we play a long and hard fought game to attain this glimmering hebel of being unkillable and undying… yunno, like every single wicked sorcerer in every single children’s fairy tale. The upshot of all of this is that, as a culture, we try to eschew the things that remind us of death or make us aware of our mortality: the sick, the poor, the homeless, the problems we can’t solve, children because they age us. Social forces may exalt one of the aforementioned cases and wave it for a time in an abstract and sociological way but only usually insofar as to “fix” the problem it presents to our pursuit of deathless health. The result is a kind of isolation and loneliness existent prior to the lockdowns (though definitely acerbated by them). “Within our frenetic necrophobia we flee death…” says Peter Leithart. And yet, there is grim irony here: that in order to preserve life we sacrifice it. Again, Leithart notes that “to elevate bare life as the supreme value we have to make the supreme sacrifice of life itself. And so we flee from death and find ourselves rushing to deaths embrace, strangely comforted. Our necrophobia becomes necrophilia.”

To be “human” means to come from the ground (from the Latin noun humus “earth”, and the Latin verb humare “to burry”) . It was from the earth that the Lord formed Adam (Gen 2.7). And in the Fall we are told that it is to the earth that we shall return (Gen 3.19).

And while this is biblically true, it is also culturally true. Since as long as we have been “human” (setting aside the debate about how long that length has been) we have been compelled to burry the dead —and, barring any community transgression— to burry our dead with ceremony.

“[I]t was steam-power, not binary code, that birthed the modern news industry” writes Jeffrey Bilbro (11). The application of steam technology to the faculties of printed media transformed the news in the early 19th century. Prior to the 1830s “the modern relationship between the press and the urban populace had yet to emerge” David Henkin explains in his contribution to The City in American Literature and Culture (27). There were small press publications whose readership was relatively small, elite, literate, and whose lifestyles afforded the leisure for the focused attention demanded by pre-“news-revolution” writing.

At its core we see that biblical worship has always been about eating with God. That idea is not a merely “New Testament” invention. God put Adam and Eve in a world of food their worshiping life was inextricably bound up in their transformation and consumption of the meal God had set before them. Their Fall was concerned with rejecting the Feast and feasting instead with the Serpent. Outside the Garden Israel worshiped Yahweh at the feat prepared by the fire of the altar after coming through the atoning work of the first sacrifice. Now, after the death and resurrection of Christ, we draw near to God to feast at his Table, but now there is no fiery sword, no burning altar. Hear we freely confess and hear the gospel proclamation that Christ has once and for all made atonement for sin. Then, we gladly give gifts to God and feast freely at the Table.

For the past couple of weeks we’ve begun walking through the bible in our midweek studies aiming to “be at home in the scriptures”. During this time we’ve looked at pop culture artefacts (jokes, memes, GIFs, music) to understand the way in which meaning functions. Here’s another: consider your neighborhood or a neighborhood that you know well –a place in which you are at home. Imagine if you were to ask me for directions from my house to Liliha Bakery. I’d tell you something like this:

When God breathes into the dead clay of Adam, he (Adam) becomes a nephesh khay, a “living creature” (Gen. 2.7). God places Adam, this living creature, into a world that is teeming with life —he’s a living creature in a living world. This same phrase is used later (in 2.19) when Adam names “every living creature” —every nephesh khay. While distinct from all creation because he is the image of God, Adam is not the only living creature in God’s world. Rather he is the chief of a world composed and filled by living things. This is not just connotatively true (i.e. Fr. Mark is making a good observation about how these things are analogically related), but true by the very verbiage of the text. God uses the same word to describe what Adam is and what the creatures of the world are.

here is a hemorrhaging wound in the human person that longs to achieve a sense of total god-like control over circumstances, primarily death. Adam and Eve were moved by the smooth words of the Serpent casting a vision of godlike autocracy —liberation from creaturehood. We want a to be sovereign not in the way God created us to be sovereign (governing our own lives, exercising servant-lordship over creation, etc.), but instead of him.

The cutting irony is that often, almost always, the very mechanisms by which we seek liberation from God’s supremacy, the very mechanisms by which we seek control, ensure our downfall.