March 22: Our Blessed Hope
♫ Music:
Friday, March 22
Our Blessed Hope
Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words.
Poetry:
This World is Not Conclusion (373)
by Emily DIckinson
This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond -
Invisible, as Music -
But positive, as Sound -
It beckons, and it baffles -
Philosophy, don't know -
And through a Riddle, at the last -
Sagacity, must go -
To guess it, puzzles scholars -
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown -
Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies -
Blushes, if any see -
Plucks at a twig of Evidence -
And asks a Vane, the way -
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -
Strong Hallelujahs roll -
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul -
BECOMING FULLY HUMAN
This devotional week begins with a paradox: death is both a problem and a solution. It is not hard to grasp how it is a problem. All around us we see, often through the distorted lens of our digitally saturated environment, scenes of starvation, murder, illness and death. Sometimes we are confronted with these things directly, and nothing quite prepares one for it. Last fall I watched the last hours of my father’s life as he succumbed to cancer, that extremely ubiquitous, almost commonplace, mask of death in this world. At the stage when language fails, when the attending nurse tells you your dad is “on the journey,” today’s biblical metaphor of being “asleep” becomes vividly real. We have hope that we will see our loved ones again, and hang on to that blessed assurance that nothing can separate believing beings from the God who created them. The uncanny strangeness of Otto Dix’s painting, and the spiritual depth of Emily Dickinson’s poem, causes us to reflect on the fact that there are still mysteries about the end of earthly life, and its extension in a heavenly afterlife, that leave us puzzled. “This World is Not Conclusion,” and all our philosophy and wisdom must be ultimately transcended by a truth—or a “Tooth”--the living are not prepared to entirely understand or appreciate.
The Texas All-State 5-A Symphonic Band conveys an energy, a vibrancy that puts us sonically on our toes, not necessarily to trip the light fantastic, but to experience a power that comes from outside us, that lifts us higher than our individual perspectives. “Kingfishers Catch Fire: II” symphonically represents Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem, a work that tells us “Christ plays in ten thousand places . . . To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” One day we will take part in a cosmic end time symphony whose participation brings us to new life. Today’s musical selection is, to borrow a phrase from Dickinson, “positive, as Sound.”
Jesus and his followers have “borne / contempt of Generations,” and Christ himself has “Crucifixion, shown”: with grace, we humans so prone to let our faith slip, will eventually watch it rally for the final victory. In this life we must be frail-y human, but in the next we have hope because we will become fully human. As a seed planted in the ground will not grow until it dies, so too our lives will not truly mature into their intended glory until we die to and in this world. Our “earthly tent” must be consumed, but our eternal “heavenly dwelling” will far surpass any majesty we thought we possessed during our terrestrial sojourn (2 Cor 5:1). Christ has taken on the destroyer death and turned it into a triumph of life for all those who believe him, turning the logic of this world on its head and redeeming his children for life in a perfect place we can’t yet fully imagine. Jesus is the solution: won’t you join him?
Prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ, I rejoice and rejoice continually in Your glorious and triumphant victory over death. For Your victory is my victory. Help me to live by it, in it, and for it. I am grateful to my depths - grateful forever.
Amen.
- Selwyn Hughes
Marc Malandra
Associate Professor of English
Biola University
For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Artwork:
The Resurrection, 1949
Otto Dix
Oil on canvas
213 x 163.5 x 6 cm
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany
Artist Otto Dix is perhaps best known for his brutal depictions of war, suffering, and violence. This painting of the resurrection, although expressionist in its style, comes from a place of experience for Dix who witnessed violent deaths during his war service. His religious works were created in the later years of his life. True to his early work, Dix focused on the physical sufferings of Jesus “without dissolving in pity.” Although Dix was not religious in a traditional way, he was powerfully drawn to the stories of the Bible, especially the Gospel narratives, which he considered “parables of myself and of humankind.” Dix stated, “Christian themes are related to our present just as much as to our past and future.”
About the Artist:
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix (1891-1969) has been perhaps more influential than any other German painter in shaping the popular image of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. Noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of the decadence of German society during the Weimar Republic and the brutality of war, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") movement. A war veteran haunted by his experiences of WWI, his first subjects were crippled and dying soldiers, but during the height of his career, Dix also painted other subjects including crime victims in shabby tenements, disfigured war veterans, prostitutes, and satirical portraits of the intellectual elite. His work became even darker and more allegorical in the early 1930s; consequently he became a target of the Nazis. Denounced by the Nazis as a “degenerate” artist, Dix sought refuge in the countryside near Lake Constance where he painted landscapes.
About the Music:
“Kingfishers Catch Fire: II” from the album 2008 Texas Music Educators Association
About the Composer:
John Mackey (b. 1973) is an American composer of contemporary classical music, with an emphasis on music for bands and orchestras. Mackey received a BFA degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music and a Masters of Music degree from Juilliard. Mackey has written for orchestras including the Brooklyn Philharmonic and New York Youth Symphony. He has also written extensively for dance including: the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Parsons Dance Company, and New York City Ballet. The majority of his work for the past decade has been for wind ensembles. His band catalog now receives annual performances numbering in the thousands. In 2014, he became the youngest composer ever inducted into the American Bandmasters Association. In 2018, he received the Wladimir & Rhoda Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
About the Performers:
Texas All-State Orchestra
The Texas Music Educators Association (TMEA) sponsors a yearly statewide competition to promote students' dedication to their musical knowledge and skill. Beginning each fall, over 70,000 high school students from across Texas audition by performing selected music before a panel of judges. The highest-ranking musicians judged at the TMEA competitions qualify to perform in one of fifteen Texas All-State Bands, Orchestras, and Choirs. These All-State ensembles rehearse for three days, directed by nationally recognized conductors, and then perform on the closing day of the annual TMEA Convention.
About the Poet:
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830–1886) was an American lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the two leading 19th-century American poets, alongside Walt Whitman. After studying at the Amherst Academy, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst, Massachusetts. Dickinson lived much of her life in reclusive isolation. By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost complete isolation from the outside world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely. Dickinson’s poetry was heavily influenced by the metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, her reading of the Book of Revelation, and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town, which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity. She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats. While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized for her poetry during her lifetime. It was not until after her death — when Lavinia, Dickinson's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems — that the breadth of her work became apparent. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances. A complete collection of her poetry became available for the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955.
About the Devotional Writer:
Marc Malandra
Associate Professor of English
Biola University
Marc Malandra is an Associate Professor of English at Biola University in La Mirada, California, where he teaches American literature, composition, and creative writing. He lives with his spouse Junko and their cat Tora in Brea, CA