I thought about all of those things. I realized that those who are wise and do what is right are under God's control. What they do is also under his control. But a man doesn't know whether God will show favor to him. Everyone will die someday. Death comes to godly and sinful people alike. It comes to good and bad people alike. It comes to "clean" and "unclean" people alike. Those who offer sacrifices and those who don't offer them also die. A good person dies, and so does a sinner. Those who take oaths die. So do those who are afraid to take them. Here's what is so bad about everything that happens on this earth. Death catches up with all of us. Also, the hearts of people are full of evil. They live in foolish pleasure. After that, they join those who have already died. Anyone who is living still has hope. Even a live dog is better off than a dead lion! People who are still alive know they'll die. But those who have died don't know anything. They don't receive any more rewards. And they are soon forgotten. Their love, hate and jealousy disappear. They will never share again in anything that happens on earth.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

1) And He said, "Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death."

2) Jesus said, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."

3) Jesus said, "If those who lead you say, 'See, the Kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty…"

5) Jesus said, "Recognize what is in your sight, and that which is hidden from you will become plain to you. For there is nothing hidden which will not become manifest."

6) His disciples questioned Him and said to Him, "Do you want us to fast? How shall we pray? Shall we give alms? What diet shall we observe?" Jesus said, "Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered."

7) Jesus said, "Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man."

8) And He said, "The Kingdom is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of small fish. Among them the wise fisherman found a fine large fish. He threw all the small fish back into the sea and chose the large fish without difficulty. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear."

What meaning have you found life to have? In all my years of engaging this theological question, with countless thousands of individuals from all different walks of life, the many answers have two commonalities. First, the meaning an individual finds life to have is directly dependent upon where that individual looks, what "world" he or she sees existence to be. If those who lead you say, "See, the Kingdom is in the sky," then the birds of the sky will precede you [if you follow what they say]. If they say to you, "It is in the sea," then the fish will precede you. And secondly, individuals can deceive themselves deeply into thinking they see and live out of one world, when they are actually seeing and living out of another that they don’t realize has taken over them. Jesus said, "Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man."

Golf is the most theological of all the games human beings play. It is so because it involves human effort, skill, knowledge, as all games do. But, in golf, unlike other games, there is a transcendent element: providence. It’s there in other games, but it is felt deeply in golf. Golf, theology, and meaning collided last Sunday in a particular moment, visually captured in our culture’s medium of television. In last Sunday’s U.S. Masters golf tournament Tiger Woods needed to make a shot from just off the green to keep a shrinking lead and help propel him back on top of golfing’s elite. It was an impossible shot, even for Woods, arguably the best in the game today, and someone who could be the best ever. He swung, the ball shot off the end of the club, skidded onto the green to a momentary halt, gradually rolled in a half-moon arc towards the hole, slowed down at the rim of the cup, and stopped. It stopped, but then ever so meekly swooned into the cup. It could have stopped completely at the rim, but it didn’t. For the longest moment it looked like it had, and that he had failed. But it fell in. Why did it go in?

Physics can account for the "how," the question of whether the shot really can go in, impossible as it was. Athletic trainers and golf teachers can account for the mechanics of Woods’ almost flawless swing, his stance, gauging the distance, the curvature of the undulating green, and where the ball needed to land. It is said that Woods, like other elite athletes, visualizes his shot, actually adjusts his eyes before the shot to "see" the ball from the ground up in the air onto the green and rolling into the hole. Of course all these things his opponent did, too. Acutally, his opponent last week, Chris Demarco, was playing even better than Woods. Several times DeMarco made shots that it appeared no human being could. But two holes after this miraculous shot by Woods, DeMarco’s shot was, like Wood’s before him, heading towards the pin, and if it would’ve gone in DeMarco would have won. But it hit the flag pole, right over the top of the hole, and didn’t go in. The author of Ecclesiastes should have announced the dramatic match for TV. Both golfers will someday die. But one gains favor the other doesn’t. Why? Believe me, Chris DeMarco is asking that, and if Tiger Woods is smart, and he is, he’s asking the same question of success that DeMarco is asking in failure!

This is, of course, a metaphor for questions concerning the meaning of existence, the question of "Why?", whose larger meanings I hope are not trivialized by applying it to such a mundane event.

We live inside of metaphors. "Golf is like theology, as both engage the meaning of events." Metaphors are means for us to try and put some understanding and order to what one philosopher called existence’s "buzzing and blooming confusion." We experience life, and may say it is like a rose when it is going well, or a tornado when it consumes us. We may compare our love to "an ever fixed mark," or our lot in life as "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Metaphors are ways we make sense of our connections to one another and life in such a manner that meaning becomes a real possibility out of the human condition.

Culture is a vehicle for metaphor. Culture includes language, music, art, institutions and ideas of the good and true and beautiful, as well as of evil and falsehood. Culture is permeated by measurements of what is desired from existence and what is to be avoided, the things a particular group of people identify as of supreme importance and those things that by their actions, if not their reflections, they treat as of ultimate concern. No one escapes the confines of culture, the ways a culture’s metaphors both make sense out of existence’s confusions and limit those meanings at the same time. Culture works in hidden and unseen ways to shape what we see and give meaning to, and what we do not see and disregard. It is these "cultural blinders" that account for why the natives on San Salvador in 1492 – by the way, cultures actually "measure" time! – viewed the ripples made by Columbus’ approaching ships but could not make out the ships themselves until they were well nigh on shore. Their culture had no word or concept or idea, no metaphor of such as a European ship, and so even the biological quality of human sight is influenced heavily by culture. A culture’s meanings, carried by its metaphors, do not mirror what existence is, but what in existence human beings in that particular culture give attention to and, thus, "see." And most importantly of all, culture is a human product.

It is this nature to our common life that has occasioned in me to contemplate a metaphor that has been tossed about of late: "the culture of life." It arose from the political part of our culture this past fall, but has no spread to other arenas of culture. It permeates medical discussions of how to deal with end of life issues, and thus health and ethics. It permeates discussions of the moment a fertilized egg has developed into a human being, and thus biology and morality. It permeates discussions of the separation of powers that mark our democracy, and whether one branch of government is true to it or not; and thus, power. It even colors our perception of biography and history, when upon his death Pope John Paul is recalled as an advocate of the "culture of life," even though he had spoken out against the political stances that gave rise to the metaphor. The metaphor had its origins in the Christian political right, even though their support of capital punishment was vehemently opposed by the same Pope John Paul whom they claimed as having embodied their political viewpoint!

When a housewife and an insurance salesman, who do not know each other except through working with me on a public school committee, use the metaphor, "a culture of life," then it has escaped the political and invaded larger cultural arenas. It has taken on a larger meaning because as a phrase it contains words with meanings larger things than just political: "culture" and "life," both containing political ideas and actions, but far larger than just that domain. However nebulous and ill defined it might be, the phrase "culture of life" is being used by those who share our common life as if it pertains to a particular way that social life and the nature of human relationships can and should be constructed. It is a metaphor for an idealized common life to be made real by human effort.

Therefore, the metaphor also holds within it the irony of history.

A little over one hundred years ago such a thing occurred in a like manner. Coming off of the wondrous developments in science, the vast achievements in industry, the deeper understandings of human social life, a greater hope of moral and ethic progress, there arose in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries cries from liberal religious quarters that it was the purpose and duty of culture to build the "Kingdom of God." The "social gospel" movement was the attempt by progressive religionists to conceive of social reform in moral terms. The social betterments of the early and mid 19^th century were largely devoid of an explicit and intentional religious hue, though motivated by religious sentiment. Those social reformers of the 19^th century, a century of unparalleled social change in our culture, are not remembered for their religious fervor but for their active devotion to social betterment. Their religious faith seems an afterthought. But in the social gospel movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries building the kingdom of God on earth became a mandated moral imperative. Christ had taught his disciples to pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven," and to religionists that became a call to transform piety into progress, into social betterment especially for the poor. Socialism was its political guise, and the enormous proliferation of social change in the 20^th century – from environmentalism to Civil Rights – were the beneficiaries of seeing our social relationships to be part of larger meanings. Human beings could actually build the kingdom of God on earth, proclaimed the prophets of progress, and indeed it was our duty as well as the heritage of having been made in God’s image. And 20^th century progressivism was its result.

The social gospel movement, of building the kingdom of God on earth, clashed with the previous centuries’ view. Social progress, especially measured by the plight of the poor and disenfranchised, had not previously been the religious measurement of the culture. For millennia before the kingdom of God had been a domain of the afterlife, a metaphor for another dimension of existence well beyond this one. It was not an ideal to be built upon this earth but something in another dimension. But, one hundred years ago that all changed. The moral capacity of our culture to be bettered by explicitly religious effort became a focus of the religious enterprise for some, many of whom are the ancestors of our progressive, liberal religious view.

Building the kingdom of God ran into a permanent work stoppage with World War I. The ideal met the real between the poppies in Flanders Fields. The disillusionment bred by the "war to end all wars" tainted the prospect of an ideal made real. And although human progress characterized the 20^th century – the century of expanded human rights and the advent of human society beginning to care for its least fortunate – what overshadowed the century was the oppression the ideal brings about upon the real. The ideal of communist egalitarian sharing became the brutal totalitarianism of the Gulag. The ideal of a fascist pure country and race littered a land with the bodies of the discarded, inferior specimens. Even our own democracy oppressed its black citizens, its female citizens, and citizens who put their lives on the line for this country but privately must conceal whom they love.

Irony of ironies, vanity of vanities! One hundred years ago human beings endeavored to build the kingdom of God, and in religious enthusiasm and fervor spent a century building alongside of it a Tower of Babel! Even amid the best of intentions and the holiest of causes, the tragic fallibility of human being begins to show. The dream of building ideals in this real begins to take on the pervasive, all-consuming shape of a Tower of Babel, and totalitarian-type methods and oppressive relationships become its bitumen and mortar.

Building a "culture of life" is as ironic today as was building the kingdom of God a century before. Culture is a human product, and is not immune to the ironies of the human condition. We produced life-sustaining vaccines alongside of horrific medical experiments. Our homes are lit by the same power that lit the skies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The workers’ lost their chains and the artists and dissidents found them around their necks! The good we attempt to do, and that we are so sure we can and will bring about, always contains the seed of the evil we are certain the good will destroy!

One of my colleagues at the University of Chicago noted, as a Lutheran, "My bishop is just back from Soweto where one-third of the people have HIV or AIDS, and he says that if people were interested in a culture of life they'd notice it." (Martin Marty, email 04/05) It is strange how striving for "the culture of life" has blinded us to death. Or, as New York Times columnist Frank Rich wryly noted, we are engaged in a metaphorical "bait and switch":

Mortality - the more graphic, the merrier - is the biggest thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we've feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV's top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time "CSI." To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness's cortex with Ms. Schiavo's.

As sponsors line up to buy time on "CSI," so celebrity deaths have become a marvelous opportunity for beatific self-promotion by news and political stars alike. Tim Russert showed a video of his papal encounter on a "Meet the Press" where one of the guests, unchallenged, gave John Paul an A-plus for his handling of the church's sex abuse scandal. Jesse Jackson, staking out a new career as the angel of deathotainment, hit the trifecta: in rapid succession he appeared with the Schindlers at their daughter's hospice in Florida, eulogized Johnnie Cochran on "Larry King Live" and reminisced about his own papal audience with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.

-"A Culture of Death, Not Life," Frank Rich, 04/10/05

Striving to bring about the culture of life contains the seed of a fear of death. Its center is a familiar dread: meaninglessness. The "culture of life" is held captive by human mortality. And try as we might we cannot build a world that does not contain death, and we cannot make of this world a Tower of Babel to the heavens by which we can escape our mortality. Medicine will preserve portions of the body’s functionings long after the person, the individual, the mind, the soul has fled to whatever lies beyond. We can engineer that every woman’s eggs are fertilized and every sperm preserved. We can legislate that every bond between human beings be one where children will result. We can build a "culture of life" that we think will please God to no end. But in the end we cannot defeat death. We cannot please God so much by the world we build that death will be removed from it. We cannot escape our mortality anymore than we can escape the irony of the human condition. We can build a culture of life and it will smell of death, of the demise of freedom, justice, and love, which give meaning to our days.

Maybe that is because realms like the "Kingdom of God." of which Jesus spoke, are not ideals to be fabricated from the world of reality. Maybe the irony of the human condition is that we think in such idealized ways about metaphors of larger realms. That the kingdom of God is someplace else like an after life, or in some other time like the future to be built towards. Instead, maybe the kingdom of God is at hand. One philosopher claimed that we really shouldn’t call this a "universe," but a "multiverse." Existence contains limitless possibilities that we limit by what we see, by what our culture and our time claim is real.

Maybe the kingdom of God is like one of those "Magic Eye" 3-D illusion pictures so popular a few years back; the ones where you placed the picture at the tip of your nose and gradually, moving it away, your eyes adjust to see a picture that is always there, but requires the eyes’ adjustment to see. Maybe, instead of building a culture of life or a kingdom of God out of the existence we’ve been given, we are to adjust our eyes to see the kingdom that is already at hand. Maybe the thing we idealize is no ideal at all, but at hand. Maybe we do live in a "multiverse" and not a "universe," and it is our poor sight that keeps us from living into that larger realm.

The towers, kingdoms, and cultures built by human hands suffer from human limitations, the ways we deceive ourselves. All that we create with fervor and love for truth can unbeknownst to us, consume us as a lion of our own longing. Our human ideals will always be smaller than what the Divine has already created.

So, maybe, what holds together this kingdom of God that is already at hand and needs not to be built as much as be fulfilled; what is its center, is the transcendence of death. That when we adjust our eyes we do not eliminate death but see something larger than the irony of it all. The inhabitants of the kingdom of God live liberated by love. Love makes them free because love would have them live larger than death. Love lasts when the meaninglessness of humanly made kingdoms and cultures is made evident. Love fashions a Republic of the Spirit here and now that makes its citizens thirst for liberty and justice for all It is at hand but needs be seen. It does not need to be built, but needs be fulfilled.

And Jesus said, "Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death."

Jesus said, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."

Jesus said, "If those who lead you say, 'See, the Kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty…"

Jesus said, "Recognize what is in your sight, and that which is hidden from you will become plain to you. For there is nothing hidden which will not become manifest."

Jesus said, "Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man."

And He said, "The Kingdom is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of small fish. Among them the wise fisherman found a fine large fish. He threw all the small fish back into the sea and chose the large fish without difficulty. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear."

AMEN.