2^nd Sunday after Pentecost:

Your Spirit renews the face of the earth.

(Psalm 104:30)

Since last Sunday, Pentecost Sunday, I’ve been buried away in my Wisdom class Intensive. That’s when the students gather for an Intensive face to face for five days, Monday through Friday, eight hours a day; getting us our forty hours of semester time in one week.

However, this year, because of covid-19, we gathered via Zoom—analogue gave way to digital. Anna helped me through the digital part—how you set up the Zoom meetings; how you make use of the Zoom white board; how you mute and unmute; how you share screen and un-share screen; how you do PowerPoint; and on and on. Anna renewed my spirit and freed me to teach in yet another digital mode. I don’t have too many such learning curves left in me.

Each evening during Intensive, I graded papers while Linda gave me her concerned play-by-play of protest and riots. While we are attending to our studies of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes along with the Song of Songs and Wisdom Psalms; the world was coming apart. Does such study have anything to say about our troubled world?

We ended our Intensive week attending to Psalm 104. It’s a Wisdom Psalm about how “the earth and the seas, vast and spacious, are teeming with creatures beyond number” (vss 24-25). Wisdom has to do with our love for our Creator’s creation. Even the ant is worthy of our attentiveness and praise (Pr 6).

The Psalm ends acknowledging that though creation takes our breath away, it can also disappoint. Nevertheless, God has “set a boundary that floods/chaos cannot pass” (vs 9). And our Creator “sends his Spirit to breathe life back into his creation” (vss 28-30). Our Creator remains attentive to his creation.