Dear friends and family,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
It may be you could use a distraction today, some bit of news that doesn’t have a non-metric ton of cultural and historical freight glommed onto it. A bit of human interest to speak gently beneath the inhumane braying of the political fray. Allow me.
It’s been an eventful and trying month for we Clemmons on Mission, heavy with tribulation and yet buoyed by grace and celebration. I’ll try to capture some of it in three sections.
Peace of Christ,
Zack
Commemoration of Richard Hooker, teacher of the faith, 2020
Trials & Tribulations
October began with a thud. More specifically, that thud was Eleanor—heavy sleeper that she can be—falling out of bed, at just the right angle & velocity to break her collar bone. I was studying furiously for my Old Testament midterm (the 4th most intimidating exam of my life thus far), when we heard the crash and the cry. It didn’t take long to realize something beyond the shock of falling out of bed was troubling Eleanor, and Erin’s broken-clavicle experience helped her diagnose quickly. I rushed Eleanor to the ER, kept her (relatively) calm with Thisbe stories (Thisbe is one of the recurring hedgehog characters in our story-times), and confirmed the collar-bone-break with an X-ray. Eleanor was remarkably brave through the whole ordeal, and healed quickly with the swiftness and vitality of the young.
Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of October’s trials.
The nadir came at the beginning of Erin’s birthday week. As probably all of you reading this know, Erin is a ceramic artist by training. Her art has been on hiatus since the birth of Ames, but we’ve been eager to make a fresh run of it in Birmingham. We had electrical service set up for her donated kiln, and Erin got to work making work (with Eleanor proving an excellent studio assistant). Within a week she had a full kiln of bisqued-work glazed and ready to fire.
Then, fiasco.
For one reason or another, the kiln-sitter (the mechanism which shuts the kiln off once it reaches the necessary temperature) malfunctioned, meaning the kiln continued to heat and heat and overheat, until Erin manually shut it down. After a mostly sleepless night waiting for the kiln to cool enough to assess the damage, it was a worst-case scenario: every clay piece had melted entirely, and a glassy pool of glaze filled the bottom of the kiln. The kiln was dead.
It’s hard to overstate how devastating a blow this was, both practically and to morale. We took a few days to grieve. We reconsidered, recalibrated. We rushed to the ER again when a utility knife fell on Erin’s foot. We wondered why everything seemed to be going awry. We celebrated Erin’s birthday with a date to the Birmingham Art Museum, where we were refreshed by Renaissance altarpieces and Bierstadt’s Luminism (see below). We took our rest that weekend in Cedar Hill, TN, where the autumn leaves lit up and a few tobacco barns smoked themselves out.
And then Erin’s father, David, did what dads do: he saved the day. He drove 4 hours to Ohio to purchase two (2!) used but functional kilns he discovered in his Craigslist research, delivered them down to Birmingham (a surprise reveal, no less!), and installed them for Erin.
So we’re back in business, so to speak.
Keep an eye out on our blog in the near future, where Erin will be writing up a personal account of the kiln fiasco, its gracious resolution, and where her art might be headed next.
Birthday Month & Reckoning with a New Human
October-November is birthday season in our household (Erin - October 16th, Eleanor - October 25th, Ames - November 8th), which means the celebratory banners go up mid-month and they don’t come down ‘til Advent.
Erin had the ambitious idea of a joint-birthday party for Eleanor & Ames. We’re not accustomed to living within driving distance of family, so when the occasion arises, we try to jump at it. Erin’s family and my own drove down to Birmingham from Tennessee and South Carolina, and we had a big (rainy) day of it. Eleanor & Ames had a wonderful time with cousins and uncles and aunt and, of course, grandparents.
This birthday weekend was also the first time it’s really hit me that we’re about to introduce another child to the world. I knew it as a fact but have been so preoccupied with everything else new in life that my brain has deferred this reckoning. We’re going to have a third child. A newborn, even.
It’s a daunting and pleasing thought, a new human. A new face to stare in wonder at, a new bundle of need, a new person belovèd and claimed by God. Occasionally, perhaps daily, I look at Eleanor & Ames and I see through the immediate crisis (a request that just can’t be obeyed, a puzzle box lid that can’t be shared) to the direct favor and kindness of God. Other times it’s immediate and obvious: Ames excitedly rumbling behind his sister into some new quest, and I am in a moment overwhelmed with gratitude. It is a joy to see them become friends; I trust they’ll take quickly to a new one.
Many of you likely know this feeling. Praise be to God, who is gracious to let us share in delightful work of creation, new life.
Writing on the Trinity
One week ago I wrote perhaps the most difficult paper I’ve been tasked to write. The prompt itself filled a page, but could be boiled down to this:
Defend the doctrine of the Trinity from Scripture and tradition.
No problem, right? It’s only the central, enlivening doctrine of the entirety our faith, the incomprehensible nature and character of the one and only God who has condescended to reveal himself to us feeble creatures.
It was a struggle. One of the slower, more painful writing experiences I’ve had, if only because there are so many ways to go wrong (as the long history of heresies proves).
There is, of course, an endless world of wonder to the mystery of the Trinity. Yet the doctrine is not so mysterious or hidden in Scripture as you might’ve been led to believe.
In fact, the Triune God is everywhere in Scripture. (Not surprising, really. Since the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is the ultimate author of the Scriptures wherein God reveals Himself, the Scriptures teach the Trinity.) The trick is that God doesn’t disclose His nature through discursive reasoning or a point-by-point doctrinal statement. “In the beginning were three eternally distinct yet inseparable hypostases united in an undivided and ousia…” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as “In the beginning God created…”).
Instead, God reveals himself to us by acting. Scripture reveals God’s nature by marking off the acts which God alone can do: creation, salvation, the forgiveness of sins. Then you look and see who’s doing these divine actions in Scripture. Well, Yahweh, of course, the one & only God (cf. Ex. 3:14 + Deut. 6:4). But even in the Old Testament, the one God seems to be uniquely one, a different kind of oneness altogether. He’s the kind of one that can admit some distinction. No one can see YHWH and live (Ex. 33:20). And yet, all throughout the Old Testament, characters interact with YHWH and live—Hagar and Abraham and Jacob and Moses and Gideon, just to name a few. So YHWH the Creator dwells in inapproachable glory, and yet somehow relates and even appears to his people, by his Word, or his Name, or his Wisdom.
Jews of Jesus’ day know that all power and judgment and glory belong to YHWH alone, which is why they’re either flummoxed or terrified when they see Jesus perform miracles that suggest he, too, has power that could only belong to the Creator. He speaks with authority, he heals a man born blind, he raises the very dead. Such power belong to God alone. So who, then, is this Jesus?
And then there’s the Spirit, who’s all over the Scripture creating life—the breath in the lungs of Adam, Ezekiel’s chalk-dry bones revivified, giving life even as the letter kills.
We see the same pattern with salvation: God alone can save (Is 43:11). But also the Father saves (Ps 32:5), the Son saves (Titus 1:4), and the Spirit saves (Rom 10:13 paired with 1 Cor 12:3).
So if the Father, the Son, and the Spirit all create, and they all save, then they are all God. And Scripture is unambiguous: there is only one God. The rest of Trinitarian theology is just clarifying and defending these truths which Scripture present so elegantly.
Which is all to say we worship one God in three Divine Persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and He is our salvation. There is no salvation apart from the Trinity—the Father who with the Son and Spirit created and filled all that is, then sending the Son to suffer and die on our behalf, a work ministered to us by the Spirit who points us to Son, who is the very image of the Father, who speaks to us by his Son who has given us his Spirit. We are caught up in the work and the life of the triune God, for His glory and our joy.
Prayer Requests
The best way to support us is to join with the Son in remembering us before the Father. If you’d like to pray with and for us, here are some things you can remember:
a healthy final trimester for Erin and our child
that Eleanor would learn to delight in sacrifice for the good of another, that she would be a peacemaker
that God would soften Ames’ at-times stubborn will and that Ames would learn to take joy in obedience
that Erin would be able to start up her ceramics in earnest this time (and perhaps a prayer against kiln-disaster)
that we would be presented with more opportunities to witness to our neighbors
that our financial needs would be met
that God would prepare the right part-time job for Zack, at the right time
We’d also like to pray with and for you! If you’re reading this, you’re probably already in our prayers, but we’d love to know more specifically what we can pray for. You can text us, of course, or you can email us prayer requests at clemmonsonmission@gmail.com
Status Board
Reading: lots of Church Fathers these days (especially the Cappadocians). I’ve long been a library addict, and having access to a full university collection again is intoxicating. I’ve got places marked in probably 20 different library books, including James B. Jordan’s Through New Eyes and Carl Beckwith’s The Holy Trinity.
Listening: The new Bahamas album, Sad Hunk, has put a bit of mid-life pep in my step on slow days, and these podcasts on Ivan Illich continue to
Watching: Not a whole lot of time for watchin’ these days. We did catch Ken Loach’s new film, Sorry We Missed You, which is a patient and brutal observation of the gig economy. The children really enjoyed Charlie Brown & the Great Pumpkin on All Hallows’ Eve.
Food & Drink: It’s been good to have our kitchen in full working order, but the culinary highlight this month was probably Bill Wilcox visiting & bringing some Amaravathi Goat Curry and Lamb Korma from our neighborhood Indian take-out, Bawarchi.
We’re the Clemmons family–-Zack, Erin, Eleanor, and Ames–-living & studying & working in Birmingham, Alabama for sake of God’s Kingdom.
If you’d like, you can support us financially as we navigate this new season on mission, without incomes.
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