 Okay, so we're talking about sacred time and We have to start from the very beginning with the creation of time time is one of those things that's so close to us so Intimate a part of our experience that we don't often times recognize it as a creation or as something that Had to be brought into existence. We just assumed that everything runs out in time But of course, we know that's not the case There was so to speak a time before time. I mean physicists tell us that time is part of the space matter energy matrix and With Einstein's theories of relativity. We know that there's this relationship between Time space energy and movement. They're all interrelated and they all began at the same time so You know big bang theory, which you know may or may not be correct But it has some things to recommend it But that's the standard cosmology nowadays and that theory holds that time came into existence along with matter and energy and so to speak before the beginning of time there wasn't any time and The theologians have been telling this us this for centuries That God is outside of time and to him all things are simultaneous. He lives in timelessness. Well God creates time in the seven days and it begins on actually on the first day We read in Genesis one in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth The earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep And the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters and God said let there be light And there was light and God saw that the light was good and God Separated the light from the darkness. He called the light day and the darkness He called night and there was evening and there was morning one day And so usually as modern readers we look at this first day And we think oh on the first day of creation God creates energy or he creates light You know we have theories about light as waves and particles and so on but for the ancients when they read this They perceive that as the beginning of the succession of days which starts the clock of time Okay, so really what's being established on the first day is really not so much light in a physical sense But it's time that's coming into being it's a succession of Periods and that is a novelty. There was no time So to speak before the first day of creation. And so once God has created time then you need to Time needs to be sanctified just as God is going to create space in what follows. He creates the The waters above the firmament and the waters below. That's the sea in the sky in day two Those are the great spaces and then he creates a habitat on day three and then he proceeds to fulfill these areas and Eventually God is going to sanctify space He's going to create a sacred space which we call the Garden of Eden and that's Clarified in Genesis chapter 2 but not only space needs to be made holy, but there also has to be time that is set aside as holy and So when we get to the fourth day Which corresponds to the first day? There the realm of time was created with the day and the night, but now we populate the day and the night with Beings that will serve for the marking of time So this is what we read about the fourth day God said let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night and Let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years and Let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth Now the sacred author presumably Moses Describes us precisely backwards from how we would think about it If we're thinking in terms of modern physics and biology and we talk about God created the lights in the heavens, you know Lights in the firm of the heavens this be the Sun the moon We would talk about to give radiation upon the earth so that Photosynthesis could take place and we could have growing plants and a food chain, right? That's how we would think that's the first thing we would think that's where the Sun is there It's to allow for photosynthesis, but look at what the sacred author says first thing He mentions is for signs and for seasons for days and years Signs Othoth in Hebrew or Otoat in the modern pronunciation those are heavenly convergences that the ancient Israelites looked for to Mark the liturgical seasons So I did a lot of work in the Dead Sea Scrolls at the University of Notre Dame. There were several documents called Otoat documents or signs documents from the Dead Sea Scrolls that were these long catalogs of different astronomical phenomena that the Essie's these Essie monks who lived in a monastery by the shores of Dead Sea They would observe the sky and wait for these particular signs to occur and that would help them to Calculate the liturgical calendar. Okay, and that goes back to very ancient roots of Israelite culture looking for the heavenly signs so you could know when the when the year began and when the Liturgical seasons were and then it says signs and for seasons and the word for season there Is actually Moa Theme in Hebrew the Moa Theme and A Moa'i's in Hebrew is a solemnity. It is a Solemn day. We'll look at this in a moment in Leviticus 20 23 there were seven Moa Theme in the Israelite liturgical calendar a Moa'i's was a Liturgical feast that had the same sanctity as the Sabbath But was did not necessarily fall on a Sabbath those seven Moa Theme that fell throughout the year were the first and the seventh day of Passover and Then the day of Pentecost Excuse me, and then the first day of the year which is actually ironically the first day of the seventh month That was Rosh Hashanah. Okay, the head of the year and then the day of atonement And then finally the first and eighth day of the feast of booze Also known as the Feast of Tabernacles, so that gives you seven Moa Theme We would call them as Catholics Solemnities, okay, and and you notice the ones on Passover and on Tabernacles Basically had like an octave structure just like we often it You know we observe an octave of Christmas and an octave of Easter with the first and the last days being of the highest Solemnity right so so what I'm saying is in Genesis 1 14 is using Liturgical language the signs and for seasons these are liturgical terms For being able to determine the liturgical year and to mark off the sacred seasons So quite literally the Bible is telling us that the reason God put the sun the moon and the stars up there is to Tell us when to go to mass okay, and Went to observe Easter and all the rest okay, that's their primary purpose and you know photosynthesis to providing warmth under You know that's a benefit. That's like a side benefit thrown in you know, but you know keep the food chain and You know the ecosystem and all that but primarily So you can figure out when we should go to mass and when we should observe Easter and all that okay Signs of Caesar for days and years let them be lights in the firm of the heavens to give light upon the earth Oh, yeah in addition to calculating time. Yeah, let them give light on the earth, and it was so and it made the two great lights The greater light of course the sun and the moon. It's interesting that They're not even called the Sun and the moon. They're just called the the great light and the little light in Hebrew and This is this is a a kind of a backhanded slap at all the other cultures because What were the Sun and the moon for all the other cultures the Egyptians the Mesopotamians and so on? They were deities, right and here. We don't even use shemesh or Reach or any of these terms for the Sun of the moon. We don't give them their proper names because They're so Inconsequential compared to the true God and they're just up there for us to to to give us light and to calculate the liturgical calendar They're not divinities, right? So just the big light and the little light For the day and the night so it it De-divinizes The Sun and the moon and in most of the cultures the Sun was the great God like for Egyptian culture the Sun was referred to as Amon Ray and He was the great God. He was the head of the pantheon and he was the God that held that bay The darkness demon kind of the Egyptian Satan and so on but no the Bible says he's just the big light Okay, so that's the the origin of the liturgy is really with the creation of The Sun and the moon and I like a phrase that dr. Han used earlier Today in response to my talk. He talked about creation as the curriculum for redemption I thought that was a beautiful phrase and never heard him or anybody else say that before But we're looking at you know one of the arguments I made in in the talk on the fire of the holiness This morning was that you know God makes the world with his end goal in mind. He knows What he's going to do? He knows the order of salvation the new covenant is coming and even the creation is made in such a way as to anticipate it Down to the specifics of the characteristics of fire and water and time and light and all of those things so we see that on the fourth day and then The first holy day of course comes at the end of the sequence of Genesis 2 1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them and on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done and he rested on the seventh day from all his work Which he had done so God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it because on it God rested from all his work Which he had done in creation and of course God doesn't need to rest from work, but he does this Just like Jesus didn't need to be baptized, but he does it as an example for us To set a pattern for his for his creatures who are made in his image And so there was no sacred day of rest for the Egyptians with their pagan Polytheism and there was no you know Pattern of six days of labor and a day of rest in Mesopotamian religion either So the idea of the week really comes from Israelite culture in the idea of the weekend Again comes from Israelite culture in this idea of resting one day in seven Which has a lot of social and biological benefit and seems to really work with the way that were made you may know that During the French Revolution they tried to destroy the week And they tried to shift from a seven-day pattern of the week to a ten-day pattern You know one day off in ten and that was far too little for the human condition and it really didn't work and Eventually they reverted to the patterns of nature that are kind of as it were written into our biology and and written into a reality and they had to come back from that but This is kind of the the week is the fundamental unit of The liturgical calendar and then the seventh day on which you rest and worship that is the fundamental holy day but in Israelite Revelation when you rested on that seventh day you were imitating God and That was profound because in Mesopotamian religion for example The origin of human beings was as a race of slaves the Mesopotamians That would mean like Babylon and modern-day Iraq and the cultures that grew up in Along the Tigris and the Euphrates those were powerful cultures in the ancient world and in those cultures They told a story about how the gods were complaining about having to work too much to make their own food and so the mother goddess took the corpse of a dead God and Used the blood and the flesh to fashion this race of slaves And that's you and I and then this race of slaves human beings would work the fields to produce grain and raise animals which were brought and then sacrifice to the gods to feed the gods and That's why we had to sacrifice you have to sacrifice to keep the gods fed and if we don't feed the gods Then they get mad at us and they condemn us so think of that kind of worldview Okay, think of where human beings are in that kind of worldview, but then the Bible says no That's not the case We're actually made in the image of the one God and we're invited to share with him his weekly rest and Just as it were hang out with the divinity Every seven days and just not bother about the rest of you know The labor but just enjoy his presence and the presence of his other image bears our fellow human beings And this brings up a profound thing about the about what the Bible says about reality The Bible insists that the personal is Before the impersonal and that the subjective is before the objective This is precisely the reverse of the modern scientific worldview Modern scientific worldview holds that energy and matter these objective impersonal realities, you know Electricity light and matter those are the first things there. They accidentally are burped into existence For who knows what reason out of the space-time matrix, you know, none of the atheists have an explanation for the big bang But it still doesn't it still doesn't persuade them to acknowledge that there's a God But for some unknown reason the whole cosmos gets into existence With a big bang and then for senseless reasons just expands and then after 14 billion years on this little planet the third rock from the Sun, you know Water and mud Organize themselves into the first amoeba and then it gets more complicated until you have human beings and then human beings Brains keep growing until all of a sudden whoop there you go, and you've got personality right and you have thought and love and motivation and all those personal attributes, so those It really when you get down to it The secular scientists think that all those personal attributes like thoughts will affection Desire love all those things they believe our illusions Created by the complicated matter in our brains But really we're just robots without any of those things and we just think that we're thinking and we think that we're loving and And all of that so what they do and this is what's taught in the schools And this is what taught in the STEM academies. That's what's taught in our universities is that the immaturity the matter and the impersonal is primary and then Persons come along very late in the game as the accidental unintended byproduct of evolution and That's completely wrong on every level. Okay, even scientifically especially Scientifically because it's contrary to the principle of entropy, which is well documented. I want to go and take my course on religion science anyway But what the Bible says is no in the beginning God and God is a person God is a subject He has a personality. He has thought love affection desire goals and Before anything material is created there is God and then God speaks because he is An agent and he calls the world into existence So the personal is before the impersonal and the personal calls the impersonal into existence Okay, and what we are made for is Interpersonal communion. I can't emphasize this enough. This is radically different from Darwin This is radically different from Marx and from all of you know from Nietzsche and all of the Thinkers whose ideas are still poisoning world culture. All those guys got it precisely wrong They you know because they start off from an atheistic premise, but we human beings are made for Interpersonal communion we're made to be with God and be with each other and enjoy each other's presence That is our purpose. That's our goal and that's what heaven is going to be like amen You know interpersonal communion that gaze of love we call it the beatific vision Why do we call it the beatific vision and not the beatific conversation? Well because after about a million years of being up there We're gonna get everything worked out and there won't be much else to say But there will still be love and just like an old couple that understands each other very well And doesn't need to say a whole lot because they just have this understanding They'll still sit on the park bench and watch the sunset and look into each other's eyes Because after 50 years they still love each other very deeply even though everything's been said amen And that's a foretaste of the beatific vision. That's why we call it the beatific vision We'll just be in that gaze of love with God that that's that's an expression for the intimacy of communion Forever and a foretaste of it is the Sabbath the Sabbath was when you stopped your work You kick back you relaxed and you worshiped and you just opened yourself to God and you just experienced his creation and you experienced his presence and you experienced the presence of the other image bearers and You'd think that a command to relax would be well received by human beings Can you think of a a less taxing thing to be told to do? I want you to take a vacation. I Want you not to work. I want you to relax and kick back But you know the whole history God's people has been rebelling against this command, you know No, no, I gotta work. I gotta work. Come on Could there be an easier command. I want you to do nothing Okay, but you know we rebel against all God's commands even Even those that are so obviously for our good and they're so obviously enjoyable to carry out and so we always try to find ways to to work and to Clutter up Clutter up the day of the Lord and the other feast days in the liturgical calendar with different activities that Distract from entering into communion with God, you know, think about when you know when people in love Want to be together they take measures to Get alone and to get quiet, you know, so they go to a quiet restaurant You know, maybe with the lights dark, you know I'm a candle on the table and they eat together where it provides some solitude, you know and And parents, you know, they want to share time with one another lock the door You know and turn off their phones, you know and share time with one another away from the kids, etc So the Sabbath is like that with us and God It's like stop the work stop the noise create this sanctuary in time In which you can be open to God and enjoy interpersonal communion with God where you have time for prayer We have time for worship prayer and worship are ways that we commune that we You know communicate with God and experience him and we think again, you know That we would just be overjoyed with this command But because of our fallen nature We find ways to resist it. Well, this is the seventh day So the all of creation is made according to a kind of basic liturgical time It's made of course It's made according to the basic unit of the liturgical year, which is the week we've seen how day and night begin the cycles of time and how the Heaven heavenly bodies are placed there to to calculate a sacred time and how the Sabbath is that fundamental sacred day and Then when we get into the creation of Adam and Eve We see many beautiful things that point to the sacredness of time and the sacredness of the human body In in verse 18 it says it's not good that the man should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him Really, I shall make a help Complementary to him is how I would translate the Hebrew there. It's a beautiful Hebrew word connecto which probably is closest to the English idea of complimentary and And In this site this idea it's not a helper. It's it's just a help is what the text says I'll make a help Complementary to him. That's the literal Hebrew there and the word for help Acer in the Bible never refers to the help provided by a servant or a subservient person or a slave or a child this word help always refers to divine assistance or to Assistance that comes from a king Many the uses of this word are actually in the book of kings when one king would send an army as a help To another king so it's it's help that comes from above and we see We see the structure of matrimony here because you know in matrimony We're channels of grace and what is grace it is help that comes from God And so we as spouses are called to be channels of God's help of God's grace Towards one another and that was the original purpose behind the creation of Eve of the original bride And so God teaches Adam what he needs Makes Adam go through experience so Adam can come to know something about himself And what God does is he brings all the beasts and the birds etc to Adam and Adam looks through Them all and realizes that none of them are suitable or complementary to him and once Adam has an idea about what he really needs then The Lord God causes a deep sleep to fall upon the man and well He slept he took out one of his ribs and this is an an Interesting word in Hebrew this word rib say la in Hebrew which means rib or side It's used 40 times in the Old Testament and except for one instance 39 of those 40 times is in the context of a Sacred place of worship Okay, so twice here with reference to Adam's body and then 37 more times Distributed among the building of the tabernacle in the wilderness the building of the temple under Solomon and first Kings 6 through 8 and Ezekiel's eschatological temple in Ezekiel 40 through 48 That's the only other three places where this term say la is used in the Bible So is that just accidental that we're using a term from temple architecture? To describe Adam's body not at all Adam's body was a temple It was already a temple of the Holy Spirit and then this sacred Building Unit from his side is is taken out and it's literally literally built into a woman This is the RSV translation says made into a woman But the Hebrew word is Banna, which is built and why is the woman built because she too is a temple made from this sacred beam That's taken out of the side of the temple body of Adam. So they're both Temple bodies of the Holy Spirit we might say and then Adam is put into a deep sleep For this to take place for the surgery to take place, you know God is the original Anesthesiologist, okay, I'm gonna put this over your face out. I'm just gonna take okay breathe deeply okay, and So he goes into his sleep and that's on the sixth day and Then he wakes up and the woman's brought to him This would be presumably then on the seventh day, which is the holy day and then he cries out This at last is bone of my bones flesh of my flesh She should be called woman because she was taken out of man You know so he bursts into song he he becomes the bard, you know up until this point He's been hanging around with the apes tossing bananas back and forth and checking out his opposable thumb And then all of a sudden a woman shows up. You're like, oh, I got to clean up here, you know And now I am a pentameter is flowing out of his mouth, you know, and he's the bard You know and it's the first lyric poetry in the Bible is all impressed with the woman. He's trying to impress her and With his artistic qualities and but it really marks us as as a high point and so on The seventh day this day of rest and worship the sacred day The first man and the first wife are brought together and they enter into communion on that sacred day and it's pointing to the sacredness of marriage and how marriage is an icon of The communion between God and humanity which is intended for the sacred day Okay for the Sabbath and so like I said, we are intended for interpersonal communion Communion with God on the Sabbath communion with our spouse to your matrimony which is a sign of our communion with our fellow image bearers and So it's it's very beautiful now. Let's move on Much farther along in sacred history and let's look at the liturgical calendar that Moses instituted a much later After God revealed himself and made the covenant at Mount Sinai. So in the aftermath of Sinai For about one year that they tarry at the mountain Moses went up and he got additional commands from the Lord commands that allowed him to set up a a Religion to set up a liturgy at a liturgical calendar And so Leviticus 23 the Lord said to Moses say to the people of Israel the appointed feasts of the Lord That's the Moa theme. I would say the solemnities and I've got an article that came out Last year in the Catholic biblical quarterly on the meaning of this term Moa theme and in in Greek it becomes The the great day or great a great day is a Moa in in Greek at a certain stage and Jewish Hellenistic culture and so on. So anyway, it's it's technical. I don't want to get lost in the weeds of that but I Would say these appointed feast I would refer to these as solemnities That's that's what they would be for us of the Lord which you shall proclaim as holy convocations That's when you'd have a when you would gather together for Communal prayer and worship that was called a holy convocation. You shall do no work I'm sorry. I'm getting out of myself my appointed feasts are these six days shall work be done But on the seventh day But the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest a holy convocation You shall do no work. It is a Sabbath to the Lord and all your dwellings. So the week With the Sabbath as a seventh day This is the fundamental unit of the liturgical calendar and then apart from the week in the Sabbath There are seven other Moa theme in the course of the year and these are them These are the appointed feasts of the Lord the holy convocations You should which you should proclaim at the time appointed for them in the first month Which was Nissan which fell in spring like around April, okay? On the 14th day of the month in the evening. It's the Lord's Passover And on the 15th day of the same month is the feast of unleavened bread to the Lord seven days You shall eat unleavened bread on the first day. You shall have a holy convocation You shall do no laborious work But you should present an offering by the fight by far to Lord seven days on the seventh day is a holy convocation You shall do no laborious work now There's a little bit of a debate, you know, how do we understand the 14th day and the 15th day and you know Are these this you know the same as this this the Passover day what's being referred to here But we don't need to get into that It's the feist is that you basically have a week-long feast of the Passover and the first and last days are solemnities, okay, Moa Thee and What's involved here in this in this observance is both a natural rhythm as well as a Redemptive rhythm so this feast of Passover on the one hand It celebrated the cycles of creation or the cycles of nature Because this falling in the month of Nissan. This was the beginning of the barley harvest Okay, and barley was the grain that ripened first of the different grains like millet and Sorghum and oats and so on all the different grains. Well barley ripens first so in the first barley came in that would coincide with Passover and so Passover Celebrated, you know God's provision through nature and part of the sacred natural cycles because the cycles of nature were a kind of primordial liturgy but it the Passover also celebrated an event in Salvation history or we might say redemptive history and that of course was the beginning of the exodus from Egypt Where God extended his hand to draw his people out of slavery and to bring them to the holy mountain And as long as we're talking about that and the exodus Let me point out that the book of exodus is a very liturgical book and there's a literary Theme in the book of exodus that at the beginning of the book of exodus. They are Laboring for Pharaoh. They're doing slave labor for Pharaoh and the word for their labor for Pharaoh is avodah But you see in Hebrew the word avodah can also be the word for worship And so at the beginning of exodus they are performing avodah for Pharaoh Which means slave labor for the king of Egypt But by the end of the book of exodus the tabernacle has been built and God's presence comes down in an abyss The tabernacle and now they are performing avodah for the Lord which means worship So they've moved from work to worship from labor to liturgy and that says something about God's intentions For his people we work we work now we labor in this temporal reality But we're heading towards the eternal liturgy where it is all going to be worship But getting back to this now that was how the Passover was structured so the Passover it commemorated on something in the natural cycle an aspect of creation the cycles of creation and it also commemorated something in Salvation history the exodus and being freed from Egypt. Well, let's go on and Look at what else we have in the Liturgical calendar, so the Lord says to Moses on the day after the Sabbath Presumably following Passover this would be a Sunday in fact then you are to take a sheaf of Your grain of the first fruits This would presumably be barley which ripened first and you're supposed to bring this sheaf and wave it before the Lord as Corn of a symbolic offering and then once you wave the grain before the Lord and Offer the other sacrifices you being you begin counting and you count out seven full weeks It says in Leviticus 23. That's a total of 49 days and then on the 50th day after seven full weeks from Passover that becomes What we know of as the feast of Pentecosts Pentecost in in In ancient Israel was just called the feast of weeks and as I mentioned in my talk this morning This 50-day period marked the extent of the grain harvest and by the end of those 50 days All the different kinds of grain had ripened and it had been brought in the wheat was the last and after 50 days You are bringing in the last of the wheat. So the feast of weeks Celebrated part of the cycles of nature. It was like a Thanksgiving festival when you bring in The final part of the harvest in the late fall because did a fall and late fall fall it fell in summer actually for age in Israel because their Agricultural season is different than North America, but it was you know giving thanks to God for his great provision But then as I mentioned this morning This feast of weeks or Pentecost also commemorated the giving of the law at Sinai and the forming of the Sinai Covenant in Exis 20 through 24 That was 50 days after the first Passover if you count carefully in the Pentateuch So again, we're celebrating the cycles of creation and also the events of Salvation history or of redemption We go on from that in in the that the day of Pentecost was a holy convocation It was a solemnity but interestingly it wasn't observed as an octave You didn't have a week-long celebration with the seventh day also being a solemnity for the feast of weeks and Then in the seventh month which fell usually around September In the fall. This is when you brought in the grape harvest This is when the vineyards were ripe and you harvested all the grapes and made the wine And so that's this the seventh month was the month of the grape harvest And we get some different Salemnities there so the first day of the seventh month was New Year's Day go figure We would think it should be the first day of the first month but actually the head of the year or Rosh Hashanah was on the first day of the seventh month and Why is that well probably something to do with the sacredness of the number seven and those of you that hung around I've hung around with my writings and Dr. Hans writings in these conferences, you know Seven is the number also of what? Covenant right it's the Covenant number Because in Hebrew when you would form a covenant you would swear an oath and oath swearing in Hebrew is literally to Seven oneself, okay, and as the Israelites looked upon it God made an oath and formed a covenant with all creation in Genesis chapter one because the seven days were a divine Sevening himself God was sevening himself through the seven days that means to swear an oath in Hebrew And so the seven days of creation are a unenacted Unenacted oath that establishes a covenant between God and all creation Which is subsequently renewed at various points in Salvation history, but on the seventh month which is sacred. It's the month of covenant It's the month of the grave harvest on the first day. You shall observe a day of solemn rest It's a solemnity with a blast of trumpets a holy convocation. This is the head of the year She'll do no labor laborious work And then on the tenth day of the seventh month. That's the day of atonement And again, you shall have a holy convocation. You shall afflict yourselves. It says in Leviticus 23 27 That means you shall fast so there was only one day of fasting in the mosaic liturgy And that was the day of atonement and then Later in that month On the 15th day of the seventh month and for seven days it is the feast of booze also called the feast of tabernacles and The first day was a solemnity and the eighth day was a Slemte so a little bit different than pass over to the first and the seventh days as Solemnities and he would celebrate for the week for a week and if you read down further What it what Moses commands the people to do is built is to build shacks using branches and leaves and so on to build these shacks or like lean twos or temporary shelters to live in during the seven days of the feast of booze Because the feast of booze Celebrated not only the grape harvest and let me explain that when you know before Before refrigeration and other means of preserving fruit and vegetables when your Vegetables or your food was ripe. Okay in this case when the grapes ripened you had to get them off of the vine and turn them into wine Immediately because if you let them stay for a couple days longer, what was going to happen? Hey, they were gonna rot Okay, things did not stay good for very long and so when you if you had a cucumber patch when your cucumbers were ripe you had to harvest them all Immediately and get them pickled before they would rot and if you had a grape vineyard You had to get those grapes as soon as they hit the peak of ripeness. You had to get them off the vine Crush them and make wine before they began to rot so there was a almost a kind of panic about getting the harvest in and so what happened in ancient Israel is When you were getting close to harvest time they would watch carefully and when they realized this is the time The grapes taste right for you know for making wine. They're at the peak of ripeness It was all hands-on deck. It was a full court press To get those grapes off and to crush them and to get them You know to start fermenting to be good wine Which is a form where they're where their nutrition would be useful to you and be would be preserved for you For the rest of the year, you know fermenting and making wine was a way of preserving that nutritious Grape juice and so they would do that and since they were in such a rush They wouldn't even go back home to their To their houses at night or their caves or wherever they lived They would stay in the field and they would build a shack in the middle of the field in the middle of the Vineyard if it was the grape harvest and they would sleep in a shack where they were basically Collapse when it finally became too dark to do any work But they would stay right there in the field so that as soon as it got light enough to get back to harvesting the grapes They could wake up at you know 445 or whatever with the first crack of light was just getting gray and get out there and get back to harvesting the grapes So these booze that are being talked about limit x 23 This was connected to the cycles of nature to the natural cycles of creation But also tied to redemption tied to salvation history because during the exodus God came down and dwelt in a tent a temporary dwelling that was like a sorry shack Compared to his heavenly mansion. And so just as God dwelt in that temporary tent While they were in the exodus so for seven days in the feast of booze the people of Israel would dwell in these temporary Lean twos as it were these temporary shelters and it would celebrate the fact that God had come down and tabernacled with them and that feast was the culmination of the liturgical calendar and You will read about the feast of booze or the feast of tabernacles in John chapter 7 where Jesus goes up to Goes up to Jerusalem during this feast Interestingly on the eighth day of the feast the lap the final solemnity That's when the Jews later in their history would begin to pray for rain and there in John 7 It says that Jesus got up on that last day the day when they began to pray for rain and he said if anyone thirsts Let him come to me and let him drink who believes in me as the scripture has said out of his heart She'll flow rivers of living water. So in the context you understand Jesus is claiming to be divine because on the day when the Jews began to ask God for water Jesus gets up and says if you're thirsty come to me. Okay, and that really implies I am God so there's a lot going on there and the the gospel of John especially Picks up themes from the liturgical calendar of Israel. So what we've seen is there are three great feasts That later on we find out God commanded all the men of Israel to come to the to the sanctuary for the three great feasts of Passover Pentecost and booze and we've seen how each of these sacred feasts celebrated both the cycles of nature as well as The events of salvation history so let's talk now about you know, how do how do these how do the realities? Celebrated in the mosaic liturgy. How do they transfer into the liturgy of the new covenant? Well, the first feast that is outlined in the Old Testament liturgy is the feast of Passover, of course And it's easy to see what the equivalent of Passover is in the liturgy of the new covenant that translates into Easter and Holy week, okay, and to a certain extent the octave of Easter celebrated for eight days with the first and the last being a solemnity so Easter is the Passover of the new covenant where the Eucharist the Passover meal for the new covenant is Established etc. And so we can we can recognize that and Easter likewise just as Passover does Celebrates the cycles of nature. This is the beginning if you're in Israel. It's the beginning of the The grain harvest in North America. It's the beginning of the planting season where it's finally warm enough that you can go out and begin agriculture a new life is springing up and the the soil is coming back to life after the winter and So you have that as well as Christ coming back to life rising from the dead a Symbol of our own resurrection that one day we will be planted in the ground and we will spring up and be resurrected to eternal life So this connection with nature or with creation as well as redemption is also present in the liturgy of the new covenant Well, secondly, we have the feast of weeks where you count seven weeks and then on the day after which is the 50th day, then you have that Feast of weeks and that's an easy one to see as well. That's the feast of Pentecost Okay, and we talked about this in the fire of God's holiness in the earlier talk So just as Pentecost celebrated the end of the harvest when you're bringing in the wheat So That's the cycle of nature in it celebrated the giving of the law at Sinai Pentecost for us Celebrates the giving of the Holy Spirit, which is the new law of the new covenant That's the event and salvation history it commemorates and it also celebrates the Harvest of the Gentiles the Israelites were the first fruits The Israelites are like barley that ripens first and so the first fruits of the church are Jewish from the people of Israel and then we enter into the harvest of the Gentiles who come later the end of the harvest who are like the wheat and so You have that connection both to the natural order as well as commemorating salvation history and then the final great pilgrimage feast of the liturgy of Moses was the Feast of Tabernacles, okay, where you would bring in the Grapes and begin to make the wine and pray for rain, etc according to the rabbis, this was the greatest of the The greatest of the feasts that were celebrated in Jerusalem. And what is what is the equivalent of this in the Calendar of the new covenant. Well, the equivalent is our feast when we celebrate God coming down and Tabernacling among us and that is the Feast of the Incarnation where God takes on as it were a a temporary dwelling He takes on human flesh mortal human flesh and he dwells in mortal human flesh amongst us And even refers to his body as a temple John 2 21 He spoke of the temple of his body But that famous verse in John 1 the word became flesh and dwelt among us John 1 14 Actually in the Greek a more accurate translation would be the word became flesh and Tabernacled among us using the Greek word for tent or tabernacle and Alluding to the Feast of Tabernacles So just as the Feast of Tabernacles was the great Temple Feast where in the time of Jesus the Feast of Tabernacles celebrated God dwelling in The Tabernacle the temporary structure in the wilderness and it also celebrated the successor of the Tabernacle Which was Solomon's temple and it also celebrated the temple that God was going to bring at the end of time Those three aspects of the Feast of Tabernacles in Jesus's day Okay, so the Feast of Christmas celebrates God coming down in human flesh and dwelling within us dwelling amongst us To accompany us in a journey out of the slavery of sin To the freedom of worship as children of God. So there's that Tabernacle Christmas connection here with the Liturgy of the New Covenant and Christmas in the Wisdom of Holy Mother Church also recognizes the natural cycles. So falling as it does near the winter solstice It is the time of the year where the light begins to increase and so he celebrate the light of the world as he Is described in John chapter 1 Coming into the world as a little child and then growing and increasing until his light Fills the whole world So we see this pattern both in the cut in the Liturgy of the Old Covenant and the Liturgy of the New That we celebrate the cycles of creation which are kind of a curriculum of redemption That God set up this cosmos in such a way for the purpose of worship All right and Adam and Eve were the first priest and priestess in the garden, which is the first sanctuary Etc. And that's our calling. We're called to be a priestly people Our status as priests and kings like Adam and Eve is restored to us by baptism And we're a people of liturgy that just as Adam's gardening in the Garden of Eden was actually also his worship His work was his worship. This is what we learn to do as Christians through the power of the Holy Spirit We learn to convert our labor into a liturgy our work into worship and we do that by Doing our work with excellence Doing it with the right intention Seeking to sanctify our work sanctifying ourselves through doing our work and sanctify others Through our work. This is that's from Saint the triple sanctification of work from St. Hosemriah Sanctify your work That's like do your work in a holy fashion with excellence and with the right intention and then seek to become holy through your labor and Then seek to work for the holiness of others through the product of your labor That's the triple sanctification and that's the way that we recover That aboriginal priesthood of Adam in our own lives and we make our lives a kind of living continual liturgy So this is how sacred time was was set up in the old covenant and now through under the guidance of the Holy Spirit sacred time is also set up in our liturgy today, but Comes back to the purpose for which we are created and that is interpersonal communion Ultimately communion with God God's Personhood is reflected in the person hood of other human beings, but his is the ultimate person hood This is why we like in in solemn benediction We praise God for all his attributes, but we also praise him in his angels and in his saints And that's an idea going back all the way to St. Augustine and even earlier that in heaven We will enjoy God and we will also enjoy God's presence In the angels and in the saints and so when we're spending time with fellow saints and with the angels for Eternity in heaven in a very deep way what we're enjoying in our fellow believers and in the angels is really God's Presence in them and the way that God's nature is reflected in in particular ways in the uniqueness of each Individual angel and each individual human being who's sanctified and purified in in heaven forever And so practically speaking what does this mean for us? We need to recapture the idea of liturgical living Okay too often in the modern especially American Catholic lifestyle The cycles of the liturgy are kind of afterthought with the exception of the biggies You know Christmas and Easter so we're cognizant of those Those kind of scream at us in the and the church gives us whole penitential Seasons to get ready for them with avan and lent, but we don't always do a good job Do we of observing the rest of the cycles of the feast days in the 70s? But these should be really big things Okay, some of the feast days of the saints used to be huge in Catholic European culture and we've gotten way away from that take John the Baptist for example His feast day is on June 25th. It's halfway between Christmas's John is the moon to Jesus's son just as Jesus's birthday is celebrated when the sun begins to grow In the days begin to grow longer In the depth of winter so John's feast day is celebrated when the sun begins to grow less When the day begins to shrink and that's because John famously said he must become greater And I must become less so on the day when on the the day of the year when the day begins to grow less Roughly the summer solstice right that's when we celebrate John the Baptist feast day And that used to be a big thing with bonfires and celebrations and so on In especially in northern Europe and we hardly even remember it We may go to mass on the day. Oh, hey, what do you know? It's the feast day of John the Baptist. It's not that ugly, you know, I'm a daily communicant anyway, you know And you know, so we don't really live into the liturgical calendar So we need to live into the literature liturgical calendar because quite literally the purpose of time is to create the condition of possibility for us to enter into communion with God and with others and we need to also recover the beauty of sacred rest and You know as dr. Ham was emphasizing the beauty of now the Christian Sabbath So we no longer observe the Sabbath on the seventh day, but because the first day of the week is the day that Christ Rows from the dead we have shifted that that sacred day one day forward Despite the objections of the seventh day Adventists who really resent this but anyway We since early time and you can see it already in sacred scripture how the first day of the week What is important in the Gospels and in acts and and elsewhere the book of Revelation? For example, John sees the whole vision of revelation on the first day of the week when he's in Prayer and worshiping so we need to keep the new Sabbath Which is Sunday. We need to keep it holy. You know, this is one of the most neglected of the Ten Commandments We think of the Ten Commandments. Okay, don't murder. Okay check don't commit adultery. Okay check Don't You know, don't bear false. I usually don't lie, you know, but you know We go through them But we forget one of the Ten Commandments, which is eternal moral law is Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, which for us means the first day of the week And so again, we need to avoid the distractions the distractions of labor the workaholism Rabbi Joshua Abraham Heschel very famous rabbi It was Abraham Joshua Founder of one of the main branches of modern modern Judaism Used to say that the Sabbath was created so that man Could rest and acknowledge that the world was already made We don't have to always be remaking the world it has been created So on the Sabbath day, we rest and acknowledge. Hey, God did his work. It's here. It's beautiful. It's good I'm going to enjoy it. Okay, so Abstaining from shopping. Okay, this is why in America 50 years ago shops were closed on the Sabbath day Why is that so you're not making people work on the Sabbath? You're allowing all the people in retail. Okay also to rest gotten way away from that. Haven't we you know and Making the day focused on worship about attending mass and not just you know Attending a vigil to get it over with so that we can have all of Sunday, too I don't know fish or whatever. Okay, but really using Sunday for what it was intended for was for worship and then for sharing time with with family and with other believers entering into that interpersonal community and You know also things like prayer and meditation on scripture a day of a day of quiet a day devoted over to Being open to God's presence and entering more deeply into communion with him This is really the reason for the entire liturgy is to facilitate Communion with God. Well, that's been a little overview Let's go to the Lord now in prayer in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen Heavenly Father, we thank you for your great wisdom to work with our bodies and to work with the cycles of creation to give us this great This great treasure, which is the liturgical year built on the precedents that you establish with Moses and your Old Testament Covenant people Lord help us to live into the liturgy and to Actually use these days of holiness that are set aside these great Celemnities that we have to the year actually for prayer in worship and for a little more time in quiet and for a little more time in adoration and For spending that time with you and being open so you can come down as it were into our hearts and walk with us in The cool of the day even as you communed with Adam and Eve in that fashion Lord help us to really take the The precautions and the measures that we need to in order to keep that sacred time safe to shut off phones and electronics and to close out the Distractions and be able to focus on you and also focus on one another Your image bearers who are our brothers and sisters in Christ? We ask this through Christ our Lord in the name of the Father in the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen Thank you And we've reached that most unusual of circumstances where I've actually run out of things to say So we have Q&A. We've got about 10 minutes left scheduled until 315 and so We'll make it available if there are some questions. There aren't any questions We'll just go. I don't know go get a snack or something But if anybody has any questions about anything that we've talked about in the Confessor Yes, there is something in the Bible that says about when humans were allowed to eat meat And it's in Genesis the end of Genesis 8 in the beginning of Genesis 9. It's the no way it Covenant the Covenant of Noah and so there's a parallel between the Covenant with Adam in the garden and the Covert with Noah after the Flood a lot of parallelism there so Adam and Noah are parallel. They're both priest fathers over all humanity and With Adam you've got the garden and with Noah you've got a floating garden Which we call the Ark and you've got Mount Eden for Adam. You got Mount Eirat for Noah And so in Genesis at the end of Genesis 8 the beginning of Genesis 9 God renews the Covenant that he originally formed with Adam With Noah But unfortunately because of the entrance of sin into world things are not as perfect as they were in the garden And in the garden it's very explicit in Genesis 1 that every every living thing was to eat the green plants and to eat The fruit with the seed in it so everybody was vegan in the garden and that's where you get the images of They they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain So that image of the peaceable mountain of God from Isaiah 11 6 through 9 That's actually taken from the description of Eden where all the animals were at peace with one another There wasn't carnivorous activity and the green plants were given for food but now in the covenant with Noah It's it's the Covenant is renewed God says I make a covenant with you be fruitful and multiply and fill The earth Repeating those covenantal commands that were originally given to Adam. So we are renewing it But now however God says to Noah now the fear of you will fall upon all the animals and You can you can kill and eat the animals. So that's the beginning of bratwurst, okay? It's a Genesis chapter 9. Thanks be to God, right? Because where would we be without brats? Yes, yes, sir Yeah, so that gets us way far afield But I think that Part of the issue is what is time? What is time really before there are any? Created observers You know and this when you get into quantum physics you find out that certain kind of physical Processes require observers even to take place. So there must have been a consciousness present But not a temporal consciousness. It would have been a divine consciousness before the creation of human beings And so, you know when we we're talking about creation before the creation of Adam and Eve When we're talking about days and so on, you know, what is the passage of time when you don't have any created observers? What is the meaning of that and what would that even have been like and I think that? Pursuing that might end up giving us an answer to You know the the apparent ages that we see when we look at over the cosmos versus the way that it's described in In Genesis from a human perspective. In fact, there is a There is a an Israeli rabbi and physicist named Gerald Schroeder Who works out a careful? accommodation between You know as it were divine days Based on the theory of relativity and from being at the observational perspective of the center of the Big Bang Versus the passage of time from the perspective of a temporal observer who's on the earth and he gets a nice match between the the age of the earth and And and a week from the perspective of human observe anyway I can't go into all of that, but the the historical critical method That gets as far a field the historical method critical method is Composed of four sub methods which are described as text criticism okay source criticism form criticism and redaction criticism and actually the historical critical method is a little bit misnamed because The history doesn't per se Enter into any of those all of those are actually forms of literary criticism so I would prefer that it be called the literary critical method and None of those methods really directly addresses. How do we you know calculate? Or how do we understand the passage of time and creation? you know from from what we're told by the creation story and in science the historical critical method does not offer a solution to the accommodation of Revelation and The information that comes to us through the methods of Natural science so I'd say that and there's a lot of other things I would say like that every two years I teach a course on religion and science Here at Franciscan and we go over different possible ways of understanding Genesis so we look at say Literal six-day young earth creationists both Protestants and Catholics representatives of that position We look at day-age theorists. We look at intelligent design theorists old earth creationists theistic evolutionists We look at we look at all of those, but the church is not dogmatic about that The best document on that question that's authoritative that's come from the church is Humanae generous from Pius XII in 1950 who establishes some basic parameters that we have to hold to for the preservation of Christian doctrine that is for example that there was a historical Adam and Eve who are the parents of the whole human race Who are created in a state of justice and had a historical fall into sin that breached their covenant with God? Those are non-negotiables that has this have to be held to preserve the integrity of Catholic dogma But beyond that in terms of timing and the possible precursors of the human body and so on Pius XII allowed discussion of that he urged that it be Frank and balanced and so on but but he left that so that's the current state at some point The church may add further definition and say no You know certain views of creation are out of bounds or are incompatible with the Christian faith Just as further definition was given to say Marian dogmas, you know in the course of church history So if it becomes necessary to do so we may come to a point where We have a ecumenical council defining more specifically what Catholics must believe about say the days of creation But we're not at that point So I try not to be more dogmatic than the church on that issue. Yeah, okay. Yes, ma'am If there's a microphone there Okay, two questions. Thank you for the talk. It was really great One is can you recommend any resources either by you or both and other authors to develop your Could use me a little closer to the mic. I can't hear what my first quick question is Can you recommend any resources that develop your topics from the previous talk? but my question about this talk is I'm a I'm a scientist I should say that there are a lot of Big Bang proponents that are physicists out there that are not One time was created is just Independent of that so like both things can be true in this truth cannot contradict truth spirit so in that spirit is Is there anything in the original language of Genesis 1 1 That would prevent us from interpreting Genesis 1 1 as the creation of space time and The rest of creation deriving from there Yes, no, in fact, I think that in fact that is the the interpretation I favor when it says in the beginning I think that's talking about an absolute beginning You know and God created the heavens and the earth the heavens and the earth is a Hebrew way Referring to the totality of that which exists, you know the cosmos, okay? So I think it's referring to the cosmos being called into being out of nothing there is you know, Criazzo ex nihilo and It was a you know one of the reasons why Big Bang Theory was opposed even by say Einstein, you know because it started with Father George Lometra who had what he called the cosmic egg theory He had this idea of the universe coming into existence and expanding like an egg growing Cosmic day didn't catch off as it didn't take off as a term But one of the critics of the theory called it a stupid Big Bang idea And the Big Bang that was that was Fred Hoyle who came up with Big Bang. He didn't like it He was the last holdout for steady-state theory and but but he unwittingly gave the name to the theory You know, but it was an embarrassment because this idea that the universe came into being in time Sounded like Christian theology. It sounded like Criazzo ex nihilo and it raised awkward questions like well What was before it that could cause it? You know and there's strong theistic implications of the Big Bang because you have You have an effect that requires a cause. So what caused the Big Bang? Well since the Big Bang is the origin of all time matter and energy its cause can't be anything That's time matter and energy. It's got to be something that's outside of that. It's got to be like an immaterial Timeless cause right and it also has to be a highly intelligent cause because you look at the fine-tuning of the universe and how all the Cosmic parameters are kind of like on a knife's edge to allow the universe to be life supporting and you have this extremely low Entropy like ridiculously low. That's where you get the Penrose number, right? And so it's ridiculously improbable that a that's such a highly ordered universe would just come into being From nothing and so it bespeaks some kind of super intelligence and so you have a super intelligent massively powerful immaterial and Timeless cause well, what could that be you know and so there's strong, you know and so strong theistic implications and when I was a kid Robert Jastrow came out with this book God and the astronomers and I read it when I was like 12 and it powerfully impressed me and he pointed out that you know that the whole Big Bang theory Which some regard is like anti-Christian or something like that But it's not actually was actually resisted because it really lent credence to the idea that there is a God And it still does when you think about it So I don't know if that answers your question But I think you're the first question you asked was are there further resources on what I was discussing this morning And I I regret to say I'm not aware yet of This you know the the theme of fire and the relationship of God's hoist fires Actually, not something that's been explored a lot in in biblical theology, but you know I was just working on it for the sake of this conference and starting to get into this and as so often happens when you take Take an aspect of sacred scripture or a divine revelation and kind of enter into The storyline from that door you start discovering. Oh my gosh There's so much there that I didn't it's like Alice through the licking glass It becomes bigger and bigger as you go further and further and you become you begin to realize this much bigger than I realized You know so actually I was talking with dr. Han earlier today about me working working this into a book and you know Trying to you know find secondary literature on this and so on but it's it's really fascinating. So thank you Thank you the question great And we are out of time. So I want to thank you very much for coming to the conference