Pondering Glory

Andrew Guffey • March 27, 2026

What does glory look like?

When I was young, maybe eight or ten, I remember sitting on the cold concrete floor of our basement, and leafing through the illustrated children's Bible my aunt and uncle--my godparents--had given me for my baptism when I was an infant. I remember pondering two illustrated scenes (they've melded in my memory into one, but they're two images). The two images are evocative, depictions of glory from the Elder Testament.


The first scene is the assumption of Elijah into heaven on a heavenly chariot (2 Kings 2:1-18). An orange glow floods the page, deepening to red in the form of two horses and a chariot. The figure of Elijah standing in the chariot, dressed in white robes, punctuates the color burning off the page. Below them is the overwhelmed Elisha, undoubtedly as he is about to cry out, “Father, father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” 


The second scene is the appearance of the Merkavah, the Divine chariot-throne to Ezekiel by the River Chebar (Ezekiel 1). Ezekiel has fallen down at the bottom of the page on the grass and stones, barely able to raise his eyes to the manifestation above him: on a background of deep blue, a bright white, complex figure of wings and wheels, with different faces at the head and ethereal flames rising from the center, illumines Ezekiel's back.


Both of these are images of glory. The first of the glorification of Elijah, the second of Ezekiel's coming face to face with the glory of God, the Kavod Adonai. Later Jewish mystical and Rabbinic speculation will name this glory of God present in the world the Shekinah. I was fascinated by these stories, by stories of God's glory breaking into the mundane, cracking open our day-to-day expectations, bursting our assumptions and certainties. It's no wonder that I have devoted much of my scholarly career to the book of Revelation and other related writings that ponder the glory of God. No wonder I was attracted to the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose work on theological aesthetics, on the beauty that undergirds all that is, is entitled Herrlichkeit, or in English, The Glory of the Lord. Balthasar aligned Glory and Beauty. At its heart, what we call beauty is a sacrament of the Glory of God.


Fyodor Dostoevsky tried to write about beauty. The tragic protagonist of his novel The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, is something like Dostoevsky's attempt to write a perfectly beautiful human being, a Christ, in flesh and human psyche, as it were. Myshkin fits uncomfortably with the socialites into whose company he has been thrust. His simplicity unnerves and bewilders them. It is one such socialite, Ippolit, who utters one of the better known phrases of Dostoevsky's writings: "'Is it true, Prince, that you once said "beauty" would save the world? Gentlemen,' he cried loudly to them all, 'the prince insists that beauty will save the world!'" Beauty will save the world. Or rather, Glory will save the world.


But where do we find glory? It is tempting to find glory in what knocks us on our faces, blinds us with its overwhelming and extraordinary shine. It is tempting to identify glory with raw power, with strength, even peace through strength. It is tempting to align glory with extreme happiness and delight, emotional elation and dopamine overload. It is tempting to displace God by such glory. But these are temptations, because although God's glory does indeed burst out of the heavens in these two stories, in both they are shrouded in the cloud of the invisible, in mystery and wonder. And they are temptations because the Younger Testament draws out another theme, another site of God's glory.


The early Christians and writers of the New Testament latched onto the song of the Suffering Servant from Isaiah 53:


Who has believed what we have heard?
    And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant
    and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others;
    a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity,
and as one from whom others hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him of no account.


Matthew 8:17 quotes Isaiah 53:4: "He took our infirmities and bore our diseases." 1 Peter 2:24 uses Isaiah 53:5 to interpret Jesus on the cross: "He himself bore or sins in his body on the cross, so that, having died to sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed."


There would appear to be no glory in the figure of Christ on the cross. Christ on the cross would seem to be the opposite of glory: "he had no form or majesty that we should look at him."


In John 12, Jesus is in the middle of praying, and he says: “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say: ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” John continues: "Then a voice came from heaven, 'I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.' The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, 'An angel has spoken to him.' Jesus answered, 'This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.' He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die."


In the Gospel according to Mark (10:35-40) James and John make a request of Jesus: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Jesus asks what they want him to do, and they ask “Appoint us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” Jesus tells them they don't know what they are asking: "to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to appoint, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.” As it turns out, in Mark 15:27 we discover for whom it has been prepared: "It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read, 'The King of the Jews.' And with him they crucified two rebels, one on his right and one on his left." Jesus, in his glory, is Jesus on the Cross.


This is one of the upheavals of Christianity--God's glory does not reside simply in the blinding light of splendor, but powerfully in the ugliness of the cross. The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth put it this way: "If we seek Christ's beauty in a glory which is not that of the Crucified, we are doomed to seek in vain. ...In this self-revelation, God's beauty embraces death as well as life, fear as well as joy, what we call 'ugly' as well as what we call 'beautiful.'" As Balthasar says,


Our task...consists in coming, with John, to see his 'formlessness' as a mode of his glory because of mode of his love to the end, to discover in his deformity (Ungestalt) the mystery of transcendental form (Ubergestalt). His bearing of the world's sin (John 1:29), his being made sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21) is understandable only as a function of the glory of love, before and after and therefore, also during his descent into darkness: what we have before us is pure glory, and even though it is really a concealment and really an entering into darkness.


When Dostoevsky raised the idea that beauty would save the world, he was deeply influenced by an experience he had in 1867 of viewing Hans Holbein's "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb."

Dostoevsky was fascinated by this painting. This was the beauty that Dostoevsky thought would save the world, the beauty of the "idiot" Prince Myshkin, the beauty of Christ in the tomb, the beauty of God's love for us in the depths of our experience. This, Dostoevsky thought, is glory.


This Sunday is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, the climax of which is Crucifixion of Jesus. The death of Jesus--if we may so speak, the death of God in the death of Jesus--is a great mystery, and Palm Sunday ends by meditating on the Cross. The mystery is that God's glory breaks out of the ugliness of this death, of this execution. The mystery is that here is glory, because here is the intensity, the gravity, the overwhelming weight of God's love for the world. The Cross, like this painting, shows us that "he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him." And yet, it is precisely in the ugliness of this One's death that glory shines on us, that we are made beautiful. As the hymn says, "My song is love unknown, my Savior's love for me--love to the loveless shown that they may lovely be. But who am I, that for my sake, my Lord should take frail flesh and die."


As we approach Holy Week, may you find in the midst of the ugliness of the world the immensity of God's love, may you find in the Crucified One the glory of God.

Pub Theology 10/13/26 -- A series of quick hits

By Peter Trumbore • October 13, 2026
Some weeks inspiration hits and we stumble onto a single topic that has enough going for it that our Tuesday evening conversation revolves around it entirely. Some weeks, like this one, we take a different approach. Tonight, rather than chew on one big idea, we've got a couple of interesting, but generally unrelated questions to animate our discussion. We'll take them on one at a time, in no particular order, and see what develops. Nine years ago New Yorker cartoonist David Sipress drew a cartoon with this caption: "My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.” Do you experience this tension in your own life, and if so, how do you deal with it? Are you more interested in buying things, or experiencing things? How far will you go to experience something for the first time? What is an example of that? Are you a thrill seeker? An adventure traveler? Something else? Lutheran pastor and writer Nadia Bola-Weber said this: "People don't leave Christianity because they stop believing in the teachings of Jesus. People leave Christianity because they believe in the teachings of Jesus so much, they can't stomach being part of an institution that claims to be about that and clearly isn't." What is your take on this? Do you agree with her? Why or why not? Podcaster Joe Rogan: "Jesus was born out of a virgin mother. What's more virgin than a computer? If Jesus does return, you don't think he could return as Artificial Intelligence? AI could absolutely return as Jesus." OK, is he off his rocker, or do you think he might be on to something? If all else fails, what's on your mind this week?  Join us for the conversation this evening, Tuesday Oct. 13 starting at 7pm at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion.

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost Sunday | October 11, 2026

By Andrew Guffey • October 11, 2026
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.

Pub Theology 10/6/26 -- Finding peace, finding God

By Peter Trumbore • October 5, 2026
It escaped my notice, so perhaps it escaped yours as well. Back on August 31, the lauded poet, farmer, essayist, and deeply influential thinker Wendell Berry died at the age of 92, in the place he loved best, his farm in Kentucky. Over the years, several of our conversations have been inspired by or touched on Berry's ideas and writings. While Berry has influenced countless Christians through his poetry and fiction, he described himself as a "bad-weather churchgoer." In the preface to his collection of sabbath day poems titled "This Day," Berry explains it this way: "But I am a bad-weather churchgoer. When the weather is good, sometimes when it is only tolerable, I am drawn to the woods on the local hillsides or along the streams… In such places, on the best of these sabbath days, I experience a lovely freedom from expectations — other people’s and also my own. I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration.." One of the things this quote brings to mind is how important the concept of "place" was in Berry's work and, more importantly, the way he saw the world and how he sought to live in it. Way back in 2017, we talked about the idea of place, with Berry as our guide. "Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are your neighbors in it ..." This is a very small portion of Wendell Berry's "A Poem on Hope". In his poem, "The Want of Peace," reprinted in the illustration above, Berry writes: "I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place." So in our conversation this week we're going to revisit this idea of "place," of finding it, belonging to it, and perhaps losing it. There are many ways we can think about this notion. Where do we find peace? Where do we find God? Where do we find ourselves? Where do we find our people, or our purpose? Join us for the conversation tomorrow evening, Tuesday Oct. 6 starting at 7pm at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion.

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost Sunday | October 4, 2026

By Andrew Guffey • October 4, 2026
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.

Pub Theology 9/29/26 -- There's an app for that

By Peter Trumbore • September 28, 2026
You're probably aware of this already, but for years now, we've been hearing that Americans in particular are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. Which is different from simply being alone. I think we're all aware that it is perfectly possible crave alone time without feeling lonely, and to feel intense loneliness even when surrounded by people. Sometimes this can be a result of things that are out of our control. But often, it's the choices we make in the name of convenience that lie at the heart of this. Journalist Gabe Bullard's new book, "Against Convenience," argues that our pursuit of ever faster and frictionless experiences comes with invisible costs, and that we unthinkingly accept those as the inevitable price we have to pay to make things easier, Reviewing the book in The Atlantic , writer Julie Beck argues that many of those costs are social. Beck writes: "Once you open your eyes to the tradeoff between convenience and community, you start seeing it everywhere. It’s more convenient to ride a Peloton bike at home alone than to go to a spin class full of other sweaty bodies (whom you might end up chatting with). Zoom meetings make working with distant colleagues much easier, but aren’t very socially nourishing. The gig economy is rife with this bargain. Ubers and Lyfts replace rides given by friends and trips taken on public transit. Delivery replaces meals out at local restaurants and time spent in stores of all kinds." Sometimes, she continues, the whole point of an innovation is that it allows you to do something in isolation that once required interaction with others. Think self-checkout at the grocery store, or the "quiet ride" option that Uber introduced. One of the things we regularly talk about in our conversations is the importance of community. It's why some of us come to church, or, for that matter, Pub Theology. But I think we all also recognize that we engage in this tradeoff of convenience over community all the time, and in all kinds of ways. So that's what we're going to talk about in our discussion this week. Thinking about your life, your-day-to-day, how do you experience this convenience vs. community dynamic? Sure, when we're streaming a new movie in our living room, we're trading that for sitting with a bunch of strangers in an actual theater. Or when we get our meals or groceries or other purchases delivered to our door we get to spare ourselves the hassle of interacting with wait staff and cashiers, or dodging around other shoppers blocking the cereal aisle. But what about the impact of convenience on the relationships we really care about? And what is the impact of avoiding interaction, not just on ourselves, but on society?Finally, how much convenience are you willing to give up in order to build, or rebuild, or sustain community? Join us for the discussion tomorrow evening, Tuesday Sept. 29, starting at 7pm at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion.

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost Sunday | September 27, 2026

By Andrew Guffey • September 27, 2026
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.

Pub Theology 9/22/26 -- What's your plan?

By Peter Trumbore • September 21, 2026
Years ago, when we were newly married, my wife and I used to schedule annual "planning retreats," where we'd leave town for a long weekend to stay in some charming bed and breakfast somewhere (typically coastal New England), enjoy what the local area had to offer, and to make plans for the future. We'd usually dedicate half a day or so of our getaway to thinking about and writing down our goals for the near and longer-term. These were the days before house and kids, when it looked like the future was ours to determine. We both had demanding jobs at the time, and while we weren't rolling in dough, we had enough to give us the luxury of looking ahead rather than worrying about how we were going to manage day to day. So we talked over timelines, savings goals, family priorities, and so on, trying to figure out things like how much we had to put away, and for how long, before we could start looking for a house. When would we be able to afford to have children? What were our career goals? Where did we want to be five years from now, or ten years from now? And it wasn't just brainstorming. We. Made. Plans. We had targets. And objectives. And we tried to stick to those plans over the following year, reviewing and reevaluating at our next annual planning retreat. At some point, though, we stopped doing this. I can't remember the specifics about when or why we abandoned the exercise, but at some point we did. If I had to guess, I think I'd say we realized that life didn't conform to our nearly laid out agenda. Or, as Mike Tyson famously said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." Or, in military parlance, "No plan survives first contact with the enemy." You may be wondering at this point where we're going with this, and how it relates to our first discussion after our long summer hiatus. Well, it turns out that scripture has a few things to say on the topic of worrying about and planning for the future versus trusting in God's goodness and care. Probably the best known example comes from Matthew's gospel, specifically 6:25-34 where Jesus is telling his followers not to worry about the future: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life?" He concludes with this: "So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today." I hear the objection. You're right, this is Jesus telling us not to worry about the future; he's not telling us to not to plan for it. And, in Luke's gospel (14:28-30), Jesus addresses this directly. "For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him ..." For me, this poses a bit of a conundrum. Why plan for the future when everything is in God's hands anyway? But if we fail to plan ahead, things can go awry and we'll face the consequences of our own unpreparedness. So where is the balance here? Join us for the conversation this week as we take on the question of planning for the future. Are you a planner, or are you more a seat-of-the-pants kind of decision maker? Do you develop plans for the long-term, or is your focus more on the immediate? For example, if it's my turn to make dinner, I make a meal plan (usually). But I'm not in the five-year-plan business. At least not anymore. How about you. Come out to Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion tomorrow evening, Tuesday Sept. 22, and share your thoughts with us. Discussion begins at 7pm.

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost Sunday | September 20, 2026

By Andrew Guffey • September 20, 2026
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost Sunday | September 13, 2026

By Andrew Guffey • September 13, 2026
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.

In Remembrance...

By Andrew Guffey • September 12, 2026
Recollection and Repetition