My husband persisted. Netflix was coming out with a show based on the book, but even better, there was an older TV version produced and aired in China, available on Amazon Prime. So, we settled in and turned on the subtitles (which only I needed, since my husband is the son of two native Mandarin speakers). The show opens with a worldwide crisis in the scientific community. Science has “stopped working” — experiments are producing impossible results, and no one can explain it. Scientists are committing suicide in despair, and the world is quickly losing some of its most talented minds. Three possible explanations are presented: the supernatural, the rational, and the extraterrestrial. Perhaps God is involved. Perhaps there is science to explain it and humanity just does not understand it yet. Or perhaps there are aliens messing with our world.

The Chinese version of the show played with this question for the first 18 episodes. And I was completely hooked. It was a slow burn of watching relationships develop between the characters during a race against time to find the answer and save the lives of scientists, with periodic flashbacks to the Cultural Revolution. When the big reveal finally happened, it turned out that one scientist, Ye Wenjie, had invited a technologically superior alien race (whose planet was caught in a destructive orbit of three stars, hence the real-life unsolvable “three-body problem”) to come and conquer our world because of her anger about her father being a victim of Mao’s purges.

During this entire time, we assiduously avoided anything related to the Netflix show, for fear of spoilers. And rightly so — the Netflix trailer shows the aliens! This made me curious: what was the draw of watching the Netflix version if there was no suspense involving this question? Ultimately, we watched both: 30 episodes of the Chinese version and eight of the Netflix. (And no, I still haven’t read the book.)

The way we consume media has changed radically, with streaming services redefining the meaning of a “season.” The Chinese version breathed and explored and pondered in a way that the Netflix version had no time to do. This is not to wax nostalgic about broadcast TV. Thirty episodes of subtitled television requires patience, and there were moments when it dragged. But after taking the time to absorb the Chinese version, I found the Netflix version jarring, with a few plot holes large enough to threaten the integrity of the storyline.

More fascinating to me, though, were the cultural assumptions revealed by the differences in plot and characterization. The Chinese version followed the book in having the entire story take place in China, but the Netflix version moved everything after the Cultural Revolution to Oxford, England. It also replaced the main character, a prickly, middle-aged scientist named Wang Miao who gets his best ideas from playing with his young daughter, with a racially diverse group of attractive young scientists plagued by a PG-13 level of sexual tension.

This attempt at “diversity” felt canned to me; the show used predictable tropes to fast-track the young scientists’ relationships because it did not have time to do anything more authentic. In addition, it changed the essence of the story in a way that felt subtly denigrating toward China. In the homegrown version, China created the problem for the world and China would lead the world in solving it. In the Netflix version, China created the problem, but the West would solve it with all the flair of a British accent.

The Chinese version notably minimizes any violence in the scenes about the Cultural Revolution. Because of this, I was unclear why Ye Wenjie would invite this alien race to Earth, fully anticipating the destruction of humanity. My husband had to explain that in the book, her father had been brutally killed for affirming Einstein’s theory of relativity, and not just disgraced, as pictured on Chinese television. (I suspect that in China, people would intuitively fill in those details.)

What is clear, however, is that Ye Wenjie does not believe that salvation is possible for humanity. It is a race bound on destroying itself and its planet, and her only recourse is to broadcast the location of Earth to a conquering horde of aliens. She seeks judgment for her people’s sins and she seeks it outside humanity. The aliens’ qualification to be humanity’s judges is their superiority, that is, their transcendence.

Ye Wenjie calls the alien race Lord, which belies the ultimate atheism of the show. God is not the answer for humanity, and yet the devotees of the aliens grant them godlike status. Whatever they decide for humanity when they arrive is for the best. It is sin, judgment, and punishment, but carried out by judges who in their transcendence have no connection to or understanding of humanity. Yet Ye Wenjie’s faith is absolute; at no point in the Chinese version does she repent, or doubt her actions.

The Netflix show has no compunction about showing the gory details of the Cultural Revolution. But in this version, the most shocking truth is revealed when the aliens hack every screen in the world to send a message to humanity: You are bugs. They throw their transcendence in humanity’s face. This is the proverbial line in the sand. This is the truth that cannot be faced in the West, that in the eyes of this technologically superior alien race, humans are worthless.

Individuality is erased in a swarm of fragile, squashable insects. The concepts of sin and judgment are minimized as the remainder of the Netflix episodes turn to desperate preparation for war, and even Ye Wenjie joins the rest of humanity in conspiring against the aliens. (Honestly, I preferred the misguided hardliner Ye Wenjie who sought out judgment for her people over the Netflix version who naively created an interplanetary race war and then said, “Oops.”)

Both shows end with the same scene, with the main characters surveying swarms of insects and realizing that bugs are hard to wipe out. While this scene is supposed to create hope in the face of the annihilation of humanity, it felt empty to me. Humanity panics over being called bugs, and rightly so. There is something innate in us that demands to be recognized and valued as individuals. This is what causes Ye Wenjie to call to the aliens in the first place  — outrage over how human beings treat each other, exemplified by her father’s murder at the hands of Red Guards.

This sin demanded judgment because an individual life matters. The survival of swarms of bugs, despite large portions of them being killed, does not solve this quandary. It means humanity endures, yes. But it provides no framework for why we should be valued as individuals or how we should handle it when humans fail to treat each other as valued individuals. And aliens as judges cannot provide that framework, either, because they have no touchpoint with humanity. Their superiority makes it impossible for them to empathize; all they see are bugs. Transcendence without immanence means that their only recourse is to attempt annihilation.

The story of The Three-Body Problem shows us that transcendence alone does not solve our problems in a meaningful way. What it fails to realize is that transcendence and immanence combined can offer hope to humanity. A God who is far enough above us to judge us and close enough to have compassion on us — he is the one who gives humans individual value and redeems us when we fail to value each other.

“High-stakes boredom,” a phrase my husband heard from comedian Andy Richter, has become the mantra of our household since our first child was born in mid-April. We became a family of three when I got pregnant last summer, but now we see the outworking of that as we show up to care for our son’s needs day in and day out, glamor or not. Parenthood ceases to be theoretical and becomes relational, a continual self-giving on our part that creates lifelong emotional and physical bonds. He is too little to respond beyond the occasional smile or finger grasp, which only increases the importance of our role as our family grows together.

We are created in God’s image, and the fact that we are born into families reflects the Father-Son relationship in the Trinity. But I am struck as much by the differences between God’s fatherhood and our parenthood as I am by the similarities. Coming to motherhood slightly later in life, I am very aware that this is a new role added to a host of other roles I have played as an adult: scholar, educator, and administrator, competitive athlete and coach, ex-pat, wife, writer, priest.

Some of these identities are more permanent than others. My competitive athletic days have been over for a while because of the time commitment, whereas I can step into and out of the scholar and writer roles more fluidly. I believe priestly ordination is for life, but even that can end under certain circumstances. Motherhood is distinctive, though, because I can never stop being a mother. Even bereaved mothers and estranged mothers are still mothers. This is a permanent relationship, come what may in the future.

Still, though motherhood enriches and changes me, it is not essential to who I am. Had I never become a mother, I would still be myself. Thus, I must negotiate between the role of mother and the rest of my identity. Right now during maternity leave, that means ensuring I have enough sleep to function! But soon, when I go back to work, I will have to balance the demands of the priesthood with those of motherhood. Both are important to God’s economy, both are parts of my identity, neither mutually excludes the other per se. At times, though, I will have to choose which role needs my attention most.

In contrast, fatherhood is essential to God the Father. The Son is eternally begotten from the Father; thus, God has never existed without this relationship. Fatherhood does not change or enrich God the Father; it is him at his core. This means that nothing he does is ever at odds with being Father. Scripture gives us many names for God, which show the different roles that he undertakes in his care for us. These names show his authority as our Lord, his provision for us, his presence with us, his everlasting nature, among other things. But none is at odds with, or competes with, his fatherhood. He does not have to negotiate his fatherhood with anything else that he is or does. This is partly because he is infinite, but it is also because he cannot be or act without his fatherhood. He is God the Father.

God’s fatherhood is where his self-giving flows from. This happens primarily in the begetting of the Son. The Son is the perfect image of the Father because he eternally reflects the essence of who God is. The Father’s self is on display in the begetting of the Son. God’s self-giving then overflows into the creation of the world and, specifically, the creation of humanity. The love of the three persons of the Trinity comes together in this act of creation, and with perfect unity of will and purpose, God brings us into being.

Because God’s fatherhood is essential to his being, this act of creation is an extension of his fatherhood. So when we as his creation rebelled, rather than cutting us off from his fatherly love, he gave even more of himself, sending his only begotten Son to live and die as one of us. Through God’s costly act of sacrificial self-giving, we are adopted into his family, children and heirs alongside the Son. God the Father steps in and cleans up the mess that we make of ourselves, children that we are. This redemption flows from his fatherhood.

The sacrifices parents make are costly. Other pieces of our identities must recede to make space for the little ones that God entrusts to us. We negotiate who we are to pour out a love that is a pale imitation of the Father’s. But even if our love pales in comparison with his, we understand his love for us better because of the children in our lives — ours or those of other parents. The loving sacrifice that goes into nurturing and welcoming them reminds us how messy and needy we are as children before God our Father. We are not quiet, orderly, and in control in his presence. We are helpless and dependent, needing to be fed, needing to be quieted and calmed, needing someone to redeem our messiness. And God in his sacrificial self-giving longs to do just that for us, simply because he is our Father.

The list of weekly fasts was fairly conventional: dessert, social media, television, and so on. In the guide, there was a note that some people might want to let the fasts build by continuing the earliest choices through all of Lent, so I decided to do that. Everything was going great, until Holy Week, when we were supposed to fast from meat. I was already a vegetarian, and didn’t eat much dairy, and was still giving up dessert from earlier. I figured the next best thing to abstain from was all forms of bread. What I failed to calculate was that I would essentially only be eating vegetables for the week, which did not bode well for someone with a jam-packed schedule as a boarding school teacher, dorm parent, and crew coach.

On Wednesday evening, while driving the boat trailer back from a regatta, I stopped for dinner with two other coaches. Both pointedly commented on how little was on my plate and together goaded me into eating a piece of bread. Besides that one concession, I was undeterred. I made it until about noon on Good Friday, by which point I was feverish and shaky, and felt on the verge of collapse. A tearful phone call to my mom ended in her ordering me to eat a bagel and go to bed. I begged out of the rest of the academic day, and one of the coaches who had expressed concern two days earlier graciously agreed to cover my boat at afternoon practice. Weak and exhausted, I slept through that evening’s church service.

Fortunately, after 24 hours of proper nutrients and caloric intake, I did make it to my first Easter Vigil. It was as glorious as promised, and remains my favorite liturgy in the prayer book to this day. But I was deeply humbled by my failed fast. I had pushed myself beyond my physical limit, and suspected that in doing so I had missed the point of Lent entirely.

Jesus’ time in the wilderness, described in each of the synoptic Gospels, lays the foundation for our observation of Lent. Matthew and Luke expressly state that he fasted for those 40 days before he was tempted by Satan, though Mark leaves that detail out. With that fast, Jesus clearly pushed his human body to the very limits of its capacity to go without sustenance. The next thing Jesus encounters is Satan tempting him to turn stones into bread, which he resists with “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4). This seems to suggest a theological pattern for Lent of “fast and resist.” Under this narrative, the point of Lent becomes figuring out whatever it is one depends on the most, giving it up, and then resisting the temptation to consume it for 40 days. This can produce an awareness of our need for God and increase our dependence on him, as we struggle with our human weakness and liability to temptation. But, in certain overachieving personality types such as mine, it can also produce a hero’s mentality, in which Lent becomes about proving oneself, at least to God, if not to the whole world.

But what happens to our theological understanding of Lent if we back up a few verses? Immediately before the Spirit drives him into the wilderness, Jesus is baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist. As he emerges from the water, he hears these words from heaven: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt 3:17). These are the words that he takes with him into the wilderness, the last thing he heard from God before undergoing his grueling fast and temptation. While experiencing weakness and mortal limitations was important for his incarnation, and while his temptation by Satan gave him understanding of what we as humans endure and succumb to, God’s affirmation was given to him before he underwent any of it. He knew who he was and what he meant to God. None of this was dependent on what he encountered in the wilderness.

In our baptism, God makes us his own. We hear these words from the priest: “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever” (BCP, p. 308). These promises are not based on anything that we have done, but are based on Christ’s death and resurrection for us. We take these words with us out of our baptism and into our wilderness, exemplified during the season of Lent. We fast and pray, we face temptation, we wrestle with our weaknesses and limitations. But God’s affirmation of us is secure, based on what Christ has done for us, not how impressive our fast is or how much temptation we resist. There is no need to play the hero because it will not change what God says about us.

In his recent book on desert spirituality, Andrew Mayes describes the relationship between our weakness and our understanding of who we are in Christ, played out as we journey in the wilderness.

There seems to be, in Jesus’ experience and in ours, a double movement: increasing exposure, and deepening enclosure. … We need to hold two things in tension: like Jesus himself we are exposed to the reality of our vulnerability and human fragility, exposed to temptation and to distorting visions of reality (Matt. 4:1–11); but we are also, like Jesus, enfolded in the enveloping truth that we are Beloved, God’s child. (p. 70)

It is our understanding of this double movement, this exposure and enclosure, that allows us to observe a holy Lent. We enter the wilderness of the season knowing who we are. Whatever we feel called to in our Lenten practice, it is based on our identity as God’s children, not our need to prove ourselves. As we experience the inevitable weakness of our humanity during Lent, in both fasting and temptation, we are driven not to perform better or do more, but to cling to the words of promise we hear from God. These words then strengthen us to continue to endure the wilderness, to pick up with the fast where we fell away. We rest in knowing we are forgiven and beloved.

Recent technological advances have revolutionized how people approach texts and media. This is no less true for people of faith and their scriptures than it is for the secular world. About 40 years ago, a transformation began for the Bible, a transformation not of content but of format. In 1982, the first commercially available digital Bible software (aptly named “The Word Processor”) was released, aimed at helping pastors in research and sermon preparation.

With the advent of the internet in the 1990s came digital Bibles on websites, and more recently digital Bible apps on smartphones have increased in popularity. This change in how Christians access the Bible is on par with the first-century shift from scroll to codex and the 15th-century invention of the printing press. In People of the Screen, John Dyer examines this change to understand its trajectory and its implications for people’s engagement with the Bible. Evangelical Christians historically have placed a significant value on reading, knowing, and understanding the Bible.

Thus, it is not surprising that evangelicals have been at the forefront of the digital Bible’s development. Its development is multifaceted and complex, however, and stands at the intersection of religious values, a certain attitude to cultural change, and various societal factors.

Dyer argues that evangelicals’ work in this area is driven by a Hopeful Entrepreneurial Pragmatism. Those involved in the development of the digital Bible are (1) hopeful regarding the role technology can play in ministry and personal spiritual growth, (2) entrepreneurial in their creative use of technology and their business methods, and (3) pragmatic about what “works” rather than guided by a belief system or spiritual authority.

Dyer sets the stage for his work by examining how evangelical culture approaches the Bible, technology, and business. Then, through interviews with programmers at three Bible software companies, he assesses how these companies approach product, process, and profit. The programmers he interviewed expressed a strong sense of mission in their work, focused on increasing engagement with the Bible in order to help people progress spiritually and see change in their lives. This attitude seemed to stem from their involvement with evangelical institutions and churches. Elements of Hopeful Entrepreneurial Pragmatism were also present, as they used their technological expertise to contribute to building brand new ways to access Scripture.

These programmers in the software industry do not make choices in a void. Dyer presents research from three evangelical churches in the Dallas area, analyzing the effects of the digital Bible on these readers’ engagement with Scripture. Participants were interviewed and were asked to complete a Bible comprehension assessment and 10-day reading plan, some using print Bibles and some using a digital app. Most of those interviewed showed comfort and familiarity with using both print and digital Bibles.

Their choice of which one to use in any given situation depended on social context, their specific activity and purpose, and convenience. Men showed higher comprehension with a print Bible than with a digital Bible, but women showed similar comprehension with both media. Participants were more consistent about completing the 10-day reading plan with the digital app than with print Bibles.

Dyer’s analysis provides a comprehensive, detailed assessment of the historical and sociological factors behind current digital Bible software. An understanding of this material is beneficial for Bible readers, as it shows how the motivations of the app developers influence the results for consumers. For the most part, Dyer avoids both theological analysis and value judgements, which was intentional on his part, but the theologically informed reader may feel a lack there.

The results of his study of Bible readers were interesting, but most of them needed to be qualified significantly or required more research to confirm and validate. Dyer’s research is a peek into the brave new world of digital Bibles, but more time is needed to see the full effect it will have on Christians and their engagement with the Bible.

The defining feature of my life right now is that I am pregnant. Almost every casual conversation starts with either a “Congratulations!” or a “How are you feeling?” But now that it is Advent, I have noticed another theme appearing, especially with other women who have given birth. “It’s wonderful to be pregnant during Advent. It will be so meaningful to proclaim the gospel of Jesus’ birth to your congregation!”

There is something special about feeling that connection with the Virgin Mary, as she was about to give birth to her child. While her whole experience was clearly different from mine, the anticipation of childbirth is nearly universal. She gave birth to a baby boy who would be the Savior of the world. I will give birth to a baby boy who will be saved by hers. This is hopeful and beautiful.

However, there is another layer here for me, because in both 2021 and 2022, Advent was marked by the grief of miscarriages. Now in 2023, the doctors tell us everything is normal, and we hope and pray that continues. But I have been here before, and the pain and the fear of those past experiences do not fade easily. As I ponder this, I realize that I have learned just as much about the meaning of Advent from miscarriage as I have from pregnancy.

On the surface during Advent, we are waiting for Christmas, the day we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, who saved the world from sin and death. We read about John the Baptist preparing the way of the Lord, proclaiming a baptism of repentance from sin. A penitential theme weaves through sermons and hymns as we prepare our hearts for this baby boy, to whom Mary will give birth in a manger. All this connects to the beauty and hope of pregnancy — the Savior of the world coming to us in such an intimate and personal way, born from a maternal womb, naked, helpless, and dependent, until he grew into the understanding of his identity and his mission, and began his journey to the cross.

That waiting is ritualistic, almost more of a remembering than a waiting, because Jesus’ first coming already happened. We know that our celebration of Christmas will not actually involve baby Jesus in a manger. But there is another waiting, one that is not ritualistic because the event is still to come. Under the surface during Advent, we look for Jesus’ return, which he promised us at his ascension 2,000 years ago. The church has been waiting for so long that sometimes it feels ritualistic, because so many lifetimes have passed without seeing it. When we are hopeful that it will actually happen in our lifetime, we tend to count all the false prophets who convinced people about a specific day and time, and then were wrong. But Jesus promised us that he would come back and we trust his word. This means our waiting and our hope are real.

Through our waiting for Jesus’ second coming, we remember that he still has work to do in our world. In one sense, his work is complete in his incarnation. Through his death and resurrection, he accomplished our salvation for us and sat down at the right hand of God. Our future with him is secure, and we can trust that nothing will come between us and his goodness, grace, and mercy. And yet the brokenness of our world leaves us longing for something more. There is something deeply wrong when the life-giving, expectant state of pregnancy is marred by death, when little children are gone before they see the light of day. It is in this pain that I know that God is not done with our world, that there is something more to come. Why would he send his Son to suffer and die, if suffering and death were to continue for us indefinitely? Jesus’ resurrection must be stronger than this; there must be a moment when he returns to finish what he started and to defeat death forever. This grief can either lead to despair or to trust that God will one day heal all of this, too.

The grief of miscarriage is particularly nebulous. The loss of a child before birth is the loss of hope, a hope for something to be. You put up the Christmas tree and you wish you had to worry about little hands grasping at the ornaments on the bottom branches, but those little hands are not there, and you do not have any memories to help make sense of that pain. You do not know what those hands would have looked like, or what other mischief they might have gotten into. Loss like this is hard to describe, and this makes it isolating, especially during a season like Advent, when everyone else seems to be excited, happy, and hopeful.

But the future that we wait for during Advent can seem just as amorphous. The apocalyptic passages of Scripture that refer to the end times are full of fantastic images and are hard to interpret. We know that Jesus Christ will return, defeat death, and remake the world, but we do not know when it will happen, or what that new heaven and new earth will look like. It is an open waiting, a trusting in the reality of a good God who promises us life and joy and hope, without having anything concrete to put with that trust. To trust in something this nebulous is audacious. And yet, in a way, the nebulous grief of miscarriage prepares us for the audacious hope of Advent. Knowing in our deepest being that we have lost something real, even if we struggle to put it into words, can give us the courage to trust that this vague and cryptic future is just as real.

A world with suffering and death is not what our God has planned for us forever. He promises to wipe every tear from our eye. He has accomplished this through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who will return one day to defeat death. Through him, life, and not death, will have the final word. This is the audacious hope to which we cling in the midst of a nebulous grief. And so we cry out with the psalmist, “How long, O Lord?” and keep waiting.