Our Task

A Sunday Quote

An Observation

Well, isn't that what most writers and bloggers do, make observations? This one occurred in one of my favorite writing locations, a Christian-based coffee shop. They have one of those chalk boards that they post a question on and then get responses.

The question one day was

What is your favorite verse this week?

At the point I was there it had only 14 responses, The observation I made was that of the 14, 10 were from the Hebrew Bible and only 4 from the New Testament. That is just barely over a quarter (28%) of the responses were from the Christian Scriptures.

No, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with quotes from the Hebrew Bible being the favorites. In my own Moravian tradition in our devotional history of "The Daily Texts", the "Watchword for the Day" is to be from the Hebrew Scriptures. The New Testament text is a "doctrinal" text that in some way expands on or enhances the watchword. That's why the "Watchword for 2015" over there on the right sidebar is from the Hebrew Bible. (By the way, the watchwords are chosen by lot. I basically looked at my birthday in the Daily Text for 2015 for my watchword for this year.)

But I found it interesting that the favorite verses were not from the New Testament. A couple of thoughts on that.

• First, 14 responses is not a large number. Low responses are often not representative of the overall response rate.
• Second, if the first few verses were from the HB then the thought is placed in the next person's mind and they also pick from the same Testament.
• Third, it is the same kind of reflection that has, over the years, elevated the Ten Commandments above what the NT strives for. You know, Jesus saying, "You have heard... but now I tell you." Things like thinking evil of someone is as bad as killing them or lusting in your heart is the same as actually doing it.

In any case, That's what I noticed.

Fourth Sunday in Advent

Up

Pray

Watch

Wrestle

Thus begins the last line of the first verse of the Advent hymn- Rejoice, Rejoice, Believers. It is a song of waiting and preparation based on the parable of the virgins waiting for the coming of the bridegroom. Some were "foolish" and weren't prepared when the groom finally arrived and they ended up on the outside.

Those words struck me last week during our Advent Lessons and Carols. They are blunt, quick, and basic words. There's no deep theology hidden in them. Sure they aren't words from scripture, but they are words that call our attention to Jesus.

• Up- Don't just sit around. Do something. Move. Get your work done.
• Pray- Keep in contact with God. Don't allow the waiting to pull you away from God's presence.
• Watch- Be alert. Be mindful. There may be (and probably are) many signs of the coming of the Savior. Don't miss them.
• Wrestle- Uh, wait a minute. What is wrestling doing here in this list of Advent tasks? 

Actually, I realized that wrestling is what I was talking about in last Sunday's post here. It is never becoming complacent with what I think I believe. It is never be willing to accept the "easy" answers that promise instant success. It is much deeper than that. Wrestling is being willing to face one's doubts and uncertainties within the certainty of God's presence- whether we feel it or not. Wrestling is allowing oneself to dig- deeper and deeper into one's own soul to discover the presence of the Savior right there.

And what we often discover is the same humility, awe, and power that Mary proclaimed in her magnificent song.

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,

my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;

for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.

From this day all generations will call me blessed:

the Almighty has done great things for me,

and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear him

in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm,

he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,

and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich he has sent away empty.

He has come to the help of his servant Israel,

for he has remembered his promise of mercy,

The promise he made to our fathers,

to Abraham and his children for ever.

To which we can only add:

In the name of the Father who created us;

the Son who brought us salvation

and the Holy Spirit who sustains us.

Amen!

Capturing Earthiness

Hebrew is, of course, a very ancient language. Before it was revived in modern-day Israel, it had a relatively limited vocabulary from a time when things were a lot more down to earth. When we read the Hebrew Bible we don't really catch that sense of the language. We "sanctify" it to make it more acceptable to our modern ears. Fortunately we do have more words that we can use.

Last Sunday I was sitting listening to the Hebrew Bible text being read. I don't usually read along; I like the sense of listening to the word. Suddenly a word went skimming by. Did I hear that, as thought? Did it really say what I think I heard? I pulled out the bulletin and double checked it. Yep. That's what I heard.

Here's the passage from the Common English Bible which we use:

Isaiah 64: 5b-6-- But you were angry when we sinned;
you hid yourself when we did wrong.
We have all become like the unclean;
all our righteous deeds are like a menstrual rag. [Emphasis added.]

What an excellent example of the earthiness (and not mincing words) that one can find in the Bible!

Other translations use "filthy" or "greasy" to describe the rag in question- our deeds. Fitting and descriptive, but not with the overwhelming power of this translation. In fact, knowing the importance of "clean" vs. "unclean" in the ancient Hebrew lifestyle, the use of the word "menstrual" adds an extreme of "uncleanness" that filthy and greasy don't.

I later dug into a concordance and found that the Hebrew word is only used once in the Bible- right there in Isaiah 64. To get its translation. scholars had to look at other similar words and other ancient languages. The root and words really do have to do with the menstrual cycle- a time of uncleanness for a woman. The phrase "menstrual rag" really is a descriptive, powerful, down-to-earth, and appropriate translation.

First Sunday in Advent: The Mystery Continues

I was sitting in one of my favorite coffee shops the other day thinking about today- the First Sunday of Advent. Here's part of the assigned lesson today from Mark 13:35:

Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn,

This is part of Mark's little apocalypse where tradition says Jesus is talking about the "Second Coming." It is used on this First Sunday in Advent to make sure that in these weeks of Advent we don't lose sight that this isn't just about something that happened a long time ago in a world far away. It has a future as well.

But if course as anyone who knows anything about the church is aware, the study of the "Second Coming" is fraught with multiple interpretations, misunderstandings and textual abuse. As I was thinking, I overheard a conversation at another table. Some of the people there were in some sort of "seminary" program. One person said his first class in the morning was "The Mystery of Salvation." What a great phrase! It says in four words my whole theology of Jesus life, death, and resurrection. Every Sunday as part of the Episcopal Eucharist we see, hear and say:

Therefore we proclaim the mystery of faith:

Celebrant and People

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

Don't ask me to explain it. It is

• beyond rational, 
• deeper than logic, 
• older than any theology trying to make sense of it.
• It is an experience of God! 

It isn't, I believe, expected to make sense. Yet we Christians spend so much time trying to explain it so we- or others- can understand.

We have come to dislike mystery. Even the greatest hero of our mystery stories, Sherlock Holmes, solves all his cases by sheer logic, an "uber-rationality" that can always be explained, even if those explanations are so deep that normal people would miss them. Someone, somewhere can describe the events and understand what they mean, even if I can't.

I find that kind of life quite dull. I like mystery. It humbles me. It keeps me on my toes- "What else is there I don't know and can't explain?" That is exciting.

So I Googled "mystery of salvation" and found a good quote from the website "Today's Christian Woman." Since it is from a more conservative web site, I was pleased to read of their acceptance of the great and unexplainable mystery of salvation. It is something to ponder today as we start our annual journey to one of the three great mysteries of our faith, the Incarnation (life) of Jesus.

God has decided to leave us with mystery that we're expected to embrace—even when we don't fully understand. But mysteries are difficult to control and grasp, and so we try to make sense of them all.

While a rationalized approach to reading Scripture makes us feel better because we have everything "figured out," this approach reduces the meaning of Scripture to the human limitation of "sense." In the end, it doesn't make God more knowable and it risks his nature, character, and will. So although it may make "sense," it negates Scripture's authority because it's superseded by our limited reason.
--Link

It's Just This Simple

Matthew 22:34-40-- When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Of course, simple doesn't mean easy. Why? Because we are humans who have been slow to learn this thing call loving your neighbor as yourself. Or, at least when it comes to defining who my neighbor is. But maybe we can get better at it. What I think will be more likely to enhance our ability to do so is to understand that in a world like ours, EVERYONE is our neighbor- and we each are everyone else's neighbor. The world-wide recession in the past six years shows that. The price of oil and its effect on gas prices AND food prices shows that. Even the world-wide terror alerts and the Ebola reactions show that.

Yet, Jesus was speaking something far more profound than we are willing to admit. We humans are community-based creatures. We need other humans to support us, protect us, raise our children. The simple fact of the long period of growth of human children and their powerlessness and helplessness is an indicator of that. When our primitive human ancestors started to form small bands or tribes, the movement toward community was begun.

But it was also the beginning of competition between tribes which only morphed (dare I say metastasized?) into states, nation-states and then mega-states. Suddenly the definitions of neighbor needed to be expanded- or identified differently. The result was the expansion of tribal conflict into war, into global war. As I mentioned in one of my posts on the 10th Armored Division in World War II the number of people involved in that conflict was staggering. There were 1.9 billion people impacted by the war. That is an amazing 90% of the world population in 1941!

Who says we are not all neighbors?

Certainly not Jesus. He broke all those neighbor taboos from women to Samaritans to children to lepers to those possessed to Romans to tax collectors to the poor to orphans to those in prison to those caught in adultery. In short, he broke the taboos by making all of the known enemies of the day his neighbors. What is kind of scary to me is that the only group he was less-friendly with - the religious and political leaders. (That I will just let sit there. Make your own determinations of that one. At least for today.)

The challenge I hear from Jesus in this hate-filled world in this time of fear and finger-pointing is to take a different look at the enemies we put on our hate list. Until we can treat them with love, we are not living up to our name as Christians. I hear Jesus telling me to pray for them- and to pray that we ourselves may be blessed by them. It is a two-way street.

Why Are You Standing Around?

An interesting connection occurred in church on Sunday as the passage from Acts 1 was read, it being the Sunday after the Ascension. Jesus had just been taken up into heaven. Then Luke tells us that:

suddenly two men in white robes stood by [the disciples]. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?

It rang a bell with a passage often heard on Easter. There, in Luke's Gospel, the women have come to the tomb... and it is empty. They are perplexed when:

suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen."

Same author, two stories, same question...

Why are you standing here?

"Well," they might have answered, "it's where we happen to be. We thought we were with Jesus or looking for him, or whatever."

And the answer comes back, "So, why are you standing around. Isn't it obvious He's not here?"

What else were they (and us?) supposed to do? What is the big rush? Why the questioning?

As the pastor led me to think about this in his sermon Sunday, it may be all about not getting stuck in the past. It may be about moving on into what is in store for us. It may be about living instead of dying, acting instead of talking, trusting instead of trying to figure it all out.

It can be so easy to stand around and be afraid or perplexed (Easter morning with an empty tomb)
or
feeling the awe and warm fuzzies of Jesus love as he ascends into heaven (Ascension.)

But if we end up just standing around we will miss even more than we can imagine.

Resistance and Ignoring Jesus

Matt, at the blog, The Church of No People, had a challenging post the other day. As usual, it started with his title: Sometimes, It's Best to Ignore Jesus. From there he only gets more challenging by posting a number of quotes from Jesus that we often choose to ignore. Like:

• “Turn the Other Cheek” and
• “Do Not Judge”

I am sure we all have our pet quotations that we will quickly ignore, re-translate, allegorize, or just plain forget. That's the real problem with Jesus. He never does what we expect.

This fit well with an earlier post on Internet Monk titled Evangelical Resistance to the Gospels: How & Why by Timothy Gombis, 4/26/2012. Gombis said at one point:

We strip away the “husk” of Jesus’ clear words to find the spiritual “kernel” that we apply to our hearts and motives.

This is a reading strategy whereby we keep Jesus safely tucked away in our hearts, self-satisfied with our piety. But we intentionally avoid doing what he says with our bodies, social practices, and community dynamics.

It’s too threatening. If we actually did the things Jesus says to do, we’d have to change, and we just don’t want to.

It isn't just evangelicals who do that, It's every one of us. We don't allow the depth and power of this life-changing God to truly enter into our lives. We don't allow the incredibly radical, revolutionary, and grace-filled direction of Jesus to become our direction. We are scared of that kind of life. If we are given grace, might we have to do the same?

But more so, Jesus did not preach a Gospel of prosperity or material comfort or the priority of the nation-state as our central tenet. He did not offer a feel-good piety. Which is what we want. At least those of us who are the comfortable who need to be afflicted.

Now, if I can only apply that to my own comfort zone of faith.

Agree? or Not?

Mad Priest is one of those blogs that is worth following for gems like this one:

MADPRIEST'S THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Scripture is a living being which,
whilst it still breathes,
has been embalmed by the Church.

One year I worked on and off on reading the Bible in Spanish which I was working on learning. It was a parallel English-Spanish version (NIV). It brought a number of interesting insights to my reading of the English. I have worked a little on the more traditional Spanish version, Reina-Valera, equivalent to our English King James Version. When you read a passage you thought you knew so well, the nuances and changes of view from a non-English perspective can sure make a difference.

It is difficult, but worth the challenge, to seek the living, breathing Spirit of the Scriptures. You may be surprised that it doesn't say what you thought it said- or want it to say.

My 2012 Watchword

I post it over there at the top of the right sidebar. In our denomination we have this tradition of "watchwords" that guide one through a day, week, or year. Usually on New Year's Eve or the Sunday right after that we pass around the baskets containing scripture verses for each person to choose one. Since I knew I was not going to be in church for that I stuck my hand into the bag with the watchwords before I had my surgery. (It helps to live with the pastor.)
Here is what came out:

In quietness and in trust shall be your strength.
-Isaiah 30:15

Considering I was facing surgery and 7 weeks of recuperation, I smiled and relaxed. No, it is not meant to be predictive or prophetic. It is a word from The Word to keep me going in 2012.

So far it has done its normal miracle.

Watchword for 2008

One of our Moravian traditions is to choose a "Watchword" from Scripture for the new year. They are not meant to be prognostications or some fortune-telling-type of thing. Rather they are meant to help us focus on our God and our Savior. They are words that can lead us closer to God, challenge us to think about Him in newer and deeper ways, and just generally keep our focus where it should be.

We chose Watchwords in church last Sunday and mine is now posted on the right sidebar like it was all last year. But here it is:

Jesus says, "You know the Spirit of Truth, because he abides with you and he will be in you.
John 14:17--