Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Christ the King Sunday

    I sometimes complain about the way lectionary passages are cut off before difficult passages, so I thought it might be nice to mention the truly wonderful selection of the gospel for Christ the King Sunday today. The gospel passage is Luke 23:33-43. At our “Lectionary at Lunch” gathering, led by Geoffrey Lentz, a number of folks were questioning this passage choice.

    The key, of course is in verse 38, with the inscription placed above Jesus’ head: This is the king of the Jews. It’s placed as an insult, but is wonderfully and ironically completely true! This follows the record of how the crowd is mocking Jesus, and then it’s followed by the conversation with the two malefactors crucified on either side. Then Jesus behaves as a king–a king in the style of his kingdom.

    It’s such a good example of the difference between God’s kingdom and our various kingdoms. We encounter the king on a cross. It reminds me of Revelation 5:1-6. There nobody is found worthy to open the scroll. The angel tells John to stop weeping, because the lion of the tribe of Judah is worthy. But when he turns to look, there’s a lamb that looks like it has been slain.

    God just doesn’t do things our way!

  • Raising the Retirement Age

    I received an e-mail a couple of days ago from the Daily Kos urging me to sign a petition pledging that I will never support raising the retirement age or privatizing social security.

    I’m afraid that this is one petition I will pass up. Since I’m in my mid-50s, I’m not that excited about seeing the retirement age raised, but life expectancy has increased a great deal since the retirement age was established, and we have good reason to believe that it will continue to increase. In the face of that, I can see no doubt that we will have to raise the retirement age sometime. Actually, even though it will get to me relatively soon, I think we’re already at that point. You cannot continue indefinitely to support a larger and larger percentage of the population based on the incomes of a smaller and smaller percentage.

    I do agree that such a change will result in increased need for disability payments. That will reduce the expected savings.

  • 1 Chronicles 14:1-16:3 (The Ark Again)

    I’m continuing my notes on 1 Chronicles, working from the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary volume on 1 & 2 Chronicles by Mark J. Boda.

    One of the strengths of this particular commentary is making the themes of the book and the connections between the various passages very clear.  The chronicler presents his theology in the form of story, and if you aren’t paying attention things will slip past you.  Some commentaries can make following the themes in a book more complex than the book itself.  Boda is very clear and easy to follow.

    In chapter 10 we find that Saul is rejected because he is disobedient and is seeking his guidance from someone other than God.  In chapter 13, we discussed Uzzah and the ark, as David tries to move the ark without due consideration of the proper procedure.  In chapter 15 the ark is moved according to the rules.  It might be tempting to regard chapter 14 as an unrelated interlude, but in that chapter we have the story of David encountering the Philistines twice, and each time he seeks God’s will.  Then in chapter 15 he admits that he did it wrong last time and does it right.

    There is also the theme in Chronicles of the proper role of the Levites and priests, and indeed I get a taste here of a call for Torah observance, a message that certainly fits with the post-exilic situation.

    I know this note is brief and general, but I think you can get the feel of the passage … and read it for yourself!

  • Received: James, Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament

    I registered in time for the blog tour for the Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, and I received my copy of the commentary on James by Craig Blomberg and Miriam J. Kamell today.  I’ll be reading it through and posting my comments here during the week of the blog tour, Dec. 15-22.

    I am already pleased to note that my pastor, Wesley Wachob (First United Methodist Church, Pensacola), is cited in the book.

    And no, I won’t be stopping by series of notes from 1 & 2 Chronicles, working from the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary volume.

  • On the Myth of Adolescence

    When I first looked over the list of David Alan Black’s books I kind of skimmed past The Myth of Adolescence. I have no adolescent children and didn’t really care to read about the matter one way or another. Over time I took a further look at his article, Want to Reform Your Youth Ministry? Reject Adolescence, and also heard him speak on the topic here in Pensacola. I still haven’t read the book, but based on those two items and my own experience, I want to make some comments and invite you to explore the subject.

    Those who know that I am a strong advocate of public education might be surprised to know that I was homeschooled for all but four years of my first twelve. Those four years were spent in a small private school where my experience was substantially different from what it would have been in either public school or a larger, more “mainstream” private school.

    The difference is not just in where I went to school, but in the way I was raised. These differences have been emphasized to me repeatedly over the years. I remember encountering a mother at a church I attended a few years back. She was sitting at a table in the church library surrounded by paperwork. I asked her what she was doing.

    “Filling out application and financial aid forms for my daughter to go to college,” she said. The girl in question was nowhere in sight.

    I was amazed. Here was a girl who was 18 years old and presumably ready to go to school away from home, and yet her mother was filling in all the paperwork for her. Not only did my parents not fill in any of my college applications, they required me to prepare any financial aid paperwork all except for their signatures where required. I’m not trying to paint a picture of the good old days. I’m not anxious to turn back the clock. And no, I didn’t walk three miles to school, in the snow, uphill both ways.

    I was reminded of this again when I saw an ad for the new show “Glory Daze” about going off to college. The assumption in the show is all too frequent. Young people will leave home irresponsible and ready to go crazy, and this is the natural thing. There’s an expected wild time when young people get to high school as well. In fact, it seems that we expect quite a lot of our children and young people–in terms of trouble, irresponsibility, and downright stupidity. Responsible behavior? Not so much!

    Responsible decision making is not learned by being told what the right decisions are. We seem to think that if we teach enough Sunday School classes that tell our young people they shouldn’t use drugs, they’ll be properly inoculated. We think that if we repeatedly indoctrinate them with the right beliefs and doctrines, they will keep on believing those things as they go on through life. No matter what the evidence, we cling to such ideas.

    But life itself is going to involved repeatedly making decisions and dealing with the consequences of those decisions. Life is going to force responsibility on people in some way. Often, because their first experience with real responsibility comes very late in life, young men and women make wrong choices that harm them for a lifetime.

    My parents were missionaries. That is a very important point in my background. Now not everyone will be a missionary overseas, but the most important witness parents can have on their children is by living their faith. I know that my parents’ faith was a faith that would hold in the face of major hardships and even the threat of death because I saw them live it in that way.

    They had high expectations of their children. We were expected to take responsibility. I went on mission trips when I was eight years old. It was my responsibility to carry out the garbage for the portable clinic. This was not a mission trip by car or by air. We were already at a clinic that was about as far as you could get by car. The clinic equipment was carried by two mules. I recall being rather disturbed that there was no room for me to take a pillow. Actually I think the problem was more that there was no way it could be kept dry, but that’s retrospect! The people walked.

    When I was 12 years old I became a teacher for the kindergarten section of my church’s Vacation Bible School program for the first time. It was a bit hard to endure the teasing of other kids my own age who laughed because I was “going back to kindygarten!” I taught that class both for VBS and often during the rest of the year for many years after that.

    When I was a teenager in South America, I would go out to churches by myself. I know my mother’s prayer life must have really grown during that time. Most of the time the host pastor or evangelist would stop at our house on a motorcycle, and I would grab my trumpet (my reason to exist at the time!), hold it in one hand, jump on the back, and head out to some church where I would support pastor’s ministry with music.

    I’m also a high school dropout. Yes, really. I have 2 1/2 high school credits earned by correspondence. My parents decided that it was no point pushing me to go through the regular high school curriculum when I was so busy doing so many useful things, including reading a small set of encyclopedias through. The high school curriculum really couldn’t keep my attention. Just to finish this story, at one point I thought I was going to have to go back to high school to get the credits. It was going to require some determination on my part just to tolerate it. Fortunately, I met with a friend of my parents who was also a college president. He told me that once I graduated college nobody would care where I went to high school. “Take a GED and get on with your education,” he told me. Best advice I ever got!

    I’m not telling these stories to illustrate how wonderful I was. In fact, I don’t think these are examples of how I was exceptional at all. They are just minor examples of what young people can do when parents, teachers, and church leaders have high expectations of them. We consistently set our sights too low.

    When I was in college I worked in a small private school teaching whatever they needed taught. At one point I was teaching American history. I picked up a wonderful book of readings, but it was aimed at the college level. As I read it myself, I could see nothing that my kids couldn’t handle, so I added it to my list for the class. I got a number of complaints. Was I sure the kids could read the book? Maybe I was overestimating their comprehension. But I got no complaints from the young people, who were in seventh and eighth grades. They just read the essays, discussed them, and had a great time.

    I believe that our educational system is becoming less and less capable of handling the world in which we live. We are still spending years and years getting the basic preparation to start working, when the world is changing so rapidly that the career for which one begins to train may be totally transformed by graduation. This suggests the value of a lifelong attitude of learning, working, and adapting. Our educational system is not providing that.

    I would suggest three words to guide child raising and education: Expectations, responsibility, and risk.

    We need to expect more and expect better. If we expect adolescents to be rebellious, they will likely live up to those expectations. If we expect college students to be wild, they certainly will be. I often mention the effect my mother can have on a room full of four-year-olds. She can begin with chaos, and in moments transform the room into order. This is not accomplished through mass violence or yelling. I’ve often said I don’t understand it, but I think now I do. She expects good things of the children and she gets them.

    Second, we need to permit responsibility. Responsibility is not something drilled into people. I receive ads in e-mail all the time for boot camps. I have no idea why. My children are grown and have their own children. But these messages claim that their boot camps will transform a child. Now there is a value in this military style training, especially for the military. But responsibility comes from making decisions and dealing with the consequences. It is practiced and not drilled. I don’t mean there is no teaching involved; rather, I mean that teaching responsibility is insufficient. Young people need to practice responsibility. In the essay I cited Dave Black uses the phrase “novice adults.” A novice learns by doing.

    Finally, we need to accept risk. Allowing young people to practice responsibility involves risk. Some aren’t going to get it right. When my parents dropped me off at the top of a mountain about 20 miles from home with just a bicycle I had repaired and refurbished myself, and then headed off for the weekend, there was risk. (No, I wasn’t going to be “home alone.” My older sister was there.) It turned out that I hadn’t been quite perfect in restoring that bicycle. I had to stop at a town half way home, buy a part, and install it in order to finish my ride, but I made it just fine. Parents may face more daunting risks, but I suggest that no risk is greater than the risk of not allowing your child and then young adult to learn responsibility through facing risks.

    I’ll get around to reading the whole book here sometime soon, but at the moment I’m convinced I’m likely to agree with most of it, and enjoy quibbling about details. I hope you’ll give this some thought.

  • Ignorant of Church Domes

    I think the combination of ignorance and bigotry expressed by opponents of this church is both said and somewhat frightening.

    (HT: Dispatches)

  • Quote of the Day on The Agitator

    I think it’s a good one. I part ways with many liberal and moderate friends over Citizens United. I simply cannot see that having the government regulate the political speech of any citizen or group of citizens will have a positive effect.

    Learn to live with freedom of speech. It may be messy, but it’s going to be better in the long run than regulated speech. As for money, the Obama campaign in 2008 proved how effective internet based fundraising can be.

  • Of Olbermann, Fox, and Commentators

    I’ve been rather interested in the reaction to Keith Olbermann’s couple of day vacation. There was quite an outcry when Fox’s parent corporation donated money to the Republicans and at the time I wondered just who imagined that such a corporation would actually be neutral on such issues. Where they give their money is a substantially smaller issue, in my view, than the way they portray the news.

    But with Olbermann we have the rather humorous situation of MSNBC trying to pretend that there was some sort of objectivity left in their afternoon and evening lineup on cable. I’m not sure who might have thought there was such a thing, but apparently the company was determined to make sure whoever it was remained deceived.

    Of course, Olbermann daily does more for candidates and causes than his three donations would have done. I have no objection to MSNBC enforcing their rules. Let’s just not make the mistake of supposing that objectivity was anywhere on the playing field. Purely objective news is a myth, and always has been. There was no golden age when news reporters were purely neutral.

    What we need to do is recognize the biases, and learn to watch, read, and listen critically. That is the only defense against biased reporting. The issue, I think, is not balance. A scales may be balanced even when using false weights. The issue is truth seeking.

    Olbermann’s show was an opinion show before, and it’s an opinion show now. There was never any doubt about which way that show (and its network) was leaning. Nobody had any reason to be deceived.

  • Responding to the New Atheism

    Laura at Pursuing Holiness has a good post on a Christian response to the New Atheism. I agree largely with Laura, though I would comment on a couple of details.

    First, a common objection I hear to the new atheists is that they are too vocal and forceful. I think this criticism is not well directed. There is no reason to expect atheists to be quiet about what they believe. As Christians we do not want to be muzzled. What purpose is there in trying to do the same to others.

    Second, my Christian friends, there are real atheists out there. There are some people who call themselves athesists who really are just backslidden Christians or often people have been so offended by other Christians that they can’t stand Christianity as a religion. But there are others who are philosophically convinced that there is no god of any variety.

    Neither of these points is actually in response to Laura, but rather to comments made to me or read elsewhere.

    The Jesus Paradigm

    Christian apologetics is important, but its role is different than many people seem to think. Few people are argued into the kingdom, if any. What apologetics (done right) can accomplish is to clear the ground, deal with particular objections, and help Christians better understand their own theology and its impact on other areas of their lives.

    In the substance of her post I think Laura is right on. The best defense we can possibly give to Christianity is to be Christian disciples. I don’t know where some of the commenters on Laura’s post go to church, but what I hear about social justice in church is not soft or easy. There is a view of social justice which calls for Christians to automatically support government programs that claim to help the poor because that is social justice. Biblical social justice calls on me to give of myself. It’s not a political manifesto; it’s a call to me personally and as part of a church community to carry out sacrificial ministry.

    I am perfectly comfortable with having Christians arguing from all portions of the political spectrum as to what government’s role should be. A Christian’s duty is not fulfilled by advocacy for government action, nor are Christians derelict in their duty if they believe such social action is not an appropriate sphere of government action.

    Christian Archy

    But both groups (and folks like me in the middle) are derelict in their Christian duty if they are not serving others by giving of themselves.

    The church has, in fact, failed in its duty to challenge the culture and to be God’s kingdom in the world. Our first loyalty has to be to the Kingdom of God and not the nations of the world. We need to get our primary loyalty straightened out so that people can tell we’re Christians and that this makes a difference.

    And while we are about this type of social justice we need to remember that the core of any social justice we pursue must be the gospel message. My impression based on our actions is that we do not generally believe, on the left or the right, that the gospel message really can change lives. If we believed it our answer to many issues would be simple: the gospel of Jesus Christ.

    This is not, as Laura put it, merely a form of fire insurance. It is a message that is transforming and demanding, two characteristics missing from too many of our churches. (Of course it is God who transforms, but he has chosen to do so through the proclamation of the gospel.)

    I’d like to commend two books that I publish on this topic, and a third that is forthcoming. Christian Archy (David Alan Black) talks about our first loyalty to God’s kingdom. We will be releasing another volume, The Politics of Witness (Allan R. Bevere) in the same series that discusses why the church cannot speak truth to power today. On the matter of Christian discipleship we have The Jesus Paradigm (David Alan Black).

  • Uzzah and the Ark – 1 Chronicles 13

    I’m continuing with brief notes on the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary volume on 1 & 2 Chronicles by Mark J. Boda.  I previously provided an overview and some notes on the coverage of 1 Chornicles 1-9, and 1 Chronicles 10-12.

    As I mentioned in my previous post I wanted to make some specific comments on 1 Chronicles 13, dealing with David’s first attempt to move the ark to Jerusalem.  It illustrates two different approaches to commentary on a passage of scripture.  It is probably not surprising that the one thing most people remember about the chapter is the same one I emphasized in my title:  The moment when Uzzah touched the ark. In fact, in the Chronicler’s story, that is a minor point.  Yes, it provides the reason for the failure of that attempt, but Uzzah and his life is not the major concern.

    I recall a few years ago teaching a class on the Bible in general.  We were running through some themes in the Old Testament, and especially dealing with the conquest of Canaan.  I was emphasizing some spiritual aspects of the story when I saw that one lady in the class was building pressure.  Finally she raised her hand and interrupted.

    “I understand about all this spiritual stuff,” she said.  “But the fact remains that in the story real people are dying!  Now what about that?”

    Joshua and Judges don’t address the issues that concern many modern audiences.  Those books don’t spend the time worrying about just why God would allow, much less command, all that slaughter.

    In the face of that there are two distinct ways we can approach the text.  (Well, of course there are more, but just two that I want to contrast here.)  I’m not saying that one or the other of these ways is the way to approach a passage, but it’s useful to know which way a commentary leans.

    The first way is to look at the text entirely in its own context.  What was the writer trying to address?  In 1 Chronicles 13, some of the issues involve the relationship between the ruler and the worshiping community, particularly priests and in Israel’s case, Levites.  The moving of the ark forms a key point in David’s rise to power and eventually his preparation for the building of the temple by his son Solomon.  Internally, there is little concern for Uzzah.  David is certainly concerned that this has happened, but the concern is not directed to the fairness of Uzzah’s death, or how proportionate the penalty was to the offense.

    In fact, it may well be that the writer did not consider this so much of a punishment by God, but rather simply the results of improperly coming into contact with something holy.  One would as well become offended at God because one touched high tension wires and died in consequence.

    The second way one can look at a passage such as this is from the point of view of the questions it raises in modern readers.  Why would God be so nasty as to kill Uzzah when all he was doing was trying to keep the ark safe.  But as Boda notes:  “This incident is a subtle reminder that God sets the agenda for his worship; he must be worshiped in the way he as required.”  I would ask just what was “subtle” about it!

    Ideally, we go from reading the text for what it is in its own context to hearing the text speak in ours.  If we see events such as this as historically valid, then we have to deal with God’s action.  We worship a God who would “break out” against Uzzah in this particular way.  One can keep the text within its own world by assuming that this is not an actual action of God, but rather just a view of God by the Chronicler.  One should note, of course, that the Chronicler is hardly alone in this view.

    A commentary that emphasizes the first approach is more useful in terms of studying the text, but if you’re a pastor in a hurry who is looking for sermon material, it provides a much longer path to speaking to the questions the congregation is likely asking.  A commentary that takes the second approach often answers the question at the expense of the text, but it can be much more helpful to the hurried reader who needs something quickly usable.

    This commentary clearly takes the first approach.  I would note as an example of the second approach the book Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God? published by my company.  The author is well aware of the text, but is addressing the questions that are going to be asked by modern readers.  That book is not a commentary, which is probably a better venue in which to discuss such questions.