This is the relevant presentation from my audio series on the gospel of John for Epiphany 1B. Though the scripture reading ends at verse 41, the presentation covers the transition from the baptism to the wedding feast at Cana.
{audio}2-1-baptism_to_ministry.mp3{/audio}
Why would I suggest this? Is it because I don’t think Governor Blagojevich is not corrupt? Do I think he’s “worthy”? Is it because I think Roland Burris is particularly well-suited to the job and somehow has a “right” to be in the Senate?
In fact, I have a very low regard for Governor Blagojevich, and Roland Burris has been unimpressive. I’ve been especially unimpressed with the claim that there is racism involved in the refusal of the Senate to allow him to take his seat. I’m certain that race played a role in his appointment precisely because of the imagery that would be evoked when he was refused his seat. It strikes me as questionable judgment on Burris’s part to accept the appointment under the circumstances.
But I am more concerned with law and procedure. We like to remake the law to suit the desired response. The Illinois legislature had an excellent opportunity to fix this situation by changing the way a replacement is selected to fill the term of a senator who leaves office, but they failed to do so.
I would note that I would oppose even that option unless one determined that the new method was a better way to handle the situation at all times, and was not just a means of avoiding a particular set of circumstances.
But for some very good reasons, the law doesn’t convict without a trial, and a governor is not impeached because he is accused. There is no “partial governor” provision in the law. Rod Blagojevich is the governor until he’s not any more.
Thus the law says that Roland Burris is entitled to a Senate seat because the legally elected and still legally in office governor says he is, and he should be given that seat. If Burris himself were convicted of something besides being boring and having lousy judgment, there would be a reason to either expel him or refuse him his seat. As it is, there he is.
We Americans have a real difficulty with procedural issues that get in our way. In the election of 2000, the Republicans, who would normally talk about states’ rights, were quick to go to the federal courts. Why? Because they were losing in state court, where such issues would normally be decided. I have no doubt that if the shoe were on the other foot, the Democrats would have been happy to go to the feds. In either case the idea would be to change the normal procedures in order to get a different result.
(As a note to those who would claim that Florida was violating those procedures, the proper forum for interpreting and applying Florida law was and is the Florida courts. The federal constitutional issue here was contrived.)
In this case most of us would prefer that Blagojevich not succeed in any of his little games. But there’s good reason that we have impeachment followed by trial. It’s to determine whether the person in question is actually guilty. We could have some form of temporary removal from office, but we don’t.
So for now the best option, in my view, is to follow the law and the established procedures, and not try to reorganize them to make the result be what we would prefer it to be.
Well, I fell behind during the Christmas break and didn’t keep up with posting. I did keep up with reading, and I may even post some of my thoughts on the older passages as I have time. I hope you won’t mind finding those in the feed. Today I will post some overviews of the lectionary passages for the Baptism of Jesus.
But there is one useful feature of this site that works even when I’m not posting myself. Each day I scan hundreds of blogs and feeds that relate to the Bible, Christianity, religion in general, and how these interact with society. I tag various ones of them. One of the groups I tag is those that are related to the lectionary and appear useful.
You will find two lists in the right hand sidebar. The first lists those posts on the lectionary that I have written elsewhere. In general, I will link to these here in specific articles, but this provides a summary. But below that you will find my selections of lectionary passages. I don’t take these by any automatic tagging system. If a post is there it means I at least scanned it, and thought it would be useful to those who teach, preach, or write on the lectionary.
Watch here also for links that will offer you the chance to discuss the passages in the forum at Energion.net.
OK, as this is an experiment, and it involves the United Methodist Church and Wesleyan theology, I’m going to play along. I have serious doubts about the validity of the results. The question is this: If some agency of the UM church put out a video and it wasn’t an experiment, would I be on board to publicize it? The answer would be “maybe.” It would depend on whether I thought the message deserved sharing, and origin in a Methodist agency is no guarantee of value.
Kevin Watson at deeplycommitted has started an experiment to see how much social capital Methodist bloggers have. This experiment was prompted by the feeling among some Methodist bloggers that United Methodism does not always do as good of a job as it could at getting the Wesleyan message out there, particularly on-line. So, he wants to see how many views a YouTube video can get if Methodist bloggers work together to promote it. The experiment is to see how many hits the video will receive in two weeks.
If you want to participate you can: First, watch the video below. Second, copy and paste this entire post into a new post on your blog and post it. Third, remind people about this experiment in one week.
Based on the results of the experiment, Kevin will get in touch with the folks at Discipleship Resources and let them know the ways in which Methodist bloggers are often an underused resource.
Here is a link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ISKTrScpzQ
While I was writing about my mother reading Hebrew yesterday, I recalled another person who was substantially involved in my Biblical Languages training, Dr. Leona Glidden Running. She was a Biblical Languages professor at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary when I took my MA from the Andrews University graduate school and was my academic advisor.
But this short story has to do with her as a languages teacher. I wanted to take Akkadian as part of my program, but there were no other students taking it, so I got my program one on one. It was a one quarter course that should have been a one year course. It turned out that there was only one test, the final, which would be open book.
Come the day of the test, she walked in, put before me a legal size sheet of paper crammed with cuneiform text front and back and told me I had two hours. The print was medium smallish, and with my one quarter of work, I was relatively certain I couldn’t come close to translating this. There was, however, no point arguing with Dr. Running. One just dug in a worked.
So I plowed forward as fast as I could, not spending the time rechecking some signs that I would have liked, and making the best sense of the inscription that I could. I can’t even remember what it was, though I’m thinking it was something from Ashurbanipal, and had some narrative sense to help me. Nonetheless I only got done half of one side, which will tell you just how far I had gotten in learning Akkadian–hardly reading knowledge!
Well, I turned in the test, thinking it was an abysmal performance. A couple days later I got it back with only a few corrections and a grade of ‘A’. With more curiosity than good sense I asked just how I could get an ‘A’ for translating about a quarter of the assigned text.
“Oh, I never expected you to translate it all. I just didn’t want you to have time to check and revise your work!”
Oh.
Well.
. . . and it is to laugh
Created by OnePlusYou – Free Dating Site
What’s to laugh about?
It says this rating is based on the presence of the words “dead” (2x) and “torture” (1x).
Hat Tip: C.Orthodoxy and a crowd of others.
GoingtoSeminary.com has a good review of A Reader’s Greek New Testament.
I find the concept interesting for new Greek students or those wishing to improve their skills through quantity reading. It’s often hard for new students to move from the word-by-word mode to actually reading Greek, and this is the sort of tool that can help.
One of my disappointments as an undergraduate student was being told by my teacher, and Old Testament studies professor, that most people had learned and forgotten Hebrew many times. It’s not my intent to criticize him–he’s one of my favorite people, and an outstanding scholar and teacher–but I was disappointed with the low expectations.
The undergraduate Biblical Languages program I took had only two years of Hebrew available, an introductory year-long course and a year of Hebrew readings, but I managed to expand it by arranging a year of independent study, in which I followed the readings class again as they read different passages, and also memorized vocabulary, covering all words that occurred more than 5 times in the Hebrew Bible.
While I’m at it, let me recommend vocabulary memorization. I have found three ways of massively improving reading in a foreign language.
First is just reading. This is why I value “Reader’s Lexicons” at early stages of learning. They allow you to cover a great deal of ground very quickly. This is no substitute for seriously working over a text in some detail, but it does build skills. Provided you don’t neglect studying other aspects as well, it will help.
But second is simple vocabulary memorization. Even though memorizing a “gloss” for a word has limitations, if you combine it with the first method, you will soon learn to combine the basic, memorized meaning, and a more sophisticated definition nuanced by the context.
Finally, I recommend memorizing the actual text. I was introduced to memorization at home and in a small Christian school, where I memorized chapter after chapter in English. After I started learning Greek I began memorizing in Greek, then carried it over to Hebrew. Since I often don’t get back to the same text at that level for some time, I often am not able to recite some of these texts without review, but I will remember specific words, phrases, and constructions even after the full text may have faded a bit.
But what does any of this have to do with your mother?
I’m glad you asked! Aside from being the person who first taught me to memorize and love scripture, my mother has learned to read both Hebrew and Greek. She started this at retirement, and during that year that I was taking third year Hebrew by sitting in with the second year class and doing extra work, she was taking her second year. What a joy it was to sit with her in Hebrew class working through the scriptures in their original language! (“Who’s that old lady learning Hebrew?” “Watch who you’re calling old! That’s my mother!” A well justified retort seeing as she’s still going strong nearly 30 years later!)
After she completed that formal Hebrew training, she taught herself Greek with a little bit of help from me, and got to the point where she could work her way through significant Greek texts.
She is now 90 years old, and most times when I visit we’ll have some time to sit down and study some passages together. She’ll have written up her own translation as she studied, and we’ll compare notes and discuss the language, the theology, and the application.
I can only dream of being a sharp when I’m 90 years old!
I try to balance a love for the original languages with the realization that not everyone has the time or the talent to learn them, especially if that is not part of one’s professional life. My mother, for example, is a Registered Nurse. Greek and Hebrew were not part of her daily life.
By lack of talent I do not mean stupidity either. Most of us find some activities quite challenging. I’ve encountered the idea that if one learns Greek (or Hebrew), one must be able to do anything. Occasionally, when I’m challenged by a task that’s outside my talents, and someone is pushing me, I’ll tell them, “You go learn Greek, and then I’ll try this again.” Usually they get the point.
But for those, like my mother, who can make the time, your going to find such a study very rewarding. There are many means of helping you get close without knowing the languages, but in kissing and great literature, “close” and “touching” are by no means equivalent.
This post was inspired by John Hobbins’ post Why it is important not to love the God of the Bible. John has some other very important points to make in that post, besides talking about reading Hebrew with “fire in the belly,” so go read it all.
. . . at Fathom Deep. I forgot to submit anything, but as usual there’s lots of good stuff.
