Fire shut up in my bones

Sneaky List of Internal Links to Skip the Scrolly Roller Hunt to Find What You Are Actually Interested In

2009-09-04T08:02:00.000-07:00

There are two basic types of posts in this blog:
1) For those who have ears to hear: prophetic ramblings aimed at purifying the church (a prophet's main job-incidentally, i would contend that a prophet's main job is not to tell the future--t's to tell the present, and what bearing the past and future have on the present vice versa)
2) Reveling in what Scripture Reveals: an informal walk through Scripture particularly for those who have been intimidated by the task of 'getting' the Old Testament

For Those Who Have Ears to Hear*:
(*you know, as opposed to those have them as mere visual accessories (: )
Mad at God for letting your loved ones die? A letter
What's Your REAL Name?
Who CARES whether God created the earth?
Despise child molesters? The bitch of Christianity
Can I actually sin by quoting scripture?
Think you are too skanky for God? Let's talk.
Hearing God's call on your life-a letter
To the Spirit-filled English Majors and Wordmiths at Heart A letter
What sucks about the cradle up Christian predicament
Can I actually sin by ministering to others?
and what does the Lord your God require of you?
Does God have a crush on me? He's definitely crushing me
a famine of purpose
Don't be dissin' My Name. . .
What you take in vain
Children of the Light. . . I hope you dance.
Jesus was not a "nice" man-you shouldn't be either
Christians are the Ultimate Hedonists-and yet He loves us
Are you authorized to use My Name?
Taking off from Rousseau on Inequality
On Top of the Globe

Reveling in What Scripture Reveals:
Items marked with *** are new, even though they're placed in the order of the biblical books

Some Notes on Genesis and Reading the Whole Bible Through
Genesis: Leah's Growing Pains. . .
Genesis: Rachel's Quest for Wholeness
Genesis: Joseph's Family Transformed Through Suffering
Genesis: Reframing the Joseph Narratives- Putting Some Stuff in Perspective
Exodus: First Born Sons, Crown Princes, and God's Favor
Exodus: Entering Exodus-The Great Exit
Exodus: Moses, Man of the Millennia, Mouthpiece of God
Exodus: Who Gets a Birth Narrative and Why?
Exodus etc: Embryonic Thought about Birth Narratives After Jesus
Leviticus: Book of Fire (under construction)
Numbers: Just What the Title Suggests?
Dude-eronomy (Deuteronomy): Jesus' Favorite Book?
Joshua: Just a MicroBlurb
Judges: Aka Tribal Leaders-The First Five
Judges: Six Through Ten***
Judges: Shechem and the Richness of Reference
Judges: Samson-Personification of the Apostasy of the Age***
Judges: A Beautiful Flower in the Samson Narratives-His Mother***
Judges: The Ghastly End of the Age of Judges***
Ruth: OT Chick Flick? A Nobody Who Chose and Was Chosen
I Samuel: One Day Hannah Stood Up!
I Samuel: A Note About Samuel and God's Involvement with Man

Mad at God for letting your loved ones die? A letter...

2009-09-03T08:12:00.001-07:00

You know, honey, we humans are so bizarre. We know in our heart of hearts that only Good comes from God. We know He created everything beautiful and glorious and loving and safe, and that evil comes from two places- Satan, and Mankind. Death came to us because Mankind made an unsavory deal with Satan one day in the Garden, electing to believe the devil over the Divine and to trust in himself rather than the One in Whose image he was created. God's heart almost exploded when we brought Death into the world by choosing to cut off our umbilical cord with Him and go float with the other Self-Worshipers in the ‘we can make ourselves good without your help God thank you very much” club.

Satan managed to make us believe that God was the selfish one who was trying to keep something good from us, rather than the reverse, which was true, that choosing to trust in ourselves would ultimately mean we couldn’t sustain Life—you can’t cut yourself off from the Giver of Life and expect to not also cut yourself off from Life-not rocket science and yet, that urge to put oneself in God’s place is strong in human kind…we brought death to earth when we chose to believe that God was holding out on us and we broke the rules He had put in place to keep us safe.

I’ve heard it explained that the reason God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden after they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was that they would then most certainly also eat from the tree of life and if they ate from that tree before they got redeemed, they would be stuck eternally in their state of damnation, cut off from God. He banished us to save us again. The way we put fences around our yards to keep our children from walking under trucks.

When shit happens to us we shake our fists at God. It’s so amazing. We ALL do it (or at least, have done it at some point in our lives). It’s an interesting proclivity that we see in people who have been molested as children by someone other than their father. Though their father was innocent, they are often unbelievably angry at their fathers! Why? He didn’t molest them! But he didn’t protect them either. In our minds we are angry at the one who is supposed to protect us. You always hear people talking about how angry they are at God. I have often felt that way myself. Trust me, way toooo often. And yet you never hear people saying that they are so mad at Satan, from whom all the crap comes. From Satan and our own fallen selves, that is. It’s a bit like getting furious at your mom because you got burned by the stove which she told you to stay away from for precisely that reason.

Well, it is and it isn’t. You didn’t specifically do something evil to make the people you love die. (Even though sometimes you doubt this because of the normal processes of grief, I understand). But you’re a part of the human family and we share in the inheritance of the sins of our fathers. And we do choose ourselves on a daily basis. So we do participate in the chain of self-worship and stubborn heartedness against God. We do know that we desperately need a Savior to make us good and to redeem us in all our ugliness. . .

Now, I don’t want you to feel even crappier about what’s happening right now than you already did, which you may be doubting based on my comments so far, but hear me out! (: God’s heart breaks when yours does! And He’s not the heart breaker! It’s just that He has all the power and we think He should whip it out to protect us whenever bad stuff starts happening. It’s a natural human response. Unfortunately, His power is under man made constrictions for this era in history--this was the grand experiment of letting man be in charge. Adam made that choice for us by choosing to live by his own rules rather than God's. I believe that it is man's prayer and faith and collaboration with God that releases Him to act on our behalves even though He hasn't resumed His full reign on earth yet because the time has not yet come.

However, the weird thing is…it’s actually very logical. Basically since the world got f’ed up, the only way for us to get un f’ed up is to go through a kind of reverse f’ing. If you get shot with a bullet you can only get well by having the bullet dug out of you the reverse of the way it got there. Which is going to hurt just as much as getting it in there in the first place did. Get your arm pulled out of socket, the only way to fix it is to pop it back in, which is going to hurt like hell, but that’s the way it works. Jesus made the reversibility stuff possible. He paid the ultimate price so that we wouldn’t get stuck with eternal death. So that we would get a second chance to make that choice about Whose/whose laws we wanted to honor and thus which kind of universe we want to live in.

All we have to endure is temporary death. Which in our finite little minds feels pretty permanent. But you have to read the end of the Book-WE WIN!!! Everybody that chooses to get back with God after the Great Divorce, gets to be Raised from the Dead. I mean holy crap! How awesome is that! And here is the big paradox and part of the reason theologians often refer to the Fall of Man as the Fortunate Fall— If nobody ever died, we’d never get to see anybody raised back to life! If nobody was blind, we wouldn’t get our breath taken away when God made them see again. God didn’t create the Fall and didn’t plan it; there is no way we can pin it on Him. However, the glorious thing about His redemption plan is that He can make all these amazing miracles happen that could never have happened without our grand F-Up in the grand garden at the grand entrance to humanity’s grand story.

Because here’s the thing. If you don’t know ugly, you can’t know beauty. If you’ve never been lied to, you can’t fully appreciate the precious gift of honesty and transparency in others. If you’ve never felt agony, you won’t really know Joy even if it tap dances right across your nose! The big mystery: the degree of joy and ecstasy you are able to experience is directly proportionate to the degree of agony you are also able to experience. . . and thus you have James urging us to consider it pure joy when we encounter hardship...

English speakers are fond of citing the shortest verse in the bible as the one in John11:35 that says, Jesus wept. (I'm not sure what the shortest verses are in Hebrew and Greek). If you look it up in context you see that it is His response to the death of Lazarus when He finally gets to the tomb (after deliberately waiting a couple of days after receiving news that Lazarus was deathly ill) and He sees Mary and Martha absolutely beside themselves with grief. Jesus loved those two women. And He loved Lazarus as one of His close friends. But Jesus also knew that He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead! Why did He weep if He knew how Very Temporary this state of affairs was going to be for this family for at least another decade or two?? Why would God weep when He knows the happy ending?

Apparently the Greek word that gets translated “wept” is only used like twice in the whole Bible and gets translated with some other much stronger word in the other use-of course I can’t remember it right now. . .but Tim Keller is a pastor who says that the word we translate as ‘wept’ here is more like ‘snorted with fury!’ It’s a word for a grief that is so angry it makes you want to explode! Jesus’ heart was breaking with Mary and Martha because theirs were breaking and He loved them so much. He didn’t want them to be in this horrible suffocating gut wrenching agonizing pain.

But He was also about to perform His greatest miracle yet, only surpassed when He would do it Himself 3 days after the crucifixion. Jesus was letting Lazarus’ story be a foreshadowing of His own story—He was giving everyone a sneak preview. And a preview that was probably necessary so they could get their heads around His own resurrection later on—how could they believe He would be raised from the dead if they’ve never seen that happen before? He was preparing them to hope and believe and experience the joy rather than feel lied to and stolen from when His body went missing!

Still, He knew about the happy endings for both 3 day stints in a smelly tomb…why did He weep/snort with furious grief??!! Keller suggests that He was taking in the whole picture of ALL the death of ALL the humans from the beginning of time till the end of the Age, He was taking in that picture of all the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives and friends throughout time whose hearts would be stabbed again and again with the horrific power of suffering and death—Jesus was feeling all humanity’s pain at once—He was furious at Satan and sin and death for wreaking this agony on His beloved humanity.

And then He put some teeth in His anger and He ordered Lazarus to come forth!!! He was screaming it because He was screaming against death and giving us that preview of how He was going to kick sin & death’s ass in the end and rescue us all, resurrect us all, every last one who reaches out to Him and asks for it—And then we can rock out and sing with Petra, Tell me death, where is your victory, where is your sting? When the Grave Robber comes and death finally DIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????????????

So you feel like God doesn't know how weak you are. But you really know He knows just exactly what you can and cannot bear. Not like He wants to rub our face in it, but every time we get to the end of ourselves, we have to reach up and take His hand and let Him carry us...every time we fall and skin our knees or whatever, we are reminded that we are weak and He is strong, that we cannot save ourselves from suffering, but He is always right there ready and willing to get us through it. Moreover, every time we experience weakness is an opportunity for His power to be displayed in our lives...

Our whole lives are theses series of painful reminders that we are not all that after all-we were dead wrong in the garden of Eden and are dead wrong now when we think we can just go our own way...there is a way that seems right to a man but the end thereof is death and destruction...each time we feel overwhelmed it is a reminder that we were never intended to fly solo and constantly crash--we were intended to fly on His strong and perfect wings...and never crash. But since the crashes are here now, He's going to make beautiful things come out of them. He's going to use the fire to refine us into the purest gold. He is, as my mother likes to say, an economical God--He will not waste a single tear or trial--He will use absolutely every crappy thing that ever happens to us to grow beautiful flowers in our hearts and lives if we'll just surrender the crap to Him.

Humans are amazing at attributing their own successes to their own hard work and awesomeness, and the crap in their lives they blame on God. That is why we desperately need to fail with some regularity so we don't get confused about Who has all the power and who is frail and fragile and fraught with flaws and fears and failure...and James, who may have sounded like he was on crack to the first century Christians who were getting tortured and killed for following Jesus...James said consider it pure joy when you encounter trials of many kinds....because when these are allowed to do their work they will make you perfect and complete...

If you want to be like Jesus, you have to suffer. You have to go through all kinds of trials and tests. But that means that every trial and test is a gift-it's a promise. It's an opportunity. It's a door behind which is more of Him, more beauty, more Love, more Power, more of you, lost (and found!) in more of Him.

Death sucks, no two ways about it. But it ain't God's gig!! And it's ok to be angry at death, God is angry about it, too. But for all who choose to be redeemed, it's only temporary. And God can use the suffering to make us strong and beautiful, children He can be proud to call His own. (:

Ruth-a story about a nobody who chose and was chosen...

2009-08-31T09:03:00.000-07:00

Ruth was neither a prophet nor a princess. She was not a judge. She performed no miracles and wielded no power. She didn't win any beauty contests. SHE WASN'T EVEN A JEW!!! And yet, in a period in history when women had no rights and were rarely even mentioned in any kind of literature or public discourse, this woman had an entire Old Testament book dedicated to her story. Who was she? Why does her story matter?

This story comes after the book of Judges in our current arrangement of OT books, but it actually occurred during the time of the Judges. Interestingly, there are no judges mentioned in it-you might expect there to be some judge who was instrumental in God's work in Ruth's family, but no. The judges from that period were so hit and miss...

Ruth's story can stand alone, but should be seen against the backdrop of apostasy that was that whole dark period of the judges (read in the voice of a monotonous chorus: when everyone did as he saw fit). Because that makes this little diamond that much more glorious. And it's nice, after finishing that ghastly story at the end of Judges, to come up for sweet, fresh air and see into the hearts and lives of a couple of godly women, struggling through very hard times globally and personally, who cling to their faith and become a beautiful part of God's salvation history.

There are three heroes in this story, Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz. And there are really three stories here. One is the story of two women who love each other and whose relationship is centered on their commitment to the same God. Another is the story of an older woman who has lost her children and seemingly has no way of ever having another child or grandchild. The other is the story of providence, a romance, between Ruth and an older man of means, Boaz, also committed to God's laws and to social justice.

Ruth converted to Judaism when she married her first husband, Naomi's son, as did her sister-in-law, Orpah. During a horrible regional depression all three of these women lose their husbands. They are destitute and childless. Orpah decides to go back to her people. But Ruth decides to stay with Naomi and Naomi's God. The most quoted bit of dialogue from Ruth and one of the most quoted scriptures ever comes after Naomi's selfless (and maybe just a tad pessimistic) directive to her daughters in law that they go back to their families, to which Ruth replies (chapter 1:16-18),
Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me , be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.

This was a commitment the woman was making to her mother-in-law! Till death do us part...beautiful, beautiful scene, as chick flicky as they get. (:

I'm sure these words and this act meant the world to Naomi, but the fact remains that they are both widows with no income, practically destitute, and, understandably, she is still just a little pissed at God. What was our first clue? When they get to Bethlehem, she says (1:20-21), Don't call me Naomi anymore. (Naomi means pleasant and agreeable) I'm changing my name because I'm somebody else now--my story has given me a different identity. Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life Bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me, the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me. Now there's a pleasantry to start a conversation with!

And there too, is our age old response to the crap that happens to us--God does not create crap, no evil comes from Him. It clearly comes from our sin, from the natural evil that our sin has wreaked on the earth, and from Satan, too often glorified as God's opposite- he's way too finite to be God's opposite. But if you wanted to point your finger at someone other-worldly and blame them for the tragedy in your life, it would be more theologically correct to point it at him or back at mankind. But no, when crap happens who do we blame? We blame God! It's just a fascinating little dysfunction we have going and it is so dyed into the wool of our human worldviews.

Naomi may still have her faith, and she may even have discipled someone else who converted to her faith through the course of their relationship, but she's still pissed.

Even if the Israelites never actually followed the law of jubilee and took care of the poor in the grand way God had intended them to every 50 years (we have no evidence that they ever actually did), they still maintained some customs that followed the law that was intended to protect the poor--land owners would routinely leave some of the crops along the way as they harvested and would let poorer people follow behind and glean from these, a kind of pro bono, I guess.

Naomi happens to have a relative who is just such a land owner and when Ruth decides to go out and gather grain from someone's fields, apparently by coincidence, she winds up in Boaz's fields. And she catches his eye. And he asks around. And he learns of her story about being a foreigner and being devoted to Naomi and her God. And he shows her favor in providing food and water and protection (from leering male workers). And when she expresses her surprise and gratitude for his kindness, he replies, May the Lord repay you for what you have done, May you be richly rewarded by the Lord the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge. (2:12) Clearly Boaz is acting as a co-laborer with the God of Israel in providing this refuge beneath his wings. He understands how God uses him--uses His people-- to achieve His purposes.

We should also note here that, according to Matthew 1:5, Boaz was actually the son of Rahab (and by son it could mean descendant of several generations) and some Jewish dude named Salmon. Rahab, of course, was not only a non-Jew, she was a prostitute at the time when her city, Jericho, was overtaken by the Israelites and she helped hide the Hebrew spies who had come to canvass the situation. Because she helped them they basically brought her and her family in to a witness protection program outside the city until the invasion, and after that, she ended up becoming a God-fearing Jew...and an ancestor of Boaz...so Boaz had some converted foreigner blood in him too...he wasn't a purely 100% homogeneous Jew.

This gratitude and mutual admiration turns into something more and, after making sure he isn't breaking any laws and clearing it with anyone else who might lay claim, he goes before the council and asks to become her kinsman-redeemer according to the law by marrying her. Remember, Ruth is not a virgin, she is a widow. Besides being destitute, she could be considered leftovers. MOREOVER, according to the law, Boaz marries Ruth in order to maintain the name of the dead (her husband) with his property, so that his name will not disappear from the family or the town records. It is a selfless act. In this Boaz is a type, a foreshadowing, of Christ, towards Ruth and Naomi.

The council responds favorably with a blessing that says, among other things, may you have standing...and be famous in Bethlehem, through the offspring the Lord gives you by this young woman...

And not only do our leading lady and landlord live happily ever after, critical to the goal of not letting Naomi's son's line die on the vine, they produced a child, Obed, who would become the father of Jesse, the father of David...they become the great grandparents of the king who leads Israel's Golden Age (and remember how at Christmas they're always saying, Bethlehem, the city of David) (Places have stories and if we will seek them we will often find them).

And not only that, this romance that blossoms in Bethlehem leads, through the lineage of David, 1100 years later, to Jesus Christ being born in Bethlehem...the great great great great (to whatever exponent) grandson of a foreign woman who became a devout Israelite, and a goodly godly selfless Jew who had descended from Rahab, another redeemed pagan whose life was transformed by contact with God's people! Ancestors of a Messiah for all nations!!! Famous in Bethlehem? Yes, I should say so! (:

As for Naomi, it is worth noting that her biographer ignores her declaration that she was changing her name from Pleasant (Naomi) to Bitter (Mara) because he continues to call her Naomi throughout the book. And as Ruth continues to be gracious and selfless in her love for Naomi, she brings the baby to her, to be cared for and counted not as Naomi's grandson, but as her son. And all the women around her are like, Guess what? God didn't abandon you! He came through and He has made you a mother--this child will make you feel young again (4:15 renew your life) and will care for you when you get old. And BTW, FYI, that girl of yours is better than seven sons!

And they (usually it says she, the mother of the baby, when a birth quote and name are recounted, so it's unclear here whether they means Naomi and Ruth, Ruth and Boaz, the three of them, or Naomi and the women of the town, at any rate...) name him Obed, meaning Servant-Worshiper. Now pleasant, agreeable Naomi had much to worship God for.

Ruth, who was a Moabite, was born neither a princess nor a Jew, and yet she chose God and He chose her to become this beautiful glorious thread in the tapestry of the genealogy of Christ, a matriarch of eternal significance. After that horrific drama at the end of Judges where everyone did whatever they felt like doing, you get an inspirational romantic movie script about 3 people who made sacrifices to do the right thing according to the law of Moses and the law of Love and are richly blessed by God as a result! (:

What's Your REAL Name?

2009-08-23T15:32:00.000-07:00

At the end of Alias Season 4, and the beginning of Season 5 , Michael Vaughn reveals to Sidney (to whom he has recently become engaged after 6 years of being in love) that for starters, Michael Vaughan is not his real name … and then naturally, in the next breath they are in a head on collision before he can explain … No more spoilers from me on that point. But this really made me think about what a real name is. He'd been using that name for at least 10 years or so… he had been that person for all that time, what's not real about that?

They asked me what my Real Name was. Is that the name on my birth certificate? Why should that name be more real than one I may have acquired later? Does being prior make my latter self a liar? The name my parents gave me before they really knew me, why should that be more real? The names I gave myself when I sought to follow the injunction on a pagan temple in Turkey to know myself." The names my friends have given me over the years ... The new identity I was given when I was resurrected…Which one is my real name?

Abram became Abraham and Jacob became Israel. It's real. How much more real could it get?

Simon became Peter when the Lord looked into his heart and into his future, into his destiny, and pronounced him a rock. His new name not only caught up with his new self, the self he was becoming. It framed his future for him, reminded him every time he was called, what his God given destiny was. His new name defined him-gave him clarity when he doubted his purpose. The real name of his old self was Simon. His real name after he met the Master was definitely Peter. And when everything has been fulfilled, he will receive yet another name, a secret name on a little white stone, a new name in glory, one that defines his unique relationship with his Creator. As will you and as will I.

Who cares whether God created the Earth? Whose Endgame is this?

2009-08-14T14:35:00.000-07:00

The creation/intelligent design vs. evolution debate is one that rages on and gets all kinds of people hot under the collar shouting at each other --and I have serious doubts that most people are really hearing over the shouts what this debate is really about. And as for the idea that you can change people's hearts and minds by outshouting them... dang humans are dumb.

It seems like many Christians are under the impression that the point of this debate is to answer the question, Where does the earth come from, where did man come from? This is not the real point of the debate because once you say, Ok God created the earth, the next question is, Ok where did God come from? People seem to think that they can prove the existence of God by reasoning that the earth is too complicated to have evolved out of thin non-air, as it were, through pure unmediated evolution. This is a circular argument that ends with the question of where God comes from, proving nothing, changing nothing, convicting no one. It does tend to alienate people we profess to care about though. We are so good at alienating all those people to whom we are supposed to be the fragrance of the knowledge of Him...

The reason it matters whether or not God created the earth and mankind is that if their is a Creator, if WE were created by Someone, then there is a plausible chance that we might owe Him something. There might be a higher Authority in the universe than humankind! We might be accountable to Someone. There might be rules made up by someone other than ourselves that matter. E-gads! The universe might not be a pure democracy! And if we break those higher laws, there might be consequences...

If intelligent design is True... then maybe not ALL reality and morality is purely the result of cultural construction. There might be an Architect-Developer to whom all cultural construction workers must report...

If this is True, mankind might not be God. And every moment, thought and action must be evaluated through this lens. His lens.

Oh, it's a game changer. Believe you me.

Despise child molesters? The bitch of Christianity...

2009-06-26T17:30:00.000-07:00

Even murderers and rapists think child predators are worse than scum under their toe nails. Of COURSE you and I are far better people; heaven was made for good people like us, wasn't it. Naturally. People whose sins are relatively white. Oh that opens up a can of racist worms I won't tackle today...But I mean, our sins aren't really quite as dirty as theirs... right?

And child molesters. There's a special place in hell for them. I mean that's what we think, right. That's what we hope in the dark corners of our minds...the corners we thought were all bright and shiny but which in Truth are little bastions of fallenness, the dark 'kingdom' of self righteousness.

I currently live in a fairly small and very conservative town in the south. There is a lovely hair stylist I go to who is a transvestite. I don't have a safe pronoun to refer to this person in a way that's neutral and doesn't plant myself firmly in one view or the other of their (there's the pronoun we settle for in the abstract, but it's hard to get by with when you're talking to an acquaintance of the person in point) current gender. This person was male and is transitioning into a female identity, which is pretty persuasive, and has chosen a genderless name, but I'm going to use Valentine as a pseudonym.

In a town this size that's overrun with the most self righteous God squads you could find anywhere in the U.S., people gawk and judge. That's what we humans do. It's like we think it's our birthright. After talking to this gentle, wounded soul, I learned that all of their 3 siblings died in separate incidents the same week! Their father was never present and rejected his child because of their gender issues...and this year their mother died too. My heart broke for Valentine. Eventually I would hear people talking about Valentine the transvestite, people who liked V. But amazingly it seemed that all anyone really knew was the transvestite part. I didn't meet anyone who knew about him but who also knew the horrible, horrible pain and brokenness Valentine was dealing with.

I was so struck by how mesmerized people are with the tawdry side of one person's biography, so much so that they were totally oblivious to the gaping wounds that beg for salve and bandages. We are gawkers who want to see some gore, who find some sick attraction to knowing about people's sin, but who allow ourselves to be completely distracted by the sin and completely sidetracked from the mission of saving and healing people--bringing them rescue... we don't come with a stretcher and a first aid kit. We come with hand cuffs and a big stick. And a video camera. And we often come disguised as vigilantes when in our sick, not yet fully sanctified minds, we are really voyeurs.

Jesus never approached people and said, Hey, you suck and you're going to hell. Wait, Jesus never did that to 'sinners.' Meaning He never did it to people who knew how lost they were. He only did it to the Pharisees and the teachers of the law... and boy did He have some choice insults for them.

You want to talk about the emperor's new clothes? I give you religious people.

But to those who were not wrapped up in their own so called 'holiness'. . . With everyone who knew that they were not righteous in themselves, Jesus did not begin with their sin. He always began with their wounds. He saw their pain and He spoke healing into their pain and THEN after healing them, He would say, Go and sin no more. The fact is that we don't have the power not to sin until He heals us. Nobody does. Not one stinking human. First He has to heal us, then we can be made whole, and then we can be made holy.

I can't believe how many American evangelicals seem to think that the Good News they're supposed to be sharing with the 'lost' is that they are vile and filthy and fall short of the glory of God, "but if they repent and put their faith in the blood of Jesus and His sacrifice, AND you follow this list of 300 rules about what you can say and wear and eat and drink and speak and think, THEN you can join our group and get into heaven (maybe, if you don't f up along the way, depends on how many points you rack up and how recently you confessed your sins when the rapture strikes)'. They seem to think that the good news is Hey we've got even more rules you have no hope of following on your own--come feel even crappier about yourself than you already do, and that is the road to salvation.

It is like they are finding a person being chased by wild animals at the foot of a cliff and saying, Good news, climb this 1 mile sheer cliff and when you get to the top you'll find someone there to help you climb it. We make people get holy before we'll talk to them or welcome them among us. That's not what Jesus did. That's not what the good news is. When you are Jesus to people, you come to that person and you say, 'Get on my back and I'll carry you to the top (because somebody carried me, and now I have the grace to help you too) and then we'll work on your wounds and I'll introduce you to this Person who took away my sin and set me free...'

When I heard that Michael Jackson died last night I was shocked. They had just taken him to the hospital, and then he just... died. That's not the script. He gets sick but he recovers...He's too young, he's too famous...I wanted him to recover so he could have more time to find healing for all the wounds in his heart. I was talking to my transvestite friend and was amazed to hear Valentine dismiss Jackson as a child molester and express his preferred sympathy for Farah Faucet (who had better hair). It seems that no matter how marginalized you are in a society, you can still hate and despise someone else, usually the child molesters. (And I am reporting what someone said about MJ, I'm not professing to know what he did or did not do) Because their sin doesn't emerge from holes in their hearts that they are trying desperately to fill to deaden the horrifying pain??? Sin is people trying to meet legitimate needs through illegitimate means. Putting the wrong things in the holes in your heart to try to fill the gaping wound, and wounding others in the process, and widening the holes in your own heart, too.

Every American Christian I think knows/believes/has heard that if they had been the only person on earth Jesus would have died for them.

Here's the bitch. Jesus loves the person whose entire identity you are summing up as 'child molester' enough to die on the cross for him or her even if s/he had been the only person on earth, too. He would have died for him. The bitch is that Jesus loves the child molester just as much as He loves you! The bitch is that you stand at exactly the same place at the foot of the cross, right beside the child molester and the serial killer and the rapist...

Again, for those who have ears to hear, Here's the bitch. Yes, Jesus would have died for you had you been the only human on earth. But guess what? Your sin (and mine) is so filthy and despicable next to the holiness of God that YOUR SIN would have REQUIRED that Jesus die for you to save your sorry ass even if you had been the only person on earth. Put that on a T-shirt and tell them I sent you. I crucified Jesus. With my own self absorption. With all the messes I've made in my life and those of everyone connected to me, whether it was my express intention to do so or not.

I'm so glad that God has the same mercy for me that He has for Michael Jackson. Who may not have committed all deeds attributed to him. But even if he did, I'm so glad that Jesus looks at him and looks at me and sees our brokenness and our wounds and is able to let His compassion overrule His wrath as long as we but humble ourselves and acknowledge that whatever our sins are/were, they are/were black enough to require the ultimate sacrifice from the one perfectly beautiful innocent loving Person who ever lived.

How dismaying that at our core, we almost always want mercy for ourselves, but justice for others.

Oh that He would transform our hearts and we would wish the same mercy we have received on even our greatest enemies. Here is the test of how much Jesus there is in you. Thankfully, His mercies are new every morning and His compassion never ceases- all we have to do is cry out for mercy and throw ourselves on His, and He will give us Jesus' righteousness to wear straight into the Holy of Holies. Right after the child molester in front of us, who has found grace.

I hope that something happened in Michael's heart in a realm we could not see that enabled him to surrender to God's grace before he died.

There are so many people who really do not want a part of any God who could forgive a child molester or some other low life, say hanging on a cross next to Him, where there was obviously not going to be any opportunity for him to 'redeem himself' by his good deeds after getting sanctified.

How critical that event in the life of Jesus-that it was recorded for us--that we see Him promise paradise to a person who had no way in this life of deceiving himself that the real redemption was in what he achieved after he became a Christian. The beautiful deeds He does through us as He transforms us after the salvation experience are evidence of His glory and His love and His amazing power. How easily we think them evidence that we are redeeming ourselves. That we were really pretty good after all and deserved saving.

Thank God for the thief on the cross. Thank God for every repentant child molester and murderer He has had compassion on and sanctified with the same blood of the Lamb that sanctifies you. Thank God that He has the same mercy for me that He has for them. Thank God for His mercies which are new every morning! Thank God, Thank God, Thank God, Thank God! Glory to God in the highest! Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. Holy Holy Holy.

Judges: The Last Ghastly Gasp at the end of the age of the judges

2009-05-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

Samson (#13 in the list of judges, hm....) is the last judge chronicled in this book. Samson seems to have ushered in even more darkness and there are no more Judges left to chronicle...just depravity of unspeakable dimensions.

We then have a case of individual idolatry (Micah the Ephraimite) and corporate idolatry when the Danites install an unnamed Levite (who had served Micah in his home shrine with is idols) as their priest and continue to use the stolen idols that Micah had made. (18:31)

Finally, the horrible nightmare of a story about gang rape and the dismemberment of the Levite's concubine. The sacredness of hospitality in that culture is something I think the western mind cannot fathom. The host offers his own daughter to be raped rather than his guest. Ironically, the Levite had passed up spending the night in Jebus because he wouldn't stay in a non-Israelite town. Looking for greater safety among their own people, they were victims of the most heinous crime. After he sends his gory message around Israel, Israel goes to war against the Benjamites, the ones who committed the crime.

They also make an oath at Mizpah that not one of them would give their daughter in marriage to a Benjamite. Since no representatives from Jabesh Gilead show up for the sacred assembly--now think about this, their punishment sounds extreme, but look at it in this light-they receive a body part testifying to the crime of the Benjamites and they don't show enough concern about- or even interest in--this horrendous breach of justice to even to send a representative-- their whole community is put to the sword including women and children(21:10), except for the virgins. These are given to the Benjamites, but there are still not enough to go around.

And so the people actually grieve for the tribe of Benjamin because it appears there would be this big gap in the tribes of Israel. So the elders get creative and decide to let the Benjamites "seize" a girl from the dancing at the annual festival of the Lord at Shiloh, and that way their fathers cannot be guilty of giving them up willingly, but the line of Benjamin is preserved. So there is punishment and purging, but not annihilation.

The book ends with its main point:

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit. 21:25

Judges: A beautiful flower in the Samson story- his mother

2009-05-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

So we've established that Samson is the weightlifting brainless thug who swings constantly from rage to lust and back to rage again and manages to kill a lot of Philistines (Israel's main enemy at the time) in the process, but only because God was weaving whatever Samson did into a nice tapestry that worked to good for God's people in spite of Samson himself.

Samson's story might be where I first started pondering birth narratives and who gets them. With people like Isaac, Moses, Samuel, John the baptist, Jesus, you have leaders who work with God to achieve His master plan. They're all good guys who do what they were meant to do-they find their purpose and stick with it. Samson seems to be the only one who gets a birth narrative but does not pan out.

And it's not just any birth narrative--he gets an entire chapter devoted to his birth announcement, and it is even more dramatic than the visitation to Mary the mother of Jesus! And Samson was really a creep. But he was a creep called by God. His story really reveals an interesting facet of the truth that the calling of God is without repentance. God never revokes His call on Samson's life even though Samson allows himself to be ruled completely by his liver-his lusts, following whatever his passions dictate, without as much moral integrity as a decent man or woman has in their little finger.

Unfazed by this, God ultimately weaves everything into good for His people and makes Samson a deliverer of Israel in spite of himself (but notably, showing him to be far more valuable to Israel in his death than in his whole life of heroic exploits). Samson does actually pray once or twice, though even then, it’s all about his personal quest for vengeance, his own passions. And we may never know what God would have done through Samson if he had yielded his heart completely to the Spirit of God. But Samson is not the flower I have for you today.

The real story of godliness in the Samson narratives rests in the character of his parents. More particularly, and more interesting for all my God fearing girlfriends (thank you, Martina McBride, for this phrase), the real heroine in the Samson narrative is Samson’s mother, the wife of Manoah, who is never even NAMED. It is to this godly woman that the Angel of the Lord appears and announces Samson’s impending birth, her history of barrenness notwithstanding.

Manoah, not around for the first visitation, asks the Lord to send the angel again, allegedly “so that they can get more details about how to raise the child.” The Angel of the Lord does appear again, but does he appear to Manoah out in the field? NO. He appears to the unsung godly woman who has to go out and track down her husband and bring him into (what turns out to be) the presence of the Lord. Moreover, please note, there was not even one more detail added in the second visitation than there was in the first visit to the lowly nameless woman about how to raise Samson as a Nazirite.

Of course, the most riveting point of interest for me in this story, with my ongoing captivation with fire imagery in scripture, is what happens in the offering they make to the Lord. Judges 13:15 Manoah said to the angel of the LORD, We would like you to stay until we prepare a young goat for you. The angel of the LORD replied, Even though you detain me, I will not eat any of your food. But if you prepare a burnt offering, offer it to the LORD. (Manoah did not realize that it was the Angel of the LORD).

Manoah asks the Angel of the Lord what H/his name is, because, he says, he wants to know it so that he can honor the visitor when H/his word comes true. You might think, if you happen to be tuned in to interactional norms and gender differences, that there are some things that women just know not to ask. But Manoah rushes in where angels—well, angels and women—fear to tread. And he is probably embarrassed a tad that he doesn’t get an answer. He is bluntly told that it is beyond his understanding and is asked why he asked. The key point here is that Manoah doesn't know exactly who he's talking to right now but if he is talking to an angel, and not the Lord Himself, what he is proposing is idolatry. So the Angel dude puts the kibosh on that right away. Whatever you offer, you offer to the Lord.

Then Manoah takes a young goat, together with the grain offering, and sacrifices it on a rock to the Lord. And then the Lord does an Amazing thing while Manoah and his wife watch:
20 As the flame blazed up from the altar towards heaven, the angel of the Lord ascended in the flame. Seeing this, Manoah and his wife fall with their faces to the ground. 21When the angel of the Lord did not show himself again to Manoah and his wife, Manoah realized that it was the angel of the Lord.

This is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the Spirit of God responding to and with fire in His pleasure/acceptance of worship in Scripture. Tucked away in a story about a guy people don’t want their sons to grow up to be like. But a guy who was raised by some godly parents in the midst of the period of the judges when people lived like hellions, each doing as “he found fit,” complete corporate amnesia about those Ten Commandments and several books of laws that had been given to detail what God found fit.

The next thing you notice that is really lovely here is that the lovely nameless woman is the voice of reason in her family. Not shocking to those of us who come from families in which a woman is often the voice of reason, but throughout history it has been a literary standard that men are the voice of reason, and women their emotional counterparts. This is really visible in the Elizabethan literature where men are at the top of the hierarchy of beings because they are, allegedly, ruled by reason.

Manoah, however, gets overcome and decides they are going to die when he realizes they have seen God. 13:22 We are doomed to die! We have seen God! His wife coolly explains that if they died, Samson could not be born, thus defeating the purpose of the whole visitation and announcement.

Then she has the baby and names him Samson and does her best to raise him according to the rules the Angel had stipulated. Throughout the rest of the Samson narratives though, you find Samson sinning, but always behind his parents’ backs—he feeds them honey from a dead animal which was a huge violation of kosher dining etiquette (i.e., it was a big fat sin), but does not tell them where it comes from. And when he insists on marrying a Philistine, his parents protest and try to get him to marry a nice Jewish girl instead. But Samson is always going to do his own thing. To his eventual destruction.

Anyway, I just wanted to draw your attention to this nameless flower in the Samson narratives (which start in chapter 13) who displays more of the splendor of God than her named male counterparts. Sometimes we miss the really tasty bits of scripture that seem backgrounded to the more dramatic actions and characters. Some wonderfully beautiful flowers are hidden in those out of the way corners of the Old Testament woods, off the main path, but very worth tracking down.

Samson- Personification of the Apostasy of the Age

2009-04-30T08:34:00.000-07:00

Samson is judge number 13. He is the only judge recorded who gets a birth narrative and is explicitly called by God from birth to deliver Israel, and is given special gifts (mainly physical strength) to accomplish this call. What he does not have is moral strength, so his life is messy—however, he is used by God in spite of his selfish, lust driven nature.

A) Birth narrative (all of chapter 13)
a. The Angel of the Lord appears to the sterile, nameless wife of Manoah and explains what part of the Nazirite vow she must keep herself and what for the child
b. On hearing of the visitation, Manoah asks through prayer for the “man of God” to come again to give more details about how to raise Samson. The Angel of the Lord again appears to the woman, who then goes to fetch her husband.
c. The Angel of the Lord repeats what he had told the woman in the first visitation (13:13-14), No grape products, no fermented drinks, nothing unclean
d. Manoah offers hospitality, but is told that the 'man' will not eat his food, but if he prepares a burnt offering, he should offer it to the Lord (13:15-16)
e. Manoah asks the 'man’s' name so that they may honor H/him when H/his word comes to pass, but is told that H/his name is beyond understanding
f. Manoah offers goat and grain, and as he and his wife watch the flame blazing up from the altar toward heaven, the Angel of the Lord ascends in the flame!!! (13:19-20)
g. When they realize who their visitor was, Manoah fears that they will die. But his (nameless) wife reasons that H/he would not have accepted their offering or revealed all of these things if he intended to kill them (after all, Samson could not then be born)
h. Samson is born, a boy. (13:24) (How would this tale have gone on if a girl had been born!!)
i. God blesses him and the Spirit of the Lord begins to stir him while he is in Mahaneh Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol.

B) Arranging a Marriage to a Philistine
a. Samson sees a Philistine woman at Timnah and goes home to insist that his parents get her for him-parenthetical insert says that this was really part of God’s plan to confront the Philistines, but does not explain how it can be God’s will to break His own laws about marrying a non-Hebrew) 14:1-4
b. Samson and his parents go to Timnah and are attacked by a young lion which Samson tears apart with his bare hands under the Spirit of the Lord

Problem: The subnarrative here, v. 5-7) has parents & Samson traveling together, but as they approach the vineyards, a young lion comes roaring toward him-He killed the lion and didn’t tell his parents—where were they? Also, are we not meant to find it meaningful that it was as he approached the VINEYARD, a threat to his Nazirite vow, that he faced this challenge?

c. He goes and talks to the woman and he likes her (14:7)
d. (Returning home) he finds bees and honey in the lion’s carcass, which he not only eats against God’s law, but gives to his parents to eat unknowingly, so that he makes them sin in ignorance.

C) The Wedding
a. Wedding riddle-the point here seems to be that marrying a woman from among your enemies is not smart. He ends up telling her the answer to the riddle to prove his love for her (or to make her stop crying, which she has done for 7 days!), and she, of course, betrays him by telling the answer to his people, where her highest loyalty still lies.
b. To pay for the riddle with 30 sets of clothes, however, Samson KILLS 30 Philistines and gives the clothes from off their bodies to those who had answered the riddle.
c. He then he goes home in anger without his bride, with whom he is, no doubt, somewhat disenchanted,
d. Since he abandons her, the Philistines give his wife to the friend who had attended him at his wedding, presumably the best man. It does not say whether Samson’s best man is a Philistine or not.
e. Samson gets over his anger and swings back to lust, the two poles that seem to govern his passion driven life, goes to be with his wife and learns that she has been given to his friend.
f. Swinging back to rage, Samson uses 300 foxes (how he comes by 300 foxes is not explained) with torches tied to their tails, to burn the Philistine wheat harvest.
g. In retaliation, the equally passion-driven Philistines kill both the wife (presumably to hurt Samson) and her father (presumably because he indirectly caused the burning of the harvest) by burning them to death, thus fighting fire with fire.
h. In retaliation, Samson kills many more and then retires to a cave near Etam. (15:7-8)

D) Slaying Philistines with a Jawbone
a. The Philistines camp IN Judah (pretty cheeky!) and demand the Israelites turn Samson over to them so they can repay him for his latest attacks.
b. Three thousand men from Judah go to Samson in the cave and point out that the Philistines have been/are, for all intents and purposes, rulers over the Israelites, just in case he hadn’t noticed. They consider his escapades a liability rather than an asset saying, What have you done to us?? He replies in the spirit of “an eye for an eye,” I merely did to them what they did to me, without concern about how his act may affect others of his own people. They negotiate with Samson, agreeing to bind him and turn him over alive to the Philistines (wonder how many of them expected Samson to do something spectacular).
c. As Samson moves toward Lehi, the angry Philistines come running toward him shouting (curses? Insults to his God?) and the Spirit of God comes on him in power (does not say he prayed for it), he breaks the ropes, grabs a jaw bone, and kills a thousand men (all in a day’s work).
d. Samson composes a song or poem about this exploit. (15:16). With a donkey I have made a donkey out of them…
e. Samson gives credit to God and prays for water and God answers. When he drinks of this water from God, his strength returns.

E) Prostitute in Gaza
a. Samson spends the night with a prostitute in Gaza. When the townspeople get wind of this, they surround that place with the intention of killing him at dawn, when he is all worn out. Instead, he leaves in the middle of the night and tears the city gate out of the wall, carrying it over his head (?) on his shoulders to the top of the hill that faces Hebron. If the gate was on the East side that means he turned his back to Gaza. Gaza was part of the Philistine Pentapolis at the time. Hebron was one of the highest points (3,040 feet above sea level), so I’m thinking it might have been visible from the hill where Samson stood. Since the story ends here I imagine there is meant to be a symbolic message in this act and the mention of direction.

F) Delilah
a. Samson’s 3 lies, Delilah’s 3 Tests: Samson actually falls in love with Delilah, though there is NO mention of her love for him. Whatever her motive in letting this relationship develop, she is soon working for a mother load of money, 1100 shekels of silver from each Philistine ruler, however many there were.
b. Her 3 tests were
i. To be tied with fresh thongs (seven)
ii. To be tied with new ropes
iii. To have his seven braids women into fabric on a loom.
For each of those requests Delilah only says, Please tell me the secret, don’t make a fool of me, don’t lie to me again.
c. But for the fourth attempt, Delilah appeals to Samson’s love for her, and nagging him like this for many days she finally wears him down until he is “tired to death” and tells her the secret that if his head were shaved he would be as weak as any man. So Delilah calls a man to cut off the braids and Samson’s strength leaves him, but he thinks he will not be weakened. Samson himself does not believe the truth he told anymore than he believed his own lies. He seems unable to identify truth. And underlyingly, he must believe that he is invincible, quite apart from obedience. It is unclear to me whether and at what level he might understand his strength to be a gift from God. At any rate, 16:20b reports, But he did not know that the LORD had left him.
d. The Philistines seize him and unceremoniously gauge out his eyes and take him back down to Gaza where he is bound in brass shackles and forced to grind grain in a prison like a common beast of burden-the man who lives by his passions like an animal gets treated like one. Having lived by bulk, to the neglect of his higher faculty of reason/intellect/wisdom, he is only taking on a visible role that accords with the way he had already been living. But his hair begins to grow, and the Philistines must not have truly believed the secret of his strength either, since they leave it unattended.

G) Samson "Entertains" at Festival for Dagon
a. Singing the praises of their false god, the Philistines call for Samson to be brought out to entertain them (and be living evidence of the power of their God, Dagon).
b. Samson actually prays for strength to avenge HIMSELF. A servant (could he have been a Jewish servant?) helps him find and feel the pillars that support the temple.
c. He pulls down the central pillars and kills all the rulers and people, about 3,000-- more when he dies than he had during his whole life.
d. Samson is buried in his hometown by his father’s whole family, ending 20 years of “leading” Israel.

Samson was called by God (as his elaborate birth narrative illustrates), gifted by God, and used by God, though he seems to have been used in spite of himself—God had to take his selfish acts and cause them to achieve His higher purposes.

Was Samson ever happy? Did he ever find peace or fulfillment in God or elsewhere? How would the Samson narratives be different if Samson had loved God and yielded to His Spirit at all times, not only when his selfish passions overcame him and God had to step in and use evil for good? All things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28)…In this case, God was working things out for the good of the Israelites… From that perspective, might we compare Samson to Balaam, or maybe Balaam's donkey?! (Numbers 22).

As is true for us in different ways, Samson’s strength was also his weakness: his physical power was too easy to use to solve problems. When we learn about the gifts God has given us, we also have to learn the positive and negative uses for each, powers for good and powers for evil. The power to build, nurture and strengthen versus the power to destroy… The power to not use a particular gift in a particular context if that’s what love calls for…

We do not (are not to) compare ourselves to others (Galatians 6:4), but according to the gifts God has given us as individuals. These gifts are not for us alone, but belong to the Body of Christ—if we do not use them (obediently) we deprive the whole Body, not just ourselves, as Samson deprived all of Israel.

Samson ‘knows’ the source of his strength at head level, as evidenced by his ability to articulate it to Delilah, but apparently not at the level of his heart and of an intimate experience-knowledge of God in his life, so that he does not really understand that he will be powerless when the Nazirite vow is completely broken by the shaving of his head. Thus he is surprised and dismayed when he discovers that the Lord has left him. When you learn to practice the presence of God, surely you will know what His presence feels like, and thus what His absence feels like. Jesus knew when God had turned His face away on Golgotha.

Samson's gifts and his Nazirite regimen--that set of guidelines for doing God's will with his life, were not sufficient for him to connect with the Spirit of God and to know whether He came or went. The gifts themselves are no evidence of our right relationship with God.

Shechem (from Judges) and the rich layers of reference in scripture

2009-04-27T03:49:00.000-07:00

Every time a place is mentioned in scripture it is significant. Every place has a name and the name has a meaning, which usually comes to bear on whatever the scripture passage is. Moreover, every place has a history—events significant to God and His people took place there.

If you talk about San Francisco you probably think of earthquakes, nice weather, outrageous real estate and gay pride. Right now everything about the history of Detroit is being brought out for exhibition as the big auto makers start shutting down. References to Detroit reach back into all this—the migration of black Americans from the south, the birth of the assembly line, Motown music, eventually crime and poverty--all these associations in the hearer’s head.

So the original audiences of scripture would have had all those kinds of associations too, with every place name and every name of a group of people (the Midianites, etc). They are part of the meaning of that passage and if you skip over them like they were just extra words in the way, you’re just skimming the top of the meaning and missing a whole lot. Every name of every place, person, people, tree, flower, jewel and precious metal has some symbolic significance. If you will dig deeper into these many layers of scripture you will uncover treasures hidden there for you. Your mind and spirit will be enriched.

For example, let’s look at ‘Shechem,’ which is mentioned in Judges 9.

1) Shechem is a place of promise. Abram met God there and God made His Big Promise about becoming the father of nations to Abram there.

Genesis 12:6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring [a] I will give this land." So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him.

2) Shechem is also a place of promise, peace, and safety for Jacob. After Abram’s grandson Jacob safely survives his encounter with Esau (when he fully expected Esau to waste him for stealing his birthright all those years prior), Jacob buys some land right there where God had made His promise of becoming the father of a great nation. He is already beginning to fulfill prophecy. And he makes an altar there, naming it El Elohe Israel, acknowledging Yawheh as God for the seedling nation of Israel, right there where it had been promised to Abram.

Genesis 33:18 After Jacob came from Paddan Aram, he arrived safely at the city of Shechem in Canaan and camped within sight of the city. 19 For a hundred pieces of silver, he bought from the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem, the plot of ground where he pitched his tent. 20 There he set up an altar and called it El Elohe Israel.

3) While these two incidents were essentially acts of consecration and devotion to God's will, the next big event scripture records about Shechem is one of defilement-it is a place where Jacob's sons take justice into their own hands. It is the site of the rape of Dinah, and subsequently, the revenge 'rape' of a city by her brothers. After moving to Shechem, within sight of the city, that is, Dinah is seduced by Shechem son of Hamor. In reprisal her brothers trick the men of the city into getting circumcised and then they sneak in and kill every man while they are still in pain. Hamor is said to mean ass or donkey, which is believed to have been the city's sacred animal (a kind of mascot), and Shechem means son of the ass/donkey.

You should read the whole chapter (Genesis 34) for this story, but here's the beginning:

1 Now Dinah, the daughter Leah had borne to Jacob, went out to visit the women of the land. 2 When Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, the ruler of that area, saw her, he took her and violated her. 3 His heart was drawn to Dinah daughter of Jacob, and he loved the girl and spoke tenderly to her. 4 And Shechem said to his father Hamor, "Get me this girl as my wife." 5 When Jacob heard that his daughter Dinah had been defiled, his sons were in the fields with his livestock; so he kept quiet about it until they came home. 6 Then Shechem's father Hamor went out to talk with Jacob. 7 Now Jacob's sons had come in from the fields as soon as they heard what had happened. They were filled with grief and fury, because Shechem had done a disgraceful thing in [a] Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter—a thing that should not be done.

I have not been able to find a single commentary that deals seriously with the problem of the city and the names of individuals from the city called Shechem. If the city was already called Shechem when Jacob moved there, it seems almost metaphorical to call its most prominent citizen (from Jacob's family's point of view) by the name of the city. Maybe it's like saying Mr. New York, Mr. Shechem. . .

4) Shechem is the place where Joseph's brothers were hanging out when he went to look for them, just before they moved on to Dothan, where they would hatch the plot to murder him. (Genesis 37:12).

5) Joseph buried in Shechem-he bought a tract of land there and willed that his remains (mummified) would be returned and buried there when his people returned. (Joshua 24:32)

6) When the Promised Land was divided among the tribes, Shechem was allotted to Joseph (Mannasah and Ephraim). (Joshua 17:2-10). It's nice that the descendants of Joseph could have the land where he wanted to be finally laid to rest.

7) Schechem was then designated a City of Refuge (Joshua 20:7-9, 21:21). A city of refuge was a place you could flee to if you accidentally killed someone and their family wanted to revenge. You could flee to a city of refuge and they would protect you until those who wanted your life had themselves died. I find this interesting since it figures in the story of Joseph's redemption-being sold as a slave rather than murdered, which is a little like being redeemed as a Christian for a life of service to God. I would have to study more to see if there is meant to be such symbolism there.

8) The naming problem-it appears that a descendant of Manassah's got named Shechem (Numbers 26:31) (because he lived there? because he was to inherit that?) and another (or maybe the same?) descendant was named Shechem as recorded in 1 Chronicles 7:19.

9) Joshua called an assembly at Shechem to renew the covenant. He drew up for them decrees and laws and then took a large stone and set it up there under the oak near the holy place of the Lord saying, This stone will be a witness against us. It has heard all the words the Lord has said to us. It will be a witness against you if you are untrue to your God! (Joshua 24:26,7)

10) Shechem is the site of all this trouble caused by Abimalech, which I will elaborate on later since it's what initially sparked this jaunt down Shechem's memory lane... (Judges 9:1-57)

11) The evil king Rehoboam (son of Solomon and an Ammonite princess, last king of the united monarchy and first king of Judah) went to Shechem for coronation. (I Kings 12:1-4, 2 Chronicles 10:1-4)

12) The evil king Jeroboam (Ephraimite, son of Nebat, remember Ephraim was from Joseph's line) had been appointed by Solomon as overseer of forced labor in the territories of Ephraim and Mannasah. He rebelled against Solomon and then fled for his life to Egypt where he married into the Egyptian Royal family, became the first king of the northern kingdom (probably) after the northern tribes had withdrawn their support from the harsh king Rehoboam) and who, upon becoming king, fortified Shechem and took up residence there, possibly using it as a capital.

13) Two enigmatic references in Psalms (60:6 and 108:7), God talking about triumphantly parceling out Shechem, I have to return to this later.

14) There is an incident after the Exile where some of the remnant come from Shechem, Shiloh and Samaria to bring offerings to the Lord, but most of them get slaughtered by an assassin (Jeremiah 41:4)

15) There is a poetic reference in Hosea, "As marauders lie in ambush for a man, so do bands of priests; they murder on the road to Shechem, committing shameful crimes." In other words, they murdered on their way to a city of refuge where they would not be held accountable for their crime. (Hosea 6:9, 10)

Joshua

2009-03-25T18:03:00.000-07:00

You've got at least 19 good stories in Joshua. Which reminds me of my favorite line in Walk the Line, the movie about Johnny and June Carter Cash. Johnny's brother Jack Cash, who is 14 (when Johnny is about 12) and wants to be a minister when he grows up, is explaining to Johnny why he studies the Bible so zealously: How can you help people if you don't know what story to tell 'em? Out o the mouths of babes. Narrative is powerful and that's why so much of scripture is narrative, why Jesus told so many stories...rather than just the standard alliterative three point sermons.

major themes? well, be people of the book, tattoo it all over yourself, be strong and courageous, leave the old guard behind and come in with new wine skins for new wine.

Big point: Failure of handing off the baton of leadership at the end, setting Israel up to slip into the apostasy that would be the 300 years of Judges. After all those very explicit instructions in the first five books of scripture, Israel scrapped almost everything after Joshua's era. There is no evidence, for example, that Israel EVER actually observed the year of Jubilee. Somebody dropped the ball. And though the Law was Beautiful and Important and pointed towards holiness, it was clear that the law alone was not going to save Israel. There was going to have to be a Relationship between God and His people...one that included mercy and forgiveness...

Judges: Judges 6-12

2009-03-24T09:56:00.000-07:00

7) Tola judges Israel for 23 yrs and only merits 1 verse! (10:1) Apparently he was not “all that.”

8) Jair rules for 22, and the most interesting thing they have to say about him is that he had 30 sons who rode around on 30 donkeys (which, granted, is reportable, but is not exactly a ringing endorsement of his leadership).

9) Jephthah is a lot more interesting, but tragic events draw the most notice to his leadership. He is a bastard son, not appreciated by the legitimate sons, and is chased away by his half brothers. But he is also a great warrior, and when the Ammonite oppression becomes overwhelming, the brothers seek Jephtha’s help. After some initial disbelief, he agrees to lead.

There are only 2 verses about his victory over the Ammonites, (32-33), (and it is noteworthy that he took military action only after diplomatic efforts had failed), and these are embedded in the story that is clearly more interesting to the author, that of the foolish vow. Jephtha had promised that if his army won the victory, he would offer as a sacrifice the first thing he saw when he got home... and that turned out to be his daughter. He then“dutifully” sacrificed her. Jephtha, his daughter, and apparently everyone else, recognize the grave obligation to keep one's vow to the Lord even if it is a horribly misguided one—they apparently fail however, to realize how utterly loathsome to God human sacrifice is.

[I think I dropped a paragraph or so about the ensuing conflict where his brothers distrust him again after the victory dust settles which is where the 'diplomacy' would have come in]

Although Jephtha demonstrated strong diplomatic skills internationally, he failed on the domestic front, fighting with Ephraim rather than smoothing things over the way that Gideon had managed to do when a similar dispute arose from the Ephraimites after he defeated the Midianites. (We are starting to get a whiny image of the Ephraimites).

This is where the linguistically legendary sh/s pronunciation test is instituted. The Ephraimites were trying to pass as main streamers but apparently had a dialect that didn’t allow for the “sh” sound (or at least not before the vowel in the first syllable of the word in point) and since they weren’t all getting Standard Israeli Hebrew instruction in their public schools, they simply didn’t notice the difference and couldn’t produce the “foreign” sound. Thus it was really easy to identify an Ephraimite by his dialect and inability to pronounce shibboleth, which apparently means ‘stream,’ which is what they were trying to cross on the occasion this little speech exam was administered. 42,000 Ephraimites lost their lives in this way.

Jephtha only ruled Israel for 6 years before he died. (10:6-12:7). And yet he gets airtime in Judges that spans 3 chapters (compared to Tola’s 23 years being brushed off by a single verse).

10) Ibzen of Bethlehem had 30 sons and 30 daughters whom he married cross clan boundaries (12:8-10). He gets 3 verses.

11) Elon of Zebulon, ruled for 10 years (12:11-12). He gets 2 verses.

12) Abdon of Pirathon ruled for 8 years. He had 40 sons and 30 grandsons who road on 70 donkeys. (12:13-15). He gets 3 verses.

And then there was Samson…

Judges--aka Tribal Leaders not completely unlike some of those those in Iraq and Afghanistan and like places today

2009-03-23T18:08:00.000-07:00

the grand theme of this book? EVERYONE DID AS HE SAW FIT. that's what tribal leaders do. they make up their own rules. opens the people up to all kinds of abuse, very russian roulette- hit and miss-sketchy. very sketchy. one is tempted to draw parallels to wallstreet's unregulated ceo's and the like as well, but 'one' will forego the temptation for now. too many irons in the fire, as it were.

i used to put off judges for a long time after reading joshua, dreading that horrible story at the end, but i don't think i remembered until the 2002 reading that the horrible rape of the concubine doesn't happen until chapter 20, at the very end of this book about the height of the early apostasy, the darkest night right before the dawn of the age of the prophets (enter Samuel stage left) but not yet, we're doing judges. hold your horses.

you do have to ask yourself what joshua had to do with the fact that the fragile little civil society spectacularly crashed and burned almost as soon as he died -- was there a failure of vision and leadership on his part? did he not think about the fact that there would need to be strong capable leaders to take over when God took him out? there is virtually no leadership structure in place when he exits. big power vacuum. those really suck.

somehow we tend to put ourselves on automatic pilot when reading through the old testament, like it was this ordeal we have to go through to get our little bible reading star in our crowns, but already determined that we weren't gonna get nothin from it.

but if you even stay half awake, you should be able to see this beautiful little pattern that swirls around about 20 times throughout the book. ok the pattern itself is tragic and pathetic, but the structure is gorgeous and there is a message in the structure! God is a God of order, so finding the structures He's built into Scripture is a delightful sally into the well groomed garden of His mind. . .

1) The people screw up and do evil
2) Other nations start messing with them and turning up the heat
3) They come to their acute senses and cry out to God for help
4) God raises up a leader, a judge, a superheroe if you will
5) The hero saves them (well, God saves them through the hero)
6) The people, with a 3 second memory like a fish, shortly if not immediately return to their degenerate ways, taking their eyes off God, sin-king beneath the waves of their self-worshiping human nature

I mean it was quite a merry go round. Except for the merry part. Unless it was the Eat drink and be merry in steps 1 and 6. It's like a laundry cycle, only two of the cycles make the clothes filthy --it's like apply filth, rub in filth, soak in soap, wash vigorously, rinse, soak in filth, repeat. but the wash and rinse cycles are glorious. they truly are. and sometimes they're pretty long cycles. and normally in judges, after telling you about a particular judge and his/her "reign" the writer adds how long the cycle was, how many years of peace ensued after the hero performed amazing feats yada yada, before moving on to the next. so that's the cycle.

Here are some of the judges:

1) Othniel conquers the oppressor, King of Aram (3:7-11) 40 years of peace ensued

2) Ehud (a lefty) kills the fat oppressive king of moab, Eglon, with a double edged sword (funniest bathroom scene in scripture embedded here (3:12-30) 80 years of peace ensued

3) Shamgar killed 600 Philistines with an ox goad. ONE VERSE. (3:31) Shortest narrative in scripture?? Shockingly, no mention of how much peace ensued.

4) Deborah, the prophetess (Married to Lappidoth (about whom we hear nothing)) rises to power when Israel's chief oppressor is Jabin, King of Canaan and his army commander is Sisera. In the voice of God, Deborah orders her own army commander, Barak, (dang, i did not remember that was his name when i voted) to organize 10,000 troops to go to war against Sisera. Barak is weak kneed and Deborah prophecies that because of his lack of courage he will be disgraced by having the honor of taking the enemy's leader out given to a woman. (some of us think worse fates could befall you).

the woman in point was apparently not the powerful, spiritual, political and intellectual force that was Deborah, but humble tent-peg wielding housewife/ homemaker/ domestic engineer Jael! apparently this struggle between Isreal and theCanaanites was a gradual victory that sort of culminated in the incident where Jael nails the enemy commander-- "and the hand of the Israelites grew stronger and stronger against Jabin,"until they destroyed him. remember Jabin was the king they were struggling against. but his army commander was Sisera.

Sisera is the one who got nailed by Jael for underestimating the power of a civilian woman who appeared to be consumed by her domestic responsibilities. Sisera takes warm milk from the nice lady and then takes a nap under her covers and then gets violently assassinated by said nice lady (chapter 4:1-24) 40 years of peace ensued.

Incidentally, Deborah's song of Worship-history is 30 verses long and a bit sadistic for my tastes (28-30) (chapter 5:1-31)

5) Gideon (also a bit weak-kneed) rose up against Midian (Oh come on you have to appreciate a primary opponent that rhymes with the leading man's) and the Amalekites and apparently a scattering of other Eastern peoples, who would come in and destroy the Israelites' crops and force them into hiding desperately in the mountain caves and clefts.

scene 1: God gives Israel a lecture about Egypt and not worshiping the Amorite Gods.

scene 2: The angel of the Lord interrupts Gideon in the midst of his wheat-threshing and calls him a mighty warrior (is there irony here? was he hiding in the barn?) Gideon is a little whiney and a little cheeky. He complains that when God delivered Israel from Egypt He performed "wonders." apparently without 'wonders' God has obviously abandoned Israel.

scene 3: Gideon asks for a sign and his sacrifice is consumed by fire. (6:17-24) Gideon Responds "Ah, Sovereign Lord! I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face." Gideon builds an altar and names it The Lord is Peace.

scene 4: Assignment-Tear down the Ashera poles and the altar your father established to Baal and make 2 proper bull sacrifices to God. (6:15-40) He did this at night because he was afraid, and in the morning the people wanted to kill him anyway (apparently he was hiding in his house). So interesting that it was his father, Joash, whose altar to Baal Gideon destroyed, but yet Joash is quick to comply and it is he who challenges the men of the town- "If Baal is really God, he can defend himself when someone breaks down his altar." Apparently everyone accepts this because the embedded narrative ends.

scene 5: Gideon asks for signs through fleeces and gets them (6:33-40).

scene 6: 300 handlapping men best the inumberable Midianite Alliance (7:1-25) via psychological warfare achieved via sound effects (trumpet, breaking clay jars). Orebe and Zeeb (2 Midianite leaders) get decapitated and the place they were killed gets named after them (7:25)

scene 7: Gideon diffuses conflict by minimizing his own contribution to success (8:1-3).

scene 8: Two unlucky and unwise towns refuse Gideon and his 300 men bread and taunt them-they get blasted later (8:4-17)

scene 9: Gideon kills Zebah and Zalmunna (Midianites) for killing his 70 brothers (with the bearing of a prince) (8:18-21).

scene 10: Gideon refuses to rule (as General Washington first had in America's founding) and urges the Israelites to let God rule. He only asks for one earring from each of them, out of which he makes an ephod, which becomes a great snare to him and his family (8:22-27)

scene 11: Gideon dies and Israel spirals right back to its cycle of idolatry.

The 6th through 13th judges coming right up. . .

Can you actually sin by quoting scripture?

2009-03-22T10:12:00.001-07:00

let me cut to the chase, the answer is hell yeah you can sin by quoting scripture! remember the pharisees? hello??? they quoted left right and center (ok, they mainly quoted it right, but they did it All the time!) but they did so as evidence of their OWN righteousness!! ok. self righteousness. in other words, filthy rags (discarded toilet paper, tampons and the like, that's the image Isaiah used-oh i'm sorry, does scripture offend you with it's strong images? blessed are those who are not offended...who understand the use of scatalogical images in scripture to show us how very filthy we are in our own righteousness) presented as if they were brand new clothes. but they HAD NO LOVE!!!!!! which is why Jesus raked them over the coals at every opportunity calling them snakes and sons of satan and nice names like that. Jesus didn't sugar coat His displeasure. He told 'em how it was. He had nerves of steele.

that should really be all the evidence you need, but lest you be unsure, i point you to the great temptation of Christ in the wilderness. what did satan use to tempt Jesus all three times? God's own words!!! SCRIPTURE!!!! He used Truth in the most deceitful way; he used TRUTH in SCRIPTURE in the most hateful unloving way possible-to tempt the Savior of the world to abdicate His role and use His power and His prestige and His position for His own ungodly gain. Thank Jesus, He knew scripture even better than the bad guy (technically He had a leg up on 'im cause He was the Author, but who's counting--that's right, we are all counting, counting the days till His glorious return) and He quoted scripture against scripture (all three times, incidentally, Jesus cited the highly under celebrated Deuteronomy) to show that scripture cannot be taken out of context and used in ways that contradict other scripture-- He reigned in the right interpretation of scripture by comparing verses and showing where one verse fills in what other left unstated. He didn't let half truths lead Him to destruction-which is where satan was leading Him--all our destruction.

what's the bottom line? the bottom line is that God is LOVE. He is perfect and just and holy, and He is love. and there is nothing Holy that is not Saturated with Love from beginning to end. Yes, Love judges when it needs to. But that's God's final role. Ours is to love everyone in sight just like Jesus did. the pharisees quoted scripture at Him to protest His healing people of their disease and infirmity. the protested His disciples picking corn so they wouldn't go hungry on the sabbath. they used scripture to 'prove' that He was a blasphemer! which means they ultimately used scripture to crucify the Lord of Lords!

bottom line: if you quote scripture to show how righteous you are, you've just painted yourself in the same colors as satan and the pharisees. if you quote scripture to a bleeding heart when what they need is love and compassion and ministry, you have made yourself a snake and a son of satan. be very very careful what you do with the Word of God. watch yourself. whenever you think you're standing on the promises but you're really standing on the shoulders of Selfishness, Self Righteousness, you are teetering on the edge of Hell. wolves in sheeps clothing. repent of your unholy scripture quoting! make sure you are hearing from the Holy Spirit and speaking His Word in the Spirit of Love as He has commanded you. but for His grace, it would be better for us to have a millstone tied around our necks and thrown into the deepest ocean. if we repent of our self-righteousness He is loving and faithful and just to forgive us our sins. His forgiveness does require repentance however. be very, very careful what you quote in the Name of the Lord.

questions to ask yourself before you go waving that sword around at wounded people:

1) What is my motive? Do I want to impress people with my memory and knowledge of scripture? Do I want to demonstrate that I am a better Christian than someone else? Do I want people to feel small and foolish?

2) What does this person NEED to hear from the mouth of God right this very moment in this very particular nexus of time and events? What will bring them closer to God in the long run? What will effectively extend the reign of the Kingdom of God in this generation?

3) What is the Holy Spirit telling you to say right this very moment? And are you VERY sure that is not your deceitful Psyche disguising itself as the Holy Spirit? It is such a pain to actually ask God to help us be sensitive to what is needed in the moment--but that dear friends is what FAITH is!!! Faith is alive and in the moment and it depends desperately on God. we love lists of rules that we can memorize because we love putting ourselves on automatic pilot and not having to actually take a risk and tune into God's heart and use our brains in conjunction with our spirits to achieve the will of God with the people before us. But God's call and command to you is to walk by faith, to take the risk and trust Him in each and every situation--Without faith it is IMPOSSIBLE to please God. Without faith, you could memorize and quote the whole blessed Bible and still be a stench to Him! Don't be a stench unnecessarily. Spread everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Christ! Be a fragrant aroma, pleasing to the Lord!

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Hebrews 4:12 NASB

Scripture is not a toy. Don't be swinging it around recklessly.

Let me recap: Safety Check for Wielding the Sword of God's Word

1) Your motive must be LOVE.

2) Love compels you to assess the needs of the person before you in the exact context of the moment.

3) Love for God and His beloved humanity compels you to seek the Holy Spirit's confirmation and leading in your spirit that He wants you to share this scripture (and that it's the right phrasing and interpretation and application of the scripture) or whether what He wants you to do is put your arms around the person before you and cry with them, any number of creative things the Holy Spirit may put you up to. (:

Be His Love Poured Out!

Deuteronomy--Jesus' Favorite Book? Did He list this on Goodreads?

2009-03-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

go around quizzing people over this at your next pot luck: what book did Jesus quote from exclusively in His grueling wilderness temptation? (or, if you're a grammar nazi you could put your preposition elsewhere. . . ) . that's right. DEUTERONOMY. (If Deuteronomy were a dude, that would be his nickname. Dude. it's just too hard to say Dute. But I can kind of hear Dude sporting a little tude, with a little, Yeah, what's the sexiest book in the old testament now???? Bite me Song of Songs! Jesus never even quoted you once)

apparently a star feature of deuteronomy is it's likeness to a well known Hittite and/or Assyrian treaty format. that format structures the book overall and is pretty awesome because it's not a treaty between nations; it's a treaty between a people and their God. so maybe Jesus quoting it to satan in the wilderness was a little like Dr. Who* citing the Shadow Proclamation to his arch enemy. i just mean He's citing a LAW-it was like the constitution for God, humanity, and the universe. (until Jesus wrote a new constitution when the Law failed, but He pointedly upheld and quoted the Old One until the appointed time, until the old law was fulfilled and the New One instituted in its place. )

even though it is laid out in this general legal structure, it adds exhortations, poetry, and other elaborations, and Holman's characterizes it as a farewell sermon of Moses. . .

some beautiful stuff in deuteronomy. everybody's favorite is chapter 28 i think. but i won't spoil it for you, go read it for yourself.

*. . . or Dr. Who was like Jesus. . . well they both do the time travel thing (: . . . but we know Jesus was at the VERY beginning. . . and while i'm veering off topic, Dr. Who really is Jesus, i mean He's the Christ figure in that myth, pretty amazingly too. . .

Numbers. Just What the Title Suggests. But you have to read between the lines...

2009-03-21T14:00:00.000-07:00

Actually Numbers has a much sexier theme than title: Desert Wanderings. Not sexy enough for you? You want to go back to Numbers? You wander around on the Saudi Peninsula for 40 years and see if it doesn't do a number on you. (oh i am hysterical. must be the sun)

The first thought most people have while reading through Numbers (ok, let's be real, most people don't read through Numbers. most people don't even pretend to read Numbers-their eyes glaze over and they assume: numbers do not equal spirituality, skip to the end ((that last phrase must be said in the voice of prince humperdink to the clergyman in the princess bride))

But those real holy people who do read Numbers (like me, of course), probably think to themselves more than once, why couldn't these lists have been condensed? To repeat the whole shpiel for each and every tribe seems so inefficient (not to mention DRY like the desert that birthed it).

But a few thoughts do present themselves. One, you've got this huge mob of kvetching, shvitzing ex-slaves with minimal education and probably zero experience in self-government wandering around dazed and frequently disconsolate. They were a rough lot. Probably really got on each others' nerves (definitely got on Moses' very last nerve over and over and over) and may not have trusted each other that much. Moses and the priests come in and they impose civilization on the scraggly band.

They introduced record keeping. Because record keeping is what civilized people do-they balance their checkbooks and update their planners and stuff, or so I hear). Not necessarily altogether unlike score keeping sometimes, either. Every single tribe gets every single detail listed in its turn. You couldn't look back later and say, "Yeah, I know they said every tribe gave 12 tons of gold, but I know for a fact that Benjamin only gave 11 and a half and just called it 12 cause that's how spoiled youngest children are." Keeping the records straight would have a civilizing effect in the future. And it seems like getting these people used to the idea of books and bookkeeping would be good since they would ultimately be called the People of the Book. And all the wonderfully explicit instructions about division of labor regarding care of the tabernacle and all that concerned it had to be indispensable for this lot of largely unskilled newbies.

Leviticus had two cautionary narratives about the scary consequences of trying to pull something over on God, and so does Numbers. 1) Korah's rebellion (ch 16, and mentioned by Jude in the NT too) and 2) Balaam's sin (chapters 22-24, yeah that's the one with the talking donkey).

Moreover, and to whit, there is actually Poetry in Numbers:
(I know you Math majors think there's poetry in all numbers, but we English majors need a little more wordli-ness to our poetry-yeah, And worldliness too, but that's not what I wrote)

1) That beautiful priestly benediction (6:22-26) that we have used across the centuries and around the world: The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn His face toward you and give you peace."

2) Moses' blessing of the Ark setting out (10:35b-36)
"Rise up, O Lord! May Your enemies be scattered; may Your foes flee before you."

3) Moses' blessing of the Ark coming to rest (10:36)
"Return, O Lord, to the countless thousands of Israel." (I'm not sure if he was getting tired of numbers at that point)

4) Israel's song of gratitude for water (21:17b-18a)
"Spring up oh well! Sing about it, about the well that the princes dug, that the nobles of the people sank-the nobles with scepters and staffs."

A::::nd that's all I got for Numbers today.

I think there is a whole lot more in here, not the least of which is the interesting factoid that in Hebrew each letter of the alphabet is also a number, so you could potentially hide all kinds of interesting ideas in big long strings of numbers....)

Leviticus: The Book of Fire

2009-03-21T13:51:00.000-07:00

Wow this book has a bad rap. (Actually I'd be interested in hearing this book in rap. (: ).

This book is full of fire. The purifying fire of the Holy Spirit-it's breathtaking, really.

Leviticus is conspicuously void of narrative. However, embedded in the descriptions of the various types of sacrifice, the detailed instructions about priestly service, and the descriptions of the holy conduct, there are two brief and alarming narratives illustrating how seriously non-compliance would be taken by God: 1) The death of Aaron's sons (10:1-19), and 2) The stoning of the Hebrew/Egyptian blasphemer, (24:10-25).

The fire is coming I promise.

Dissimilation from Egyptian culture and future contact cultures is clearly an objective all through Leviticus, but is explicitly articulated in 18:3: "You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do Not follow their practices." Cultures past nor cultures future. .

Ok, the fire will come when I have more time...

Think you are too skanky for God? Less worthy of His love than others? Let's Talk

2009-03-21T10:30:00.000-07:00

HELLO???? we ALL suck without God. Christianity 101. (see a few posts down).

and what's with the unworthy crap? duh, we are all unworthy. but you were bought with the precious blood of Jesus and to refuse to acknowledge and to accept the full redemption power of His blood shed for you is tantamount to blasphemy. to speak of worthiness is to cling to the carnal desire to become worthy by your own virtue. that is pure blasphemy. it plagues us throughout our earthly lives, and we have to keep throwing it back under the blood. look at Jesus, beaten and mocked and naked for you. look into His eyes and tell Him His blood wasn't enough to redeem you--you can't and you shan't (and you dasn't, as they used to say 100 years ago in chicago for you dare not).

God doesn't redeem us because we are good-that's the whole point! He redeems us because HE IS GOOD. and HE IS GOD. Look into His face and let that sacrifice lift you out of this lostness. i don't know how long your dark night may last, but i know the lostness, the unworthiness, is not supposed to endure. rise. your Beloved calls you to Himself. do not deny His power to drive away all darkness. there will be struggle. that's the dimension we are now in. struggle, but not defeat. lift up your eyes. Your Redeemer is gazing lovingly down at you. calling you out of darkness. answer the damn phone! (:

Hearing God's Call on Your Life- A Letter

2009-03-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

You can devote yourself to ministry (even in the Catholic church:) ) without becoming celibate. And it always concerns me when people who have Any history of sexual abuse, even what appears to be minor, choose to become a priest or a nun, sister, whatever particular categories & ministry descriptions there are that I don't completely remember. I heartily and rejoicingly commend your sensitivity to the Holy Spirit and to the call of God on your life. I caution you to do two things: to hear God for yourself, trying to see Him outside of the lens of everyone around you and to know that you know that you know that it is God calling you in a particular direction and not Psyche, disguising herself as an angel of light .

Our benevolent, well meaning communities often package God for us. They put Him in frames and His calling in boxes that they have backed themselves into... Sometimes, for failure to listen closely enough to the voice of God themselves and for failure to recognize the immense creativity God has given us with the gift of free will which He intends for us to use in our co-laboring with Him in bringing the Kingdom of God to mankind. There are many, many kinds of ministry that are so neglected by the majority of the established institutional roles churches have generated to date. There is always a need for new wine skins, to bring the new wine to those in need of it. Be a new wine skin, Friend of Mine!

I think I may be speaking prophetically about your specific situation, by which I mean that I think this gut feeling is one that comes from the Holy Spirit, but ultimately only you can decide what God is telling you about the path you take--if God is speaking to someone else about what He wants for you, be sure that He will tell you too! Even if it takes a little bit after hearing from someone else to really be still and hear what you may not have been able to hear before. Beware of anyone coming and pronouncing you a missionary to Africa, for example, if God has never brought that to your heart before. Talk to your parents, as I know you are planning to do, and talk to your spiritual leaders. Good decisions are not made in isolation, even when the decision you ultimately make parts with the pack because you hear God calling you away from it.

Because you have had your boundaries violated in your past, I believe that you have a great responsibility, a greater responsibility, to aggressively pursue counseling and healing and to make sure that wounds and impulses far below the surface of consciousness are not major invisible motives for moving away from a relationship with a person of the opposite gender and into an exclusive relationship with God which will also entail a relationship with many young people of your same gender, many of whom have also experienced great violations and wounds to their emotional and sexual selves--Make sure that you know that you know that you know that you are running TO the ministry and not AWAY from the intimate relationships that require you to face so much really hard stuff to get totally whole and be a healthy functioning man or woman in relationships He may have ordained for you.

There is no doubt that He is just aching to give us the wisdom we lack--If anyone lacks wisdom, let them ask of God, Who gives to all generously and without holding back,

May the Spirit of God flood your mind and invade your soul with love, power, and sound mind. Cling to it. Wear it like a banner, boldly, fearlessly. Let it flow from your lips, your heart, and your choices, and spread the Kingdom of God through your life everywhere you go!

To the Spirit-filled English majors and wordsmiths at heart-a letter

2009-03-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

The Prophet is in! :) Flagrant and Fragrant

Your words caught the eye of the prophet in me and the following spilled out. It is in solidarity and the urge to spread the Word, the Good Words, among the church. . . spread it! Speak it! Let the flame of the Holy Spirit consume all our pettiness, arrogance, complacency, smugness, fear, and self-absorption. And let what remains of our humbled, chastened, purified hearts be a glorious sacrifice devoted to the Lord by fire, filling the sky with a fragrant aroma, pleasing to our God. We must get rid of the stench of self-righteousness!! We must ardently purge the church of the stench and stains of self-righteousness, like filthy rags we could not stand to retain-we must expose and expunge! We must purge and purify-for self-righteousness, my friend, is the filthiest sin of all. It is essentially giving the finger to God and saying, Thanks, but I've got this under control.

You are a great writer. (: What are you going to do with that? It is so much needed in a world where kingdom people tend to cower in the shadows of public life and thought, hiding behind their favorite cliches, afraid of their own brains (and how much more so those of others!). There is a need for Spirit-filled Word-smiths to influence those people, but more importantly, there is the need for those Word smiths to go out and be salt and light, allowing themselves to get rubbed into the culture, rubbed into the fabric of the community like salt was rubbed into meat to preserve it in Jesus' day-- His image is not one of hiding away in sanctuaries that 'protect us' from the world, but one of running out into the river of life without fear, fueled by faith, knowing that we can do nothing in ourselves, but that through Him ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE, that Faith is the opposite of Fear, that where Fear waxes Faith wains and without Faith it is IMPOSSIBLE to please God.

And I'm afraid I see more fear than faith in most Evangelicals today--they are afraid that sin will get on them and will seep into their souls like cigarette smoke soaks into their clothes after an evening out at a restaurant among "the lost" (because, of course, anyone who smokes is going to hell in a hand basket And on a roller skate!) They forget the power they have not only over sin for themselves (through Christ), but to release others from their sin, to dispense Sanctification, as it were, to all who would have it.

They forget-- or did they ever get it? that the Good News is not, Hey, Guess what, you're a sinner and you're going to Hell. People get that. People know they're lost and sinking. . . what they don't know is that there is Grace that will carry them back into the light, that there is a way out of the quagmire they are in, that WE are willing to carry them on our backs to the Master, and that He will carry them the rest of the way. American Christians behave as if the Good News was this: Hey, guess what? If you climb this 2 mile high sheer cliff, when you get to the top, there is someone there who can help you to climb it. But until then, you're on your own.

Jesus never railed at the outcast sinner. He only railed at those who thought themselves holier than everyone else, those who issued unsolicited holiness grade cards to everyone else, those who were too busy being 'holy' to make anyone *whole*. Too obsessed with Justice to dispense any Mercy, too busy hating Sin to love Souls. In every case I've been able to recall, Jesus started by 'seeing' people and seeing what hurt in them. He then lovingly moved into that wounded place and administered a salve to the body, to the soul, to all that ailed them. . . and then that salvific salve that saves and sanctifies.

After He has touched our wounds and sanctified us, THEN and ONLY THEN, do we even have the power not to sin!

As I have said before, too many of us too often want the Old Testament for others and the New Testament for ourselves. 95% of the time the prophets in the Old Testament were preaching to God's people!!! They were not railing at the non-Jews! They were like, To you alone has God given this indescribable treasure of His friendship and love, and yet you have become morally bankrupt-- and you do not put out! You do not put out that love to the poor or the lost, and you do not put out to God, without Whom you would have Nothing.

Jesus turned everything on its head-- revealed to us that it is the poor who are His favorite, not the rich. Revealed to us that leaders must be servants, that those who want life must die, that to gain, you must give up. And after He turned the money tables over and drove the hard hearted, stiff-necked, money grubbing temple tyrants out of the temple, symbolic of what He was doing with His death and resurrection for the entire universe, and rent that incredible wall of a 'curtain' between the common man and the Holy of Holies, giving every little nobody access to God Himself, as He gave up all power to give us all power, dying to purchase our lives, after this great capsizing of the human slave ship that man and sin had made out of the earth, most of the church, those who Called themselves by His name, spent the next 2,000 years trying to put that slave ship back together again!

Many, many Christians over the centuries have staunchly prevented His Grace from ruling. . . We didn't put the Pharisees out of business, we BECAME the Pharisees! And so it has come to pass, in this the land of our fathers, that Christians have perverted the gospel of Christ and profaned His sacrifice by living as though His injunction had been and remains, They will know you are Christians by your laws. The church is bound to make itself a stench to the world either way it goes, with love or law as its signature feature. Unfortunately we have gone the wrong way, and have made ourselves not only a stench to mankind, but a stench to God!!

[14 But thanks be to God, Who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Him. 15 For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. 16 To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life. And who is equal to such a task? 2 Corinthians 2:14-16]

The time is short and the order tall. It is time to rise above our delusions of holiness (the ones that make us a bunch of silly little emperors running around naked in our 'new clothes' (the letter to the church at Laodicea in Revelation is quite clear about that)--we are partially naked and partially clad in the filthy rags of our own 'righteousness.' We have to give up the delusions of our own sufficiency and humbly put on the robes of righteousness we had no hand in purchasing, and THEN He will be glorified in His church and as we lift Him up from the earth, all men will be drawn unto Him. Then we will have become a sweet, sweet aroma to our God.

Keep running the good race! Keep spreading the fragrance of Christ!

what sux about the cradle-up christian predicament

2008-10-31T11:32:00.001-07:00

guess what? we ALL suck without God. that would be Christianity 101. And Romans 3:23. even us dyed in the wool fundies with our undies in a big starchy wad.

(and don't forget that suck comes from weaning and the notion that you're not measuring up because you're not grown up yet, and don't make it something that it's not. just revisit that whole why are you still on milk when you should be already into the steak of God's word? exhortation-Hebrews 5:12)

anyone who thinks they don't suck without God is heavily deluded. most susceptible to this delusion are cradle-up Christians who've never been tested or tempted outside the little Christian ghettos that they hide in. they somehow manage to construe the fact that they have thrown themselves upon God's undeserved mercy as a spiritual trophy. it's like thinking someone should be given a medal for allowing the ambulance to carry them to ER and the surgeon to save their life when they were minutes away from death. and then proudly wearing that medal around. . .

i went to the hospital when i was mostly dead and i allowed someone more powerful and skillful than myself to save my sorry butt. praise me, praise me, this was an ACHIEVEMENT. someone gave me a gift i didn't deserve and i opened it!! and i kept it!! and i still have it!! and sometimes i even use it!! praise me for all those achievements. and don't mind me while i look down my nose at those who haven't found their care packages yet much less opened or availed themselves of them.

self righteousness is mystifyingly, mind blowingly, oxymoronic, a gross contradiction in terms!

yet somehow it's hardwired into our dna. that little black thread from Adam's seed, and Eve's really brilliant people are just as susceptible to this assinine line of thinking as anyone else. probably even a little moreso. how very pathetic our little human psyches are when it comes to seeing ourselves in the light of Truth.

cradle christians have long lists of sins they've never committed and good deeds they have. and many of them are only too happy to share that with you. they have usually become pretty eloquent at describing the grace of God in prefabricated chunks handed to them by others-not a bad thing when you are still weaning. not an impressive one, however, when you've been a christian for years.

eloquence can be a good cover for comprehension and experience. flowery language can camouflage the fact that you have virtually no understanding of how deeply your sin nature runs and how desperately dependent on God's grace you are. how many christians seem to think they stand higher up on the hill of calvary, closer to Jesus than other sinners, maybe because they bought their tickets early and got good seats. in serious denial about how very equally they stand at exactly the same place at the foot of the cross, utterly helpless to wash away their own sins, just like every prostitute, pedophile, and perpetrator of perversions worthy of perdition throughout space and time. SAME exact predicament.

the list of sins they have not committed is spelled out in flashing neon lights. the list of those they have (either sins of commission or omission) is written in invisible ink and they are afraid even to look at it themselves. we are so much better at deceiving ourselves than anyone else could ever be. the human heart is deceitful above all things. it is as if we believe that if we actually glance into the spiritual mirror of truth and see the beast in our visage we'll just spontaneously explode and be instantly sucked into hell.

the problem is, when you are a bearer of the image of Jesus, if you have never seen what you were/are without Him, when you look in the mirror it's possible for you to confuse His image with yours. to confuse His free Redemption for personal virtue.

i know because i was pretty much a cradle-uppy. and i'll tell you about it a little later. (:

Embryonic thought about Second Birth narratives and Paul

2008-10-29T20:50:00.001-07:00

I haven't had time to really develop this thought, but I realized that even though Paul didn't have a dramatic birth narrative, he does have a dramatic, supernatural conversion narrative, a narrative of RE-BIRTH. As do others in the New Testament. Maybe after Jesus' final triumphant birth, and then the Death of Death that He wrought on the cross-His killing the second death and rending the wall-like curtain to the Holy of Holies from top to bottom, was the point from which the narratives thereafter would be of rebirth and transformation, tales of the experience of being Born Again, testimonies of His Triumph, testimonies that all those dramatic narratives of first births were all leading up to the real Story, The Grand Narrative, (yes, HIStory) (: the fruit of the New Covenant, the Second Births.

First Born Sons, Crown Princes, and God's Favor

2008-10-10T15:01:00.000-07:00

In a culture where the first born son was the crown prince of every family, it is amazing that God recognizes this relationship in the detailed code of conduct and religious observance He lays out for His people, while at the same time continually flouting that expectation in His choice of leaders throughout the history of His people as chronicled in scripture.

Jacob was not technically the first born, but he was chosen. Joseph was the firstborn of his mother, but not of his father. He is chosen for glorious leadership and the salvation of his tribe, but he is not chosen as the ancestor of Christ. Neither is Reuben, the actual first born of his father.

It is Judah, the fourth born, as I've discussed in some detail in the posts on Genesis, who becomes the ancestor of Christ. Judah offered his life in exchange for his brother. Reuben doesn't even get to be the fount of the priesthood. Nor does Simon. It is the third son who gets to be the priestly patriarch. Even Moses was not the first born son--Aaron was! And Aaron ended up serving under Moses' command. He did get to be one of the priestly patriarchs however, descended from 3rd born Levi. And if we skip ahead to David, the Golden boy of the Old Testament, the Golden King of Israel's Golden Age, he was the youngest son of a whole passel of quivers in Jesse's cache.

So it's fascinating to read Exodus and see the Passover experience where the first born son of every home is taken; all the crown princes are lost, all those at least whose families did not put their faith in God by putting the blood of the lamb on their doorposts to appeal to God's mercy. This is a poignant recognition in this pivotal act in the Exodus where God acknowledges the significance of the crown princes. He builds them into the justice system and the religious system for His people, into His judgments, which are meant to bring salvation.

But God doesn't limit Himself to those favored by man. It seems like He might be saying, guess what? You don't get to just be born into favor with God. You don't get to approach God with the silver spoon of being the first born son as if that entitled you to His favor. God is not impressed by claims of entitlement. Check out the self righteous older brother of the Prodigal Son in Luke. And unlike some Ivy League schools, nobody gets into Heaven as a 'legacy student.'

Two things are true. One is that God gets to put His favor wherever He wishes-there is no entitlement for any of us in that regard. The other is that faith is what makes you a 'man after God's own heart.' Abraham believed God and was called the friend of God. Jacob never stopped believing that God was going to bless him and his faith in God's goodness pleased God. And David, David was the apple of His eye. Not because of his birth order and not because of his personal righteousness. He humbles himself and puts his faith in God's goodness. And God pours out His favor upon him. This pattern of birth order is one I want to study in more detail throughout scripture, but for now, I just wanted to draw your attention to this little pattern that might be easily missed without reading the Bible in its entirety again and again. Beautiful patterns jump out and reward you. (: I love to pray with Psalmist from 119:18, "Open my eyes that I may behold wonderful things from Thy law!"

Who Gets a Birth Narrative and Why?

2008-10-10T09:09:00.000-07:00

We're talking about Exodus and about Moses the mouthpiece of God. Moses of course gets a fabulous birth narrative (which Willow gives a lovely homage to in the story of Alora Danon, also sent to save her people, thank you Ron Howard). (: Who gets a birth narrative in scripture? Let's see

Adam & Eve
(equivalent of a birth narrative,
the birth of humanity direct from the hand of God)
Cain & Able,
the first to be actually born of a woman
None for Noah
None for Abraham
Isaac-miracle of an 'elderly' mother
Jacob/Esau-
unusual birth of wily twins, fathers of rival nations
All of Jacob's children, father's of tribes
Benjamin & Joseph-miracle of fertility
Moses-miracle rescue from infanticide
Samson-miracle of fertility
Samuel-miracle of fertility
None for Saul
None for David
(although for David we had the book of Ruth introducing his grandparents)
John the Baptist-miracle of birth to 'elderly' mother
Jesus-miracle of the Virgin birth, trumps all the other miracle births (:

We have equivalents of birth narratives in the creation accounts of Adam and Eve. None for Noah. No birth narrative for Abraham, father of nations, though we do have them for his son and grandsons Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph (and as I wrote of for Genesis, very briefly for each of Jacob's sons and his daughter). Even Samson, who did not turn out as God had desired, because he he failed to fulfill God's high calling on his life, rascal that he was . . . . . . even he had a birth narrative. I say "even," but it may be a critical clue about the nature of God's call on our lives. . . Later we have an elaborate birth narrative for Samuel, but none for David (although as I noted we get a detailed narrative in the book of Ruth, presenting a wonderful story about his grandparents). In the New Testament we have one for John the Baptist and one for Jesus. In fact, all the birth narratives come to a halt in the final miracle birth of Jesus. There are no more birth narratives after Jesus, the Final Savior, the culmination of the salvation plan.

Why do we get birth narratives? Surely it is to show God's sovereign call on the lives of these individuals, that He not only created them and knew them before they were born, but He created them with a purpose. A purpose of redemption for His people. Because we are co-laborers with God, we have to answer the call. We have evidence that people can choose to answer the call of God on their life or not in Samson (I wrote about this in earlier posts). One of the casualties of using the King James Version 400 years after its language has become obscure and often misleading to contemporary ears is the verse that says the calling of God is without repentance Romans 11:29. An amazing woman of God named Wanda, from whom I have learned so much, once shared with me what this really means--it doesn't mean there is no forgiveness for not answering the call of God, which is how it is very often understood and applied with more destructive than edifying results. It means God never takes it back, He never gives up and withdraws the call, He keeps working with us to the very end of our lives to give us every opportunity to reciprocate His love and work with Him. Birth narratives remind us that He knew us in our mother's womb--nay--He PUT US in our mother's womb. And He did so with Purpose.

So, as far as Paul is concerned, even though Paul was man of the millennium for his testament, he doesn't get a birth narrative. Although he does get far and away enough air time to make up for that. (: And his ego does not seem to have suffered for it. He knows who He is in Christ. And God has a birth narrative in His heart for Paul, as He has for all of us. Every day written in His book before any of them came to be . . .

And as for Exodus, it can be seen as the birth narrative of a people. Egypt has become an unlikely womb, its oppression the labor pains that will give way to its emergence as an entity independent of that which has been harboring it. It was a difficult birth with both complications and miracles along the way. It was the birth of a people with whom He would reveal to the world His nature, His desire for relationship with us, and ultimately, His plan to bring about reconciliation between Him and all those in humanity who would receive Him.

Moses, Man of the Millennia, Mouthpiece of God

2008-10-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

If the Old Testament had a man of the millennium award, well if they had a man of the last 4 millennia award, Moses would be the uncontested winner. In the Old Testament, Moses is the Man. Sometimes he is compared to Jesus in the New Testament, but since Jesus is fully God and fully man, that is really an apples and parakeets comparison.

His real counterpart is Paul, another mere human. Both men were educated and prepared in the highest classes of the highest civilizations of their time. They were super literate (although there is speculation that both men had speech impediments!), they never did anything half way. Oh, and they were both murderers. Well, if you want to define a person by a single action, repeated or otherwise. In fact, it has often been pointed out that most of the bible was written by three murderers: Moses, David, and Paul. And the point of that? God's redemption is greater than the vilest sin. To be fair, Moses and Paul killed on principle-they killed for social justice and zeal for God, even if they made bad calls in so doing. David killed out of less noble motives, at least in the case of Uriah. But God's grace extended even to him and his very selfish personal reason for murder.

Earlier I said that Joseph's story was a foreshadowing of the story of the Hebrews in Egypt as suffering and education there was necessary for the purposes God was calling them to. Moses is like the book end to the time of slavery in Egypt, the kind of leader Joseph was, one who would save his people by following God. Joseph saved his tribe from famine (and illiteracy). Moses delivered them from slavery. Both men enjoyed favor from royalty and developed great leadership skills among the Egyptians. So Joseph was the left bracket and Moses was the right bracket, so to speak, setting off this period of time when the people of Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt.

Moses and Paul are explicitly recorded as having exclusive, privileged, secular educations, which helped prepare them for leadership that would profoundly affect the rest of human history. Considering their respective importance for their covenants/testaments, it interests me that we have a birth narrative for Moses, but not for Paul. . .

Entering Exodus-The Great Exit

2008-10-10T07:45:00.000-07:00

Exodus is all about Redemption. Okay fine, they're all about redemption. Exodus is like Joseph's story magnified by four hundred years and thousands of descendants. It follows the same path. . . there is a time of slavery following all the promises of prosperity (Joseph's dreams about himself and his brothers, Abraham's dreams about all his descendants). Something beautiful happens during the time of oppression that prepares the protagonist for a greater purpose beyond it, both in Joseph's story and the story of his descendants.

God is not the author of suffering or any evil. But God's magic is that He alone can take evil and transform it into good. God took the opportunity to use Egypt as a furnace for educating and shaping His people. He took a handful of nomads and put them in the thick of the most advanced civilization in the world up to that date.

We can assume that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were illiterate. Why all the stopping to pile up a bunch of rocks in commemoration of something? They couldn't write and their people couldn't read. You needed visuals to mark the milestones of your history, to provide an opportunity for dialogue. Uncle Judah, what is that big pile of rocks doing there in the middle of the river? Well, son, I'm glad you asked. . . let me tell you a story about God and your grandpa Jacob. . . which is part of your story, too.

Apparently Joseph learned how to write since he got to be kind of the finance minister for Pharaoh. And boy could Moses write. . . since we attribute to him the Pentateuch, this first five books of the Law, also known to the Jews as the Torah (separate from all the other books of the Old Testament and more revered). But we'll get to that.

While Genesis covers a ton of time and is one exciting narrative right after another, Exodus is only about half narrative. The rest consists of descriptive instructive details about how to worship, how to manage relationships and social conduct, how to maintain the tabernacle and rituals that would be a lifeline between a people and their God, basically an initial handbook on how to have their own culture now that they're not just some random diaspora population of slaves in Egypt assimilating to someone else's values and traditions. Exodus is the beginning of God's instruction about how to build a culture based on God's values, establishing traditions that embody and preserve them.

Among the well known narratives of Exodus are these:

1) The birth of Moses
2) The killing of the Egyptian
3) Moses' exile to Midian
4) The Burning Bush: Moses' Calling
5) Ten Plagues
6) The First Passover
7) Four Tests on the way to Mt. Sinai:
a) bitter water, b) hunger, manna and quail, c) thirst, d) conflict (Amalekites)
8) Moses' brother-in-law Jethro mentors Moses in the art of delegation
9) The 10 Commandments and other instructions
10) The golden calf debacle

Joseph's family transformed through suffering

2008-05-26T08:56:00.000-07:00

I guess what I was most touched by this year was how love grew up in the relationships in this family as the years passed and their understanding deepened. How much Joseph loved Benjamin, how Jacob said he would go to his grave mourning over Joseph (all those decades later when the famine drove them to Egypt, Jacob was still mourning the loss of his cherished son), and how dearly Jacob loved Benjamin, all he had left of Rachel.

And how the brothers had actually grown to love their father, finally understanding that it would kill him if he lost Benjamin too- how Reuben offered his two sons if anything happened to Benjamin—remember how Reuben had planned to come back and rescue Joseph from the well? But he didn’t have the guts to stand up to his brothers to their faces, and now he seeks redemption. Now he is a father himself and he understands what he did to his own father by letting them do away with Joseph. And he offers his own two sons in Benjamin’s place. Remember also that Jacob named him Benjamin-son of my right hand, reminding everyone how important he was to him. And then Judah took personal responsibility for Benjamin and made good on his promise when he offered himself as a substitute for Benjamin. . . a foreshadowing of the Lion of Judah, substitution for us all.

How obtuse I was all these years till this (2002), not realizing how carefully Joseph had set up the test to find out whether his brothers had softened their hearts over the years, whether they would sacrifice Benjamin as readily as they had rid themselves of Joseph.

When Judah made his plea to Joseph (not yet knowing his true identity-and realize that there would be no way to know how his heart had changed if he did know Joseph’s identity- how would we know whether his motive was pure? This is why the tests are so poignant and pivotal-Jospeh wanted to hear the brothers tell the narrative from their perspective-he wanted them to tell the story so that he could see who they were, who they had become, through their narratives).

When Judah made his plea, he said, “His brother is dead, and he is the only one of his mother’s sons left, and his father loves him,” (44:20b). Here I began to weep. (And I had recently lost a dear, dear friend and watched her father lose her five years after he lost her mother).

Judah continues, in verse 30. . “If the boy is not with us when I go back to your servant my father and if my father, whose life is closely bound up with the boy’s life, (31) sees that the boy isn’t there, he will die. . . please let your servant remain here as my lord’s slave in place of the boy. . . (34) No!! Do not let me see the misery that would come upon my father.”

Those boys did suffer from their crime. They had to watch the agony of their father all those years. And Judah cries out for compassion on his father, and on himself, not to have to see how much more agony would be wrought for his father and how it would destroy him. Judah was shining—the love that had grown in his heart was shining brightly and everyone could see it. Here I cried a lot, and re-typing it now I am crying again. Perhaps before I had watched my friend dying of a horrible cancer, I didn’t have the depth of experience with grief that would cause this story to take on this infinitely more meaningful and powerful understanding for me.

This time Judah’s cry pierced my heart and I understood. As I had never understood those hundred other times this story was presented to me. It is not clear how Judah or the others actually felt towards Benjamin himself, but perhaps it does not matter so much. They loved their father, and this meant that they made choices motivated by love about who and what Jacob loved most. Love for one person calls you to love those that they love, as Love for God calls you to love His cherished humanity . . . You cannot love the One without loving the other.

Finally, at the end of Genesis, the point. The point of the whole book perhaps, perhaps of the whole human project. . When Jacob died and the brothers still feared retribution from Joseph, Joseph said, “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children. And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them.” (50:19-21) And I don’t think Joseph was strutting now. As his brothers had learned to love by loving whom their father loved, Joseph had learned to love his brothers through humility, as well as by protecting them.

There is so much of the gospel in this narrative. A beloved son’s life is taken, but in the taking, their salvation is won. After the taking, watching Jacob’s heart aching, the boys became so aware of their sin. They knew what they deserved. But they had also learned to love through this horrible ordeal. They sought redemption. Reuben offered his sons, Judah offered himself, both foreshadowing the sacrifice of Christ.

And in the end, Jacob lived his last days in the presence of all 12 of his living sons and his one daughter. And they were all in position now to spend 400 years gestating and becoming a great nation, to emerge from its chrysalis in the Exodus. Indeed, what Satan meant for evil, God meant for good.

You cannot catch Him by surprise. You cannot sin so much that He is not still able to take deviance, death, decay, disease or disaster and transform them into something beautiful and glorious, weaving them into the exquisite tapestry of His extravagant love story with humanity. He is ready to weave you in. He's just waiting for your consent. You have not because you ask not. . . (oh, do I detect schema from the book of James working itself into Genesis? Weird how that happens . . . (: ). Ask and you will receive.

And that’s just one or two layers of the Joseph narratives. But let’s move on for now and leave that for the next time you read Genesis.

Reframing the Joseph Narratives- Putting some stuff in perspective

2008-05-21T10:52:00.001-07:00

It was the Joseph narratives today (January 1, 2002), that caught me utterly by surprise. Same old story, same old version (NIV), same old study Bible for the last four readings notwithstanding, I wept all the way through them, tears streaming down my face. I guess what I was most touched by was the Love throughout the various relationships—in some cases love that emerged later after lovelessness had wreaked horrible wounds in the soul of this family, in the soul of each member.You’ve heard the story many times,

But if you’re like me, you seriously missed the main point. True, there are many, many important points in the story, many life lessons to be gleaned. And maybe you missed it because the people who told you the story had missed it, too.

Start by thinking about the relational dynamics in this family. Can you imagine being the son of the wife who was not loved? To feel that you were NOT enough to satisfy your father because your mother was not enough to satisfy him, something over which you had no control, like the circumstances of all our births. And loving your mother, and seeing her unloved by your father. . . hm, some of us actually know that acute pain. And it is more painful yet when, like a dear friend of mine, your father left you and your mother when you were still a child, and went and married another woman and became the father of somebody else’s son. You left me to become someone else’s father???!!! That pain must be like a stake right through your heart.

Only in Jacob’s family, both wives and sets of children all lived together, right there all under one roof (or tarp, as it were), and let me tell you, this was no Brady Bunch, no "blended family,"-- you had to SEE him loving someone other than your mother, and loving her children more than you, every day of your life. Now that puts things in perspective. Those boys have been maligned throughout history, I feel, in the way the story is told and interpreted.

Those boys had such deep, deep holes in their hearts. And they were powerless to fill them. Imagine how hard they must have worked to try to get their father’s approval, to try to make him love them. And to find that your best was never good enough to make him love you. You were powerless to heal the wound in your family. And in your powerlessness, and all that pain which you were obliged to pack away in your bones, all that suppressed rage. . . you were a murderer waiting to happen. (Kind of foreshadows the great great…great grandson of Joseph, Moses, when he saw the injustices done to the brothers he loved. . . but I digress, just a little sneak preview for later(: ).

This was the context in which the boy with the amazing technicolor dream coat lived and walked, and very probably, strutted. You might even have come to think throwing him in the well was too good for him. If you had to hold your tongue and watch somebody else take all the love you so desperately desired. Yes, I believe there was some bottled up bitterness (and bitterness bites! It bites everybody involved).

So there's some orientation to chew on. . . I'll get to the complicating actions in the next installment. But I'll give you a hint, God loved Leah's sons just as much as He loved Rachel's, and He had a plan to actually use that spoiled boy to save the lives of the sons of the rejected wife, to save them and make them the fathers of millions. And to finally bring love that would bridge the divided house. Oh, and to make Jesus the descendant of one of Leah's sons, not Rachel's Joe Cool (whom God also dearly loved, I'm just saying, God likes poetic justice).

To be continued. . .

Rachel's Quest for Wholeness

2008-05-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

And then there's Rachel. She doesn't have to strive for her husband's love, which has always been freely available to her. She does strive against her sister, though, jealous of her fertility. Interestingly, she turns her anger on her husband saying, "Give me children or I'll die!" (30:1), which, unsurprisingly, begets anger from Jacob who points out that only God can open her womb.

After offering her own maidservant, Bilhah (ok so we have Zilpah and Bilhah, do you think they were twins? (: ), Rachel gets an adopted son, Dan and says, "God has vindicated me; he has listened to my plea and given me a son" (30:6). And on the birth of the second son through Bilhah she says, "I have had a great struggle with my sister, and I have won," (30:8), naming him Naphtali, meaning 'my struggle'.

I'm not sure how she means she won, since at this point Leah has four biological sons and Rachel only has two surrogate sons. When finally she has her own son Joseph she says, "God has taken away my disgrace," and, "May the Lord add to me another son." This is about respect and shame. In her cultural context, there was so much shame in being barren.

When Rachel finally has Benjamin, late in life, she dies in childbirth, naming him Ben-Oni, "son of my trouble," (though Jacob changes this to Ben-Jamin, "son of my right hand.") And the only equivalent to a birthquote is the midwife's, "Don't be afraid, for you have another son," (35:17).

You notice from the verse references that these birth vignettes are scattered through out the text, so you have to search for them when you start to see the pattern (or are looking for the patterns you know must be there, because that is the way God is--and His Word has so many layers of meaning to discover). You're welcome for my hunting them down for you. (:

You may also stop to think about how weird it would be, not only to have your husband have a second wife who was part of your household, but to have that second wife be your sister?? And if Leah was the oldest and she was plain, and Rachel was the youngest, and she was beautiful, you can imagine that there were years of painful strife long before they had to share the same husband. Rachel was probably a little spoiled growing up, and she was definitely spoiled by Jacob. Motherhood tends to suck the selfishness out of you. . . I am not a mother, but I see how selfish I am relative to my friends who are mothers. So Leah had more years to purify her heart, I think, in this way.

I cannot imagine bringing that strife into a marriage and then having the love of your husband and your ability to give birth be your bargaining chips as you strive for significance anywhere outside your very particular unique purpose given to you by God Himself.

Neither Rachel nor Leah seems to have a very happy life, even though each has what the other believes will make her happy.

You might not have seen these patterns on your first cursory perusal of Genesis. And it is only the beginning. (: There is so much more in that same book, in those same verses, even. Buried treasure waiting to be found by those hungry enough to dig for it.

Leah's growing pains. . .

2008-05-17T21:34:00.000-07:00

Women don't take up a lot of the Old Testament. Although it is important to notice that the Hebrews were extremely progressive among other cultures of their time in allowing women to own land, be mentioned in genealogies, etc. One venue they do get to speak out from in scripture is that of the birth quote (there's probably a fancier term for that somewhere; this is mine). I had read the Bible several times before I really noticed this amazing little micro-genre. One interesting study is just going through scripture and looking at who had miraculous/angel-announced births (which you will notice ended with Jesus). And another study to go through all the births that give the name of the baby and why the mother named it what she did-something autobiographical usually. (Remember Ichabod? The glory has gone out. Look that one up for poignancy).

Anyway, Leah, the unlucky, unloved, unlovely wife. Her husband had to be tricked into marrying her. How much would your heart break at the fury of your husband the next day when you were not who he wanted to be married to. Leah's story is eked out every few years with birth of each new son.

1) Reuben ("See, a son!") 29:32. And she says, "Surely my husband will love me now!"
Maybe having this son will change his feelings for me. . .

2) Simeon (one who hears) 29:33. "Because the Lord heard that I am not loved, He gave me this one too." Wow, how much pain does that reveal. Maybe he won't love me now either, but God blessed me because of my broken heart.

3) Levi (Attached) 29:34 "Now at last my husband will become attached to me because I have borne him three sons." Now it sounds like Leah has finally given up on winning her husband's affection through her fertility. . . and something beautiful happens.

4) She gives birth to Judah (Praise) 29:35 and she says "THIS TIME I WILL PRAISE THE LORD." She has turned from looking to her validation from her husband to connecting directly with God. And perhaps she begins to look at her children as ends in themselves, gifts from God, not means to her husband's heart.

Now, let me just pause to do a little Hallelujah dance. Zoom in on this and think. The oldest son is always given all the honors and birthrights, yes? You'll find out as you read on that Reuben and Simeon made God and a lot of other people really really mad after Dina's assault. Levi at least gets to be the father of the priests for a few thousand years. But JUDAH. Judah is the ancestor of Jesus (and David, first of course). So Two Huge Points here:

1) When Leah's heart totally yielded to God, she gave birth to the man whose descendant would give birth to the Son of God.

2) Jesus did not descend from Rachel, the favorite wife. He descended from the wife who was rejected!

There's an even cooler reason for Judah to be the ancestor of Jesus which I will get to when we get to Joseph (also, btw, not the ancestor of Jesus, just to reiterate (: Jesus did not descend from the favorite)

5) Now she "has a baby" through her concubine Zilpha, and names him Gad (Good fortune) 30:10,11

6) And another via Zilpha, Asher (How Happy I am! The women will call me happy!) 30:12,13 (and I don't even want to think about what it was like to be Zilpha)

Leah may also be succumbing to a motive of competition with Rachel, whose loveliness and lovedness seem to leave Leah empty handed even now. Still, with her maidservant-borne children, she continues to focus on gratitude rather than wistfulness toward her husband.

After a spate of barreness, apparently, Leah is able to conceive again when she so poignantly "hires" her own husband by giving Reuben's mandrakes of the day to Rachel. Mandrakes are a root and they kind of resemble hips and legs and were regarded as fertility 'enhancers.' Her seventh and eight sons come from her own womb.

7) Issachar (Reward) 30:17, 18 "God has rewarded me for giving my maidservant to my husband."

8) Zebulun (Honor) 30:19,20 "God has presented me with a precious gift. This time my husband will treat me with honor because I have borne him six sons."

So her feelings seem to progress as
1) I can win his love
2) He doesn't love me so God will comfort me with a child
3) At least maybe he will feel some bond toward me as the mother of his 3 sons.
4) I give up on my husband; I will praise God.
5) Eh, a child is good thing.
6) Motherhood is good-other women will see me as happy and blessed-they will esteem me.
7) This child is a reward for my good deed (I'm not sure I follow how giving the maidservant to her husband was a good deed bearing on Issachar's birth, since it was her own womb that bore him--I would have expected her to mention the mandrakes).
8) This child is a precious gift AND I should receive honor (if not love) from my husband

In her search for identity, it seems that Leah tries the role of wife, but it does not fulfill her need for meaning. She tries the role of mother and finds her greatest fulfillment here. In some ways her identity is the cut out as the complement (or the negative?) of Rachel-Rachel is what Leah is not, Leah is what Rachel is not. In the end, like many people, Leah seeks out respect, which is a cousin if not a child of Power, in lieu of love, at least in her identity visavis her husband.

And about Rachel I will write in my next post.

Some Notes on Genesis and reading the whole Bible through

2008-05-11T12:47:00.000-07:00

In one way reading the Bible is like reading any other great piece of literature-your understanding of it deepens and is enriched the longer you live, the more you see and learn and feel. . . the years layer your schema ever more densely, drawing connections from everything to everything else. When you read the Bible through for the first time, you are just surveying the land.

You get your bearings, figure out which way is East, which mountains are next to which lakes, where are the hot springs, where is the soil rich and where is it lying fallow. But every time you read it again you bring more to the text before you from the text of your own life, the text that you and God have been writing together, your own story. The Bible is The Story and yours will become a part of the The Story of God and His glorious works. So your life creates this enormous resource for understanding scripture, but scripture itself is another enormous resource for understanding each part. The more you read of the whole, the more you understand each part. You begin to recognize images and ideas from other books and chapters that shed light on the one you are currently viewing.

On your second reading you may notice, for example, that the Gospel of John begins by echoing the beginning of Genesis. In the beginning, God. . . In the beginning,was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Very purposefully the author draws your attention back to the bedrock of Judean dogma. John is telling you that his writing is a continuation, a cohesive part of the whole, not a breaking away, not a totally new "religion." You will find glorious patterns woven all the way through the old testament and the new, like an other worldly tapestry of staggering beauty. I always think it is like looking at one of those three dimensional pictures. You have to study it for a bit before you can "see" the image, and when you see it, it is glorious--it's so obvious now, and so beautiful, but it would not be seen if you gave it only a glance to 'prove' itself to you.

Genesis is a great place to start since it is the beginning of the Bible and describes the beginning of Earth and mankind. It's amazing how many of the central and celebrated OT narratives are all compressed in the book of Genesis. 1) Creation 2) The Fall 3) Cain & Abel 4) Noah and the Ark 5) The Tower of Babel 6) Abraham-Called out of a foreign land to become father of nations, Sharing his lot with Lot (actually giving Lot a lot more), Lying about his wife being his sister in the early days when his faith was small Trusting God for a child well past his and Sarah's fertile years, Having a son with a concubine, trying to "help God out", Angels appearing and announcing the birth of a son in his old age, Naming him Isaac, which means Laughter, both because his mother laughed at the angels' announcement and because he brought so much laughter into their lives, he was the promise of God made manifest, Being asked by God to sacrifice his son to prove that he loved God more than he loved God's gift to him, and God, seeing his love and obedience and faith, stepping in to provide a sacrificial substitute, a foreshadowing of God sacrificing His own son so that Abraham and the rest of humanity would not have to sacrifice theirs, or themselves.

Finding Isaac a wife from the "old country", Isaac's twins, Jacob and Esau, and God's choice of Jacob though he was the younger by a few minutes, and though he was a devious self-interested schemer. God chose Jacob like he chose us, not because WE are good, but because HE is good. And yet the poetic justice that Jacob the cunning is out-deceived by his father-in-law into marrying a woman he did not love before he could marry the one he did. Rachel and Leah and all the strife between women who want both children and the love of their husband, and whose birth quotes encapsulate each woman's new stage of thinking and trusting and loving with the birth of each new child. All kinds of escapades with Jacob and his 12 sons and 1 daughter (including her rape and her brothers avenging it, literally overkill) Benjamin is born and Rachel dies, and the jealous brothers (sons of the rejected wife) throwing Joseph in a well and then selling him into slavery, The roller coaster of Joseph's life, lifted up, cast down, lifted up, cast down, lifted up, cast down. . . (reminds me of my own!) probably because God wants to make the point that we do not make ourselves successful, He allows it, or not, should he choose to remind us that we are nothing without Him, The salvation of Abraham's tribe through Joseph's rise in Egypt. . . what Satan had meant for evil God turned to glorious good. Ok, I lost count. (:

One of my study Bibles mentions that Genesis spans a larger period of time than the rest of the Bible combined. I prefer and highly recommend reading each book of the Bible in ONE sitting. Don't forget that the entire Bible can be read aloud at a normal speaking pace in fewer than 80 hours! It is not daunting that it is "long," it is daunting that we must think so clearly and reflectively, that we must ask Him for illumination in a way we need not ask in order to read a modern day novel, that we must study to understand the context. That we must read it again and again to understand the rhythm of the whole majestic symphony. It is daunting because it is not the word of man, it is the Word of God.

When I made the journal entry that I am typing from in 2002, it took me four hours that day to get through Genesis, but mainly because I got so excited seeing the patterns in the birth quotes of Jacob's wives and having to color code and lay it all out in an elaborate chart so I could look at the patterns more closely (there are a lot of other stories packed in between births). This was the first time I think I noticed that this custom of recording (orally or in writing) a quote from the mother at the birth of a child (male children only?) is a pattern which pervades the Bible and has meaning in itself; I will present that story in my next entry. (:

Can I actually sin by ministering to others?

2008-03-10T14:39:00.000-07:00

God: I desire obedience more than sacrifice.

One of your standing orders is to pursue healing for yourself, for when you do not, everyone else suffers. Your wounds are not yours alone. Every single person in your life suffers from the behaviors, conscious and unconscious, that are the natural result of woundedness (not to mention that they hurt because they love you and your hurting hurts them that way as well). I think you can hear Him saying, "You keep turning your eyes away from the hurricane of your soul-- you'd rather tend to the hurricanes of others. Yes, Dear One, when you offer sacrifices I did not ask for in lieu of obedience to what I am asking of you, you sin."

You still have ahead of you this very important epiphany--the one that God used one of you to show me this year: I cannot pull those I love out of hell, if I cannot let God help me pull myself out of hell. Place the oxygen mask securely over your own face before assisting others.

Stage one: letting the scales fall from your eyes, letting the cocoon fall away so that your raw baby skin touches the air for the first time, and finds a healing balm in the gentle wind of the Holy Spirit for you there. You look for diversions-- you TRULY care about the broken hearts around you, but you involve yourself with them in ways that distract you from the business of tending to your own broken heart.

Pursuing God’s calling on your life requires you to undergo this surgery of the soul--you have to have the open heart first; if you don't, you won't live to save the others. Trust me in this, Honey. I am broken, and I know that. You know that. But broken people are all God has to work with. It is His amazing plan to use the broken to make things whole. Everything is a big fat joyous paradox for Him! He gives us so much to laugh about for eternity!!!! He will turn your ashes into beauty and your mourning into dancing. But first, you have to STAND UP.

It is painful to reset a broken arm. But you won't be able to carry that baby out of hell if you don't. Schedule the operation. I'll do anything you need to make this happen. I BELIEVE IN YOU. I see a pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night hovering over you, leading you to healing that moves in every direction. You are interwoven in it with the Holy Spirit, with the Body of Christ, with broken relationships He will heal, with broken children He will make whole.

Too oft said, but denial . . . de Nile, is not just a river in

Egypt

. If you sit down in the safety of Jesus and look at all these shards in your life left by hurricane after hurricane, He will make looking at them a healing experience. Surveying the damage accurately is the first stage of rebuilding and renewal. Take some of the spiritual lessons from Katrina and Rita. They have hit home for you on so many levels. You are little David. The armor doesn't even fit you. You will have to go out there with just your sling and your unflappable faith in God Almighty. You'll take that giant down and we will dance for years in celebration.

Take him out, Baby Girl. This is your calling. Your armor is His spirit, your stone is Jesus. Your sling is faith, a gift from God. I am standing here on the sidelines praying all the way. With the clouds and crowds of Holy witnesses—insert names of your loved ones, on both sides of the Jordan, the moms and dads and sweet little boys and girls. run, child, run. let it rip. He's in you. He will not fail you. Run. Chase that demon down and beat the living crap out of it. If you want me to, I'll hold him down while you punch. (:

One Day Hannah Stood Up!

2008-03-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

3-10-03 I Samuel What a rich book replete with revival and renewal--God present and attentive all over the place. The book opens with the story of Hannah's pain and God's providence. Her story mirrors Rachel's in that she was the beloved but barren wife (of two)--Elkanah (& Sarah, too to some extent, in competition with Hagar for Abraham's child/heir). It is also very interesting in juxtaposition the narrative of Samson's mother, also barren, though she was Manoah's only wife. I think comparing those two stories might merit a separate blog entry though.

Every year Elkanah would take his wives and family to Shiloh, where the priests of the Lord were, to worship and sacrifice. (Doesn't say whether this is Passover or what, but it seems to be harvest time according to some of the commentaries, so it might be Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year). On sacrifice day, Elkanah would give Hannah a double portion of meat because he loved her (remember Joseph doing this with Benjamin to reveal himself secretly among the unwitting brothers?) Also thinking of the double portion of Elijah. Also Genesis 29:31 where God opens Leah's womb because her husband does not love her).

Because GOD had closed Hannah's womb (like Sarah and Rachel?), her rival kept provoking her, as Hagar and Leah had done to their rivals. This was the cycle every year --it would always happen at "Thanksgiving" and Hannah would always end in tears, unable to eat (1:7). Elkanah would helplessly try to console her with his love--as though it should suffice in spite of the baby-shaped hole in her heart (commentaries remind us that fertility was an imperative from God- Multiply the earth!). 1:9. One day when they had finished eating and drinking in Shiloh, HANNAH STOOD UP.

1) This seems to suggest they were right by the door, either in an extension of the tabernacle or perhaps outside, so that when Hannah rose, she was already at the point of entry to the tabernacle. Some of the commentaries suggest that the tabernacle had become rather more elaborate. On the other hand, the high priest is just sitting out there on a chair available to everyone, so others suggest that this was the point of deterioration to which Israel had fallen.

2) Otherwise, my inclination is to explain it linguistically. Perhaps, "stood up" means something like, "took a stand" or "one day Hannah sat up and took notice." This makes sense to me discursively because they have just emphasized that this happened every year, but ONE YEAR. . . Hannah stopped the cycle of dysfunction.

She became agentive, even if it is a helpless agency. Perhaps the most important agency is co-laboring with God--which is always helpless (compare O. Hallesby on Prayer and how it is our helplessness and our acknowledgment of it that moves the heart of God to act). Most likely "stood up" is a double entendre--a play on the physical and the figurative. 1:10 IN BITTERNESS OF SOUL. . . this description of Hannah's emotional state makes me think of the many mentions of bitterness of heart and soul in scripture. Lamentations 3:19. . . the bitterness and the gall. . . Ephesians 4:31 Let all bitterness, envy, and wrath be put away from you. . .

1:11 Hannah made a vow which was like the vow God told Manoah's wife to take and keep for Samson, the Nazirite vow. While God wanted Samson to be a Nazirite and conveyed this in a vision (close encounter of the angel kind), Hannah made this vow voluntarily for Samuel (not very democratic, but apparently not marked for parents to make such choices about the future of their children). In the case of Manoah's wife, God is the apparent initial agent.

In Hannah's case, the vow is made almost as a bargain, and Hannah appears to be the initiating agent. Incidentally, what is the probability that Hannah knows the story of Samson's birth, calling and "ministry"? Is there any message or causality in the fact that Samson's mission was other initiated and failed, but Hannah's was self initiated and succeeded--and so magnificently? I suppose that would only be true if the 'other' initiator were someone other than God. All the other people He approached and announced a calling for turned out splendidly. Samson was the one exception.

Obedience was required from everyone in both cases. . . 1:12-14 For years I thought Eli's belief that Hannah was drunk just showed how little spiritual discernment Eli had, but on thinking more about the physical context and the feasting and drinking, it seemed a more plausible conclusion for him to make (this year). 1:15-16 "I have not been DRINKING. . . I have been POURING! (out my heart to the Lord). Look at this beautiful play on these two words and images! 1:17 Eli then believed her and blessed her, and without knowing her request, said a prayer for its fulfillment.

1:18 Hannah took Eli's words as from the Lord. The state of Hannah's heart and emotions actually changed after this experience of crying out to God and feeling that she had been heard. 1:19 The Lord remembered her--I think of Joseph wanting to be remembered by the cup bearer being released from prison. The repentant man on the cross next to Jesus saying, "Jesus remember me when you come into your Kingdom. . . "

1:20 AND SO IN THE COURSE OF TIME Hannah had a baby boy and named him Samuel: "I asked the Lord for him." 1:21-24 Hannah doesn't go with the family to the Shiloh festival until she is finished weaning Samuel and is ready to surrender him to the service in the tabernacle. This choice was approved of by Elkanah who said, "Only let the Lord make good His Word." Why is it GOD making good His word instead of Hannah making good her word? I can't answer this necessarily, except that man's view of who's trustworthy is so distorted.

The point, I think, is that Hannah and God worked together to do something that would change the course of Israel and the course of history

. Hannah was a co-laborer with God and God always keeps His end. All the other parties don't necessarily.

Samson made a big mess out of God's glorious plans for him. It cannot be a mere coincidence that the first Sam, Samson, was given a calling as judge of Israel he chose not to fulfill. This is an important precursor to Samuel's calling because it reminds us that we still have free will not to respond to God's calling. God doesn't want robots, He wants partners. He wants co-laborers. And in His glorious redemptive plan He commissioned another Sam, Samuel, to have a shot at obedience and the leadership of His people. And this one bore fruit.

My point, dear friend, is that we often find ourselves situated in dysfunctional contexts that convince us we are stuck. They convince us so well that we don't ever even step outside the frame long enough to contemplate our sense of stuckness. One day, Hannah stood up. One day Hannah said, I want everything you have for me, God. I want to end this cycle of dysfunction. Dear One, stand up!!!!!!!!!

A Note About Samuel and God's Involvement with Man

2008-03-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

March 17, 2003

What strikes me most about reading 1 Samuel this year (end--I have read it twice this year) is the nearness of God--His activity, His direct intervention and interaction with men, particularly, Samuel and David. Here the sense of Calling and Purpose are loudly present. This is no theistic-wind-up-the-world-and-see-what-it-does God. This God speaks to Eli. He speaks through Eli to Hannah. He speaks to the child Samuel, and ever afterward to Samuel.

This God comforts Samuel when his people ask for a king, rejecting Samuel's leadership as their prophet-judge as insufficient. This God causes men to prophecy quite apart from their intentions (remember Saul?). This God comforts Samuel again when he is grieving for Saul after God reveals that He is going to replace him. David finds comfort in God repeatedly in this book. He is not a God far away who leaves His people to muddle through their fallen world on their own. He asks them to depend on Him and when they do He defends and protects and comforts. . .

He has purposes and a will, and yet he allows for human agency. IF Saul had obeyed, God says he would have had an heir on the throne forever. . . it all comes down to the choice of co-laboring with God or choosing to go off on one's own. If Saul had obeyed, does that mean David would never have come to fulfill the role he did? Was David predestined to be the ancestor of Christ? Was Saul predestined to fail? I doubt the latter, --God could certainly have worked both families in to the colorful family tree He designed for Jesus) (:

Christians are the Ultimate Hedonists-and yet He loves us

2007-09-07T19:28:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, most Christians are the ultimate hedonists. They know that the greatest pleasure, in the long run, will be attained by foregoing much of what looks like pleasure in this present life and then 'rewarded' for it in eternity. Is this wrong? Is it wrong to give your life to God as a kind of 'fire insurance' against hell? Well, God accepts us on those terms--as long as we genuinely confess Christ as Lord, repent of our sin, and turn our face towards righteousness, asking Him to take us into His heart and make us His, as we take Him into our hearts and Make Him ours. This puts our spiritual maturity at that of an infant however. And sadly, far too many Christians remain infants for much of their lives--there are 70 year old infants out there aplenty. He takes us because of His mercy and because of His love--it never was nor ever will be because we are good. It is because He is good.

But what parent would find joy in having their baby never grow up? Such conditions horrify a parent--we long to see our children grow to healthy adulthood and to have children of their own (that we can spoil). I can imagine the weeping and distress of those with children who suffer from diseases that keep them from growing up. Can God feel any differently about His children when they do not grow? What joy can He experience when His plan for us to grow strong and tall and bear much fruit does not bear out? When we drink in His Word hungrily and then move on to solid food and even the choice meat of His Word--then His heart is filled with joy. We reciprocate His love by growing in Him and growing like Him. His is the love of laying down one's life for others.

If we grew to perfect maturity, we would love Him first and foremost because of Who He is, no matter what our own fates were to be. We would worship Him out of reverence even if we knew we were going to be destroyed for our sin, because we know we are guilty of it and we deserve it. We know there is no shadow or hint of sin in His presence--we would love Him too much to besmirch anything in His Holy presence. Thankfully He is so tenderhearted and merciful to us that He laid down His life so that we could be made holy and therefore able to approach His throne boldly and to worship and glory in His glory, one with Him, lost in Him.

It is perhaps instructive to our hearts to pause and consider our long term hedonism when we think condescendingly on those we see pursuing the pleasures they can enjoy now and call them hedonists. Paul seemed to be willing to give up even his own salvation for the sake of those he loved and led. I don't know if I can do that. I would hope and pray, but I think I have far to go in letting Him purify me to that degree. And God does not require it of us. But it is always there as a sobering reminder that we are just not all that 'good.' Any time we are tempted to indulge in self righteousness, (the ultimate oxymoron), it is a good way to sober up and remember the filthy rags He found us in. It is a good cause to rejoice in Him and His willingness to impute to us His own holiness, burning up our hubris so that all that is left is the pure gold He has wrought in us. Glory to God in the heavens, He is perfect and beautiful and loving and holy and compassionate--were He not, we would have no hope. Amen.

Jesus was not a "nice" man-you shouldn't be either

2007-09-02T22:05:00.001-07:00

Jesus was perfect and kind. But He did not play nicely with everyone. Those who seek to be nice and liked by everyone cannot at the same time be good. A good man stands up for the helpless against those who oppress them--if put yourself between the abused and the abuser, the abuser is going to be angry with you. If you are a GOOD person, all kinds of abusers will despise you. If you stand up for social justice, those who benefit from injustice will seek to knock you down. Oh, "Be careful you who think you stand". . . If no one is trying to knock you down, you may be down already--you may in fact never have stood up in the first place. If you are the friend of God, you are the enemy of His enemies. And they are Legion. But in the end, if He is for you, who can be against you? You may have to sacrifice your life fighting His enemies, but you will not do so in vain. You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you. That means you can endure anything He calls you to because His grace is sufficient. Although He makes no such promise for 'callings' of your own design, You can do all the things HE CALLS YOU TO. If your heart is ringing, pick up the phone.

Children of the Light. . . I hope you dance.

2007-08-31T21:45:00.000-07:00

Do children of the Light wrap themselves in robes of golden rays, dance drenched in all the colors of the rainbow, glorying in the Author of Light, magnifying His glory with their dance and with the righteousness of Christ they wear--knowing full well that the robes they exchanged for these, the robes of their own making, were the filthiest of rags, eyesores, a stench, biohazards unfit even for human company-to say nothing of their unquestionable unsuitability for presentation in the presence of a holy God. . . it would have been better if they had come naked into His presence-the only thing that could make them less worthy of His presence than their bare naked sin-soaked selves, is the filthy rags of self-righteousness they had assumed as their fig leaves. . . but neither rags nor fig leaves could camouflage their sin--only highlight it for all to see. Now their rags have been consumed by a holy fire of consecration, and bathed in His purifying crimson blood, the paradox . . . they are washed as bright as the most brilliant snow. No man's nor woman's righteousness could have ever bought such glorious robes. No mountain of heroic good deeds could have paid for a thread of these robes which were paid for with the blood of a perfect Man, also a perfect God. The One, the Only. Our At-One-ment.

Do the children of the Light dance before Him for His pleasure, celebrating His grace and His love poured out upon them, the mercy He extended when He invited them to feast with Him in spite of the nails they had driven into His hands with their own sin?. . . Indeed, there is so much to rejoice about--He has turned their mourning into dancing. Their ashes into beauty. That which was dead is sooooooooooo alive!! They are called to dance and they do dance, but the time has not yet come for the Great Uninterrupted Dance. . . there is a time to rejoice and a time to mourn. A time to work and a time to play. Before His Kingdom comes in all of His glory, we cannot stop toiling to bring redemption to the billions more dying daily in filthy rags that will too soon serve as filthy shrouds.

An angry American evangelical stands on the grounds of a university campus and screams to the lost about their sin. A message of holiness, but not a ray of love can be seen or heard or felt by any there who bear witness. There is no holiness, my friend, that is not driven from beginning to end by LOVE. You cannot love God without loving the humanity He died for. You cannot be holy without loving Him wholly. You cannot love Him wholly without loving them wholly. Unless you let Him make you His love poured out, you are an empty vessel, nothing more than a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. Many claim to preach in His Name. Oh, yeah? Who told you?

The Pharisees preached holiness without wholeness. They preached a message of good works. Condemnation for breaking their laws (hundreds more than God had issued). Holiness through personal goodness. Loving God, to the pharisees, seemed impossible without precluding loving humanity. It appears that they believed that loving anyone else could only detract from loving God. They did not understand that you cannot love God without loving His cherished humanity--all of it--every man woman and child. There is NO SUCH THING AS HOLINESS APART FROM LOVE. The pharisees would rather let a man die on the side of the road than get dirty touching him. The story of the good Samaritan is told around the world, but most Christians seem to miss the point just as obliviously as the Pharisees had. Would you allow yourself to be soiled with feces for the sake of saving a human life? Would you allow yourself to do so to save a human's eternal soul? Tony Campolo has made statements numerous times to audiences of evangelicals--variations of "40,000 people just died and went to hell. And you don't give a damn. And nothing proves this point more than the fact that you are so much more concerned about the fact that I just said the word damn than you are about any of those people." You have become petty and have completely missed the boat. You strain out a gnat, but you swallow a camel!

Those who call themselves children of the Light dance, so many of them forgetting so soon that they did not buy their own tickets to this party. That they could not even buy their own clothes to show up at this dance. And they look disdainfully out on those still dying in their disease ridden rags and occasionally scream, "Hey, Sinners! You are dying in the dark! You filthy miserable wretches-- you are clothed with the stinking rags of your unrighteousness, you are lost and don't know where you are going because you cannot see. You are starving and afraid and it is all your fault for being such a pathetic excuse for a human being. It sucks to be you. You should find the Light and leave the darkness, even though you deserve it because of your sin. Get your acts together! Climb out of the miry fiery pit-- though its walls are both as hot as burning coals and a as slippery as slime. Clean yourselves up! Get some new clothes! Come and do as we do--dance before the Lord. . . Get holy so you can hang out with the holy likes of us--the holier than thous." Astonishing amnesia. About how they got holy to begin with.

Even when God saves you and redeems you, He does not remove the free will mechanism from your brain. He cannot take over any part of you that you do not relinquish to Him--He must abide by His own rule and He chose to relinquish to humanity His right to control them, until this age closes and all is set right again. As a result, most Christians never manage to let Him take them over completely. And the room with their heart they guard the most fiercely is the one that gives them the illusion that they have something to do with their own redemption. In fact they got it for free. For the low low price of a request and repentance--all they had to do was identify themselves as spiritually bankrupt and in need of His help, to recognize Him as the Lord of all, and to turn over whatever they had to Him. What came to them as a gift, of course, had been paid with the highest sacrifice of all, by Someone Else.

So many 'children of the Light' screaming at those in darkness, condemning them, berating them, preaching a message of holiness and failure, forgetting that the whole Good News part was the part about how Someone Else would carry them out of the darkness and into the Light. Forgetting that whole co-laboring with God to save the lost part--forgetting that whole Being- Jesus-to-others-by-carrying-them on our backs as He did to a place of safety. Jesus did not scream to the lost about their sin. He spoke tenderly into their pain and healed them. He looked at them and LOVED them. And after that, He sometimes reminded them to Go and sin no more. (Three times it is recorded that He said this. On the other hand, the NT reports Thirty-Three miracles of healing and provision performed for the lost and the outcast. You do the math). But first He made them whole. Because no one can make herself holy unless He first makes her whole, and then He gives us the power to become holy THROUGH Him. Jesus preached holiness to the Pharisees--He preached the holiness that has its beginning and end in LOVE. Jesus scandalized them all by saying that all the law and the prophets could be summed up not only by the Shemah, which they knew--that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, but also with its corollary: love your brother as yourself, which they did not get. They understood the vertical. They did not understand the horizontal. They thought they could love God without loving man, and they were dead wrong. Thus He had occasion to say, Let the dead bury the dead. You follow Me.

Does not the true child of the Light take that golden robe and make of it a rope. . . and then, while keeping one foot in the Light, anchored to the Rock of Ages, dare to step down into the darkness with the other, trusting the Light not to let her be swallowed up too, to be dragged into the pit of sin and despair? Does not a child of the Light take the risk of throwing out that brilliant robe so that someone in the darkness might be called out of it, awakened, as it were, by the Light falling across their faces as that child reflects Him onto their light-starved faces, awakened from the coma of the heart and soul into which they have fallen, awakened as ee cummings exclaims, "to life and love and wings and the great gay happening illimitably earth."

Does not the child of light reach into the fire and filth and grab the hands reaching for help and pull with all her strength--knowing that to be insufficient, but also knowing that where her strength runs out, His begins!!?? Knowing that our weaknesses are the platforms for His most amazing performances?

What are the children of the Light really drenched in? Contempt or compassion???? How many of those who call themselves children of the Light actually do live in the Light and dance in His courts before the throne? And how many are really just shadow puppets living between the lost and the darkness, in a perpetual state of denial? Too selfish to let the Light thoroughly subdue them, too selfish to take the step of faith towards the darkness where they can be His love poured out in golden light, trusting that nothing can separate them from the love of Christ, choosing the terrifying path of faith in Him, choosing to sacrifice that false sense of security that comes from self-righteousness and to love others as Christ has loved them--because the beauty and love that sacrifice will yield, like the birth of a child, will fill the air with laughter, drowning out the memory of the cries of anguish that preceded it.

WWJD? He'd do a lot more than wear bracelets with provocative religious initialisms on them-- He'd put Himself in harm's way for the 1 in 99 who had wandered away and fallen into dire straits. He'd open His eyes and attune His ears to the voices of the spirits of the people passing Him on the sidewalk, sitting next to Him in class, hanging back from participation in His study group. He'd be far more consumed with identifying the broken hearts around Him than counting lexical items on somebody's 'do not say' list. When you focus on forms, you focus on whitewash. when you focus on forms, you have become a Pharisee. When you focus on the function that is the injunction to LOVE all at all cost, you are not afraid to use whatever forms you need to to get the job done.

Focusing on a list of forms someone designates as sanctioned or not allows you to go on automatic pilot. It allows one to proceed without caution, without concern, without compassion--if somebody just gives you a formula then it makes faith unnecessary. (It actually makes faith impossible). Living by faith means you have to actually be alive and conscious and leaning in to listen to the Holy Spirit and find out what He wants from you right now with this person in this moment. And nobody can write you a formula for that. What He wants is for you to listen to Him all the time and let Him tell you where the relevant line is right now.

You can map the oceans but you can't map the waves. The waves move. The map could never represent each second of billions of shapes of billions of waves. If someone wrote you a formula about walking on the waves, tried to give you some detailed map to use and tell you what muscles to do what with each step of the way, it would never match the actual set of waves you would have to confront at any given point in time. But if you fix your eyes on Jesus and let Him tell you each second of the way what you need to do, what He will do through you if you are listening, you will walk with Him on the water and you will make His joy complete walking there by faith. Without faith it is impossible to please God.

That is why, Virginia, you cannot walk by a list of rules generated by man. You don't have a hard drive big enough to cover all the possibilities you will encounter. It's arrogant beyond description to think that you do. What you have to do is plug in to the Original Hard Drive, the one Who wrote the rules and can predict every eventuality. Then He will walk you through, moment by moment, telling you exactly what LOVE requires of you with this person in this moment. Think about how differently Jesus loved Mary at Lazarus' death from the way he loved Martha. He knew what each woman was struggling with at the moment and what she needed to hear--Jesus is not a cookie-cutter God--one size does not fit all--if He wouldn't deign to make two snowflakes alike, do you really think He'd treat human beings with any less particularity?

Yes, indeed. On that day many will come to Me saying, Lord, Lord, -did we not dance and pray and preach and tithe in Your Name? Did we not let everyone know, enthusiastically, about Your laws? And I will say to them--How many people did you tell about my love? Did you tell them with your lips or did you tell them with your life? I was the death row inmate whose execution you cheered, I was the single black mother on food stamps working at McDonald's and trying to feed and house four children, I was the mentally ill man living under bridges and pushing around a shopping cart of garbage all over town during the day. I was the gay man struggling to find . . a place where I would be loved just as I am. I was the bully who was beaten at home and acted out on other children. I was the weak child who was terrorized by the bully until one day I pulled a Columbine because no one cared enough to reach into my pain and love me. All the contempt you poured on them when they were Me, all the things you did NOT do for them, you did NOT do for Me.

You called yourselves by My Name, but you did so in vain, leaving a filthy stain on My reputation before the world! You may have bandied about my Name claiming association with Me, but in deed you denied Me. And on that day I will separate the sheep from the goats. To the goats, on My left, who used my Name without My permission, to those who used My Name in vain, I will shout, Away from Me!!! You who have despised and neglected love, the heart of Holiness-- I never knew you!!!

Now, will the children of the Light please stand up! ?? You done yo Daddy proud! I am taking you and those you have labored with Me to pull out of darkness into My glorious Light, I am taking you all to your eternal reward. And there will be dancing!!!!!!!!!!! And there will be feasting!!!!!!!!!!!! And we will live in joy forevermore.

Don't be dissin' My Name. . .

2007-08-04T18:39:00.000-07:00

I said this very clearly through Moses--yes, as a matter of fact, it WAS written in stone--do NOT take the Name of the Lord your God in vain. You dishonor Me by trivializing My commandment as if My central concern was to worry about your vocabulary choices, the superficial, surface form of your language, to the neglect and direct contradiction of the substance and function of your language--what you are DOING with your language. I am calling you to be the humility and the love of Crucified Christ to all your fellow humanity. I gave you ten concrete commandments to show you what it means to love Me and to love all those I love. But you fell in love with the law when I was trying to show you how to fall in love with love. What love looks like. . .

You put far more energy into whitewashing your exterior, the exterior of what is allegedly My Temple-your body, your person, your behavior--all that energy into manicuring the lawn and the exterior walls of your temple, while inside you are starving people of love, starving them from the basic material goods you have access to and they are in desperate need of, starving them by not reaching out your hands to help them, to serve them, of knowledge, of --and you deprive them of the forgiveness and grace and joy that will help make them whole.

The honor of being called by My Name should correspond with the evidence of My Love in you--the evidence that the fire of My Holy Spirit is constantly maintained in your heart. "Your attitude," as Paul reminded you when he was writing to the Philippians from prison, "should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, who being in very nature GOD, did not take equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death-- even [that most humiliating and dispicable death reserved for the vilest of the vile--Nero, Hitler, Charles Manson, Saddam Hussaine, BTK-- the public shame of being hung naked and exposed for all the world to see and revile] death on a cross!

My Son was the only human to walk the earth who had the right to be Self-righteous, but He laid aside His reputation--didn't worry about what "church people" would think of Him for hanging out with the prostitutes, drug dealers, loan sharks, and 'trailer trash' of His day. Nor did He worry about what they would think of Him if He allowed Himself to be nailed to a cross and 'permanently' staining His reputation by dying with the lowest of the low. He was Not Too Good for them. He loved them enough to lay his reputation aside. . . But how many evangelicals do you know who can say the same? Frankly, I see you doing more crucifying than cross bearing with your sterile, distant, and sanitized church lady words.

You are obsessed with forms--with the exterior--that which everyone can see and judge you for. But you neglect the functions, the actions, the deeds, the sacrifices hidden within their forms, these functions that I have set before you as your purpose--you do not impress Me when you sanitize your language according to the prevailing whims of preferred vocabulary, but allow your ballooning egos inflated by the hot air your own (imaginary) self-righteousness-- based on trivial superficiality that I hardly care about--and those damned inflated caricatures of Christianity that you strut around with like floats in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade--you allow those enormous floating abominations to block the path between Me and those who seek to escape from the fire of judgment into the fire of My love, of My consecration, My holiness. . .

Wake up people! You are not part of the solution, you are part of the PROBLEM! You are standing out there trying to get your bigger-than-life blow-up doll of yourself positioned as prominently and as close to Me as you possibly can-- for all the world to see. And guess what? I don't give a DAMN about your stupid inflated self-styled "Jesus dolls" and how many people you manage to impress by being seen "with Me."

What I WANT is for you to reach into the fire with Me and help pull these people out--to minister to their burns, give them mouth to mouth if necessary, to be more concerned about saving them than about getting slimed by touching them! Get your stupid floats out of the way and get in here and help Me. THEN I will acknowledge being seen with YOU and I will lift you up. If you want to save your life, you must lay it down. If you want to be great in My kingdom, you must make yourself a humble servant to people you currently seem to find unworthy of your presence. Holiness works from the inside out. No amount of whitewash is going to change the filth and death inside that house. Most of your neighbors can't see what I see in your secret rooms. And appallingly, you spend all your time worrying about what THEY see, when My view is allegedly what you care most about.

You fear cursing Me by mentioning Me in expressions of surprise or dismay, and while you put so much energy into bleaching your vocabulary, you curse Me by calling yourselves Christians, but not being Christ to the world, laying down your self righteousness and helping those seeking Me to get through the wall of fire that separates them from Me. You are more worried about getting dirty or burned than you are about saving them. And as long as you position yourself as the superior person, you are a stumbling block for the lost, not a stepping stone.

Now, you need to help or get out of the way. And you can expect me to approach your Jesus dolls with a sharp object and take care of the need for deflation, if you don't. And you need to be a little more concerned about Me cursing you for wearing My Name unworthily than you cursing Me by the culturally fickle inclusion of My Name in various idioms and expletives when they have nothing to do with fulfilling the call of Love. Study up and improve your game or you're going to need to find another Name.

Got it? God it? Good. (:

What you take in vain

2007-08-04T18:12:00.000-07:00

I said this very clearly through Moses--yes, as a matter of fact, it WAS written in stone--do NOT take the Name of the Lord your God in vain. You dishonor Me by trivializing My commandment as if My central concern was to worry about your vocabulary choices, the surface form of your language, to the neglect of the substance and function of your language--what you are DOING with your language.

I am calling you to be the humility and the love of Crucified Christ to all your fellow humanity. Frankly, I see you doing more crucifying with your words than

You put far more energy into whitewashing your exterior, the exterior of what is allegedly My Temple-your body, your person, your behavior--all that energy into manicuring the lawn and the exterior walls of that temple, while inside you are starving people from love, starving them from the basic material goods you have access to and they are in desperate need of, starving them by not reaching out your hands to help them, to serve them.

You are obsessed with forms--with the exterior--that which everyone can see and judge you for. But you neglect the functions, the actions, the deeds, the sacrifices hidden within their forms, these functions that I have set before you as your very purpose--you do not impress Me when you sanitize your language according to the prevailing whims of preferred vocabulary, but allow your ballooning egos inflated by the hot air of your own (imaginary) self-righteousness-- based on trivial superficiality that I hardly care about--and those damned inflated caricatures of Christianity that you parade like floats in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade--you allow those enormous floating abominations block path between me and those who seek to escape from the fire of judgment into the fire of My love, of My consecration, My holiness. . . Wake up people! You are not part of the solution, you are part of the PROBLEM! You are standing out there trying to get your bigger-than-life blow-up doll of yourself positioned as prominently and as close to Me as you possibley can-- for all the world to see. And guess what? I don't give a DAMN about your stupid inflated "Jesus dolls" and how many people you manage to impress by being seen "with Me." What I WANT is for you to reach into the fire with Me and help pull these people out--to minister to their burns, give them mouth to mouth if necessary, to be more concerned about saving them than about getting slimed by touching them! Get your stupid floats out of the way and get in here and help Me. THEN I will acknowledge being seen with YOU and I will lift you up.

You fear cursing Me by mentioning Me in expressions of surprise or dismay, and while you put so much energy into bleaching your vocabulary, you curse Me by calling yourselves Christians, but not laying down your self-righteousness and helping those seeking Me to get through the fire that separates Me from them

a famine of purpose

2007-07-19T15:16:00.000-07:00

one cannot live long without purpose. a famine of purpose--purposelessness runs rampant through every modern society on the earth--it is the poor, ironically who suffer less from existential crises, perhaps because they suffer more in barely scraping together their meager existence, theirs and their children's, with hope that the latter will not have to suffer as much as they. but this is where our staggering rate of suicide has its genesis. you don't find many moms falling into the despair of purposelessness (sylvia was an exception) because i think they don't have time to think about it and they are driven by the purpose of caring for their families. it seems to me the moms who do commit suicide tend to have more mental wounds and dysfunction those just despairing for lack of meaning or place in society. so if you can just hang on in the meantime (and i do hope it is not such a mean time) and the inbetween time, to see whose minds you can sweeten with tantalizing little drops of faith that there is meaning and purpose in life, if they can first believe in purpose and then perhaps to pursue it, you will have done a great thing.

Taking off from Rousseau on Inequality (Rated DS for Deeply Sarcastic, let the reader beware)

2007-06-25T16:08:00.000-07:00

"I conceive of two sorts of inequality in the human species; one, which I call natural or physical because it is established by nature and consists in the difference of ages, health, bodily strengths, and qualities of mind or soul; the other, which may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends upon a sort of convention and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of men. The latter consists in the different privileges that some men enjoy to the prejudice of others, such as to be richer, more honored, more powerful than they, or even to make themselves obeyed by them."

Rousseau (1964) [1756] Cited in Hymes, 1996: Narrative Inequality, p. 25.

There are two resources that the mention of the role of consent in inequality brings immediately to my mind, which I think valuable to any brave soul interested in an exploratory sally into the cold, murky waters of our present social reality, a reality so successfully disguised as the produce of free will and individual human agency, which are, in turn, portrayed as the central doctrine of what is touted to be the social organization of choice in the modern world: effectively the true religion of the Holy American Empire and all its Western cousins: Democracy. I am not anti-democracy, but one big problem is that it doesn't really exist in the way most Americans imagine it does. The other is the the way we not only idealize but idolize it, as if it came part and parcel with the 10 commandments on Mr. Sinai--you have to wonder whether this ideology isn't just a little like the old divine right of kings in ages past. . . but that discussion for another day.

One is the video documentary of Noam Chomsky's: Manufacturing Consent. The other other is an article that appears in an edited volume called Social Dominance; this latter is one of those works whose essence is rich, but which rich essence has been distilled and concentrated in the title--rendering everything after the title more or less supplementary and superfluous. The title is, Let's Both Agree that You're Really Stupid: the Power of Consensual Ideology.
A caveat about Manufacturing Consent. I am neither prescribing nor ascribing to anarchism. I think the chief virtue of this documentary is that it points out that that you can wield power over a people so much more effectively if you make them believe that they are in charge and you are giving them what they want.

This reminds me of the common saying that The man is the head of the house, but the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head any way she wishes. Humorous, but nails the nature of manipulation. Well, some would call it diplomacy or politics, but that's also begging the question--what is relationship between the language we use to describe (or obscure!) reality, and the true nature of reality itself. Yes, it's 1984 all over again, (but are we not all grateful that orwell did not have the foresight to prophecy the big hair of that ignominious decade, and thus extend the life of its unpleasant effects) . (: and he may have been off the mark a few decades too early for the extremity of Big Brother, but dear Lord, just a few.

I write from the perspective of what many find surprisingly conservative social views, as one who met with the rude awakening in 2004 of accidentally discovering a law of (politico-)physics whereby, apparently, a fairly conservative resident of Washington DC, by driving a few thousand miles and taking up residence in the heart of Texas, is instantaneously transmogrified into a liberal. And not a lukewarm liberal either, apparently there are flames emanating from my aura. I think that technically, however, they are coming from the fire shut up in my bones and that my 'liberal' ideas resonate with all the old testament prophets and Jesus and the disciples. . . we should not lose sight of the earlier meaning of the word liberal-it means to be generous and giving. It is sometimes used as the translation of 'goodness' in the list o the fruits of the spirit. . .

Apparently, nothing need change but one's residence, for the transformation to Bearer of the Scarlet Letter (L, the L-word in point of course being LIBERAL) and 'poof,' my identity was suddenly transformed into some enigmatic entity I myself could neither see nor describe, save after several years, in year Ot Seven, I had accustomed my eyes to see the image in the collective mirror of the many faces of my new community and culture, and gradually to recognize my own face as it appears in mosaic pieces, on the sea of prosaic faces, in the countenance of a thousand Texans, skewed in the light of a strange reflection, unfamiliar enough to defy detection, and leaving me with a waterless beach full of mystified questions.

The word consent, as it is bandied about in the U.S., is integral to the sacred American ideology of freedom and independence, and is the pivotal notion in what I have come to believe is probably the greatest political snow job of the last thousand years, with the greatest number of subjects in the history of humankind taken in by it. The human animal is smart enough to object to overt efforts at enslavement by other humans. There seems to be enough of a sense of social justice encoded somewhere in their DNA that in time, at least some of them will recognize the exploitation of one class of human by another and will exercise their gift of agency and volition by intervening, revolting, and setting about to right the imbalance that incensed them.

However, it has generally been members of the oppressed population who rise up, having nothing to lose, in an effort to seize back their rightful autonomy as human beings. Unfortunately, it seems you have to actually be one of the oppressed before this burst of humanity shakes you in your shackles. Shucks. Sure the others shirk their responsibility with a shrug of their shoulders and a shameless show of shit-headed apathy. (No apologies for scatological representations of the products of fallenness and hell--scripture quite favors that literary device).

And of course, that other persistent trace in their DNA seemed to destine the revolutionaries to the same fate of their 'evil' predecessors, the same cycle of rising to power with decent motives and then finding that being in the dominant position in society causes clear and certain danger to one's moral health, first a cancer to the eyes, which results in a blissful oblivion to the suffering of others, and soon addictions to comforts (call it palliative care, you know you want to) that cannot be maintained without the oppression of some other capriciously determined class of human beings, and thus, 9 times out of 10, the new civil savior eventually becomes the new unsavory oppressor, just like clockwork.

All that agency and yet--how unbearably predictable the human cycle. All that free will and the lion's share of the population keep their heads down focused on the bit of rut in front of them as they rock back and forth spinning their wheels and trying to free themselves by accelerating in the rut. 9 times out of 10, no one turns the wheel and tries to cut across the grueling groove. 9 times out of 10 they do not step outside themselves to survey the situation and engage in a little metacognition--assess the situation, regroup, develop a new strategy and take decisive action. Yes, Alexander was right, the masses are asses. And we are they.

And Americans may just be the guiltiest and the stupidest asses in the history of time, the most inexcusable. What society has ever had so many tools and done so little work with them? Do not even animals arrange themselves such that the dominant alpha male takes his leadership not only to enjoy its power, but to look after the interest of the herd? Understanding the safety of the herd to be inextricably linked to their own?

What society has ever had so much knowledge at their fingertips (literally), and so much leisure to pursue it--never has it been so easy to just reach up and grab a torch and start illuminating the dark corners of society where evil still reigns to reach in and take up the cause of the innocent and the oppressed. But I see Americans sitting in their lazy boys in front of the TV--a crystal ball providing direct access to intense real-life, naturally occurring, unscripted untrumped up, real life survivor drama where the stakes are life or death, not being kicked off an island, the stakes are shelter from falling bombs and stray bullets, seeing your child live to adulthood, enough food for your family to eat, escaping or surviving rape and domestic abuse, rather than missing out on a chance to win a million dollars with a consolation prize of public notoriety that may still lead to luxury and to still more insulation from the actual reality-shows (not reality charades) unfolding behind closed doors and iron curtains. . . that square shaped flat screened crystal ball a window that leads to a critical door, ubiquitous and thus, much too easy to ignore.

Here it is, heroism (another of the American pantheon of purported principles of purpose) on a silver platter. The American, however, elects to lean back, dim the light, and watch Die Hard for the 4,000th time. Watch someone strong and beautiful spend millions of dollars blowing things up and pretending to risk his life saving others' so we can get our adrenalin fix, pretending-just as a mental exercise- to care about the lives of people outside our own, even if they are imaginary people being saved by an imaginary hero from a gang of imaginary terrorists. Americans spend millions of dollars and millions of hours RE-CREATING death and destruction so we can slake our thirsts for what??? A reminder of how cozy we are and perhaps a spark of a glimmery memory of of an age when we ached with those who ached and spent our millions of dollars and millions of hours on the billions of people trapped in story lines they cannot turn off when they are ready to go to bed at 11:00. Oh yeah. Reality check. We may have thought we had come of age. But the fact is, that golden age has yet to come. We are currently merely inhabitants of the age of gold.One cold ice age, this one is. Yeah, yeah, whatever, one gold one coming up.

RE-CREATION of DEVASTATION as RECREATION--Animation as anesthesia, animal nation shooting up for corporate amnesia, exercising nothing but imagination, exorcising any suggestion of guilt or obligation, hell bent on escaping any actual conflagration, blasting doubters with our righteous indignation, we gave at the door, dammit!! When we checked our consciences with our sheepish woolen cloaks.

Americans pay through the nose to keep the hallucination coming in a steady stream, we pay top dollar for this elaborate delusion, deaden any impulse that might lead to resolution, restitution, revolution. Sheesh, revolution was so much more chic and noble when we were not the oppressor. The best laid plans. . . well, they're still lying there. Right next to the American also lying there intoxicated by their creature comforts, in a pool of luke warm social vomit, expulsed from God's own mouth. Having been neither hot nor cold. Suffocating in their own self absorption. What was that about all roads leading to Rome? Romans road? All Romes leading to this road? A Very, Very long (thrill ride of an) Access road leads to Excess road, A dead end. Well, first there's a moral cliff to fall over, and then the dead end's at the end of your fall. Well, technically, The Fall, capital F, but who's keeping score?

Make no mistake, I do not speak of all Americans. But I speak of the current essence of America. She who has an ear to hear. . . let her hear. But I wax pessimistic. And my alter ego (and my altar ego) believes you really can change the world, and so can I, and so we must.

No transformation can begin, however, before an assessment has been made and acknowledged. Someone has to see and interpret the handwriting on the wall, otherwise its just prophetic grafitti. Mene , Mene , Tekel , Parsin . . .

Reveling with goblets of silver and gold and praising the gods of silver and gold-- yeah there's a cup for you, but it's not a cold one, nor is it a gold one, and I daresay it shall not pass from you save you drink it to its dregs. . . Someone call for a wise man or a wise woman who is not afraid to tell the Emperor that he is BUCK naked! Let the headline show: Almighty buck exposed. We can just call him Al. For now. Al American. The Emperor is not one man or woman, it is the spirit of a nation.

I've strayed a a bit from my original focus. But fear not, I shall return later to continue discussing the matter of deformed consent.

does God have a crush on me? well, He's definitely crushing me. . . but what a beautiful yield He promises

2007-06-25T08:40:00.000-07:00

God is crushing me like an olive. He has been doing this for several years now (since 2001). The beautiful thing about crushing an olive is that it yields the anointing oil of healing, the oil of his Holy Spirit, the oil that fuels the flame of His Holy Spirit in our hearts, which we are to maintain--like the lamps in Leviticus that God warns over and over must NEVER be allowed to go out. and the oil of His Spirit is available in wonderful infinite supply--He can keep it flowing and burning as long as we maintain the wicks in our hearts (which involves cutting the wickedness (: , among other things).

if this blog inspires you, please share it with others. i really feel that it is a prophetic undertaking that he has inspired, and i approach the task with fear and trembling, and would appreciate prayer for faithfulness to His Spirit, not to wander off in my own arrogance and ever so fallible flesh.

keep listening to Him, and He will do mighty things in you and through you. beware of the deceit of the pharisees, they spend all their time shining their halos, and don't notice the souls falling and dying all around them. God can take care of your halo, if you take care of the harvest. (:

grace to you and His boundless love,

and what does the Lord your God require of you?

2007-06-23T11:41:00.000-07:00

a passionate voice crying out in the wilderness,
Prepare the way of the Lord.
repent! In the Name of the Lord-
stop dishonoring Me by dishonoring the poor!
I am calling you to awake and arise,
to evaluate and mobilize.
I long to redeem you,
but you must long to be redeemed.
I have for you a purpose, a plan, a call.
you have seen My will for you in the writing on the wall,
but you must choose to read and understand,
to be delivered from your place among the ruins of fallen man.
then when you seek Me you will find Me,
and I will put your sins eternally behind Me.
I will lead you forth with a pillar of Fire,
if only you will hear Me and embrace what I require:
that you should live justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly before your God.
and when you become My love poured out, I promise you, all of heaven will applaud.

Are you authorized to use My Name?

2007-06-23T08:02:00.000-07:00

a call to all Americans who would call themselves Christ-ian—

that they not take the Name of the Lord our God in vain.
to heed t-His command, you may not take My Name
unless you take My character, My passions, and yes-My Pain
you cannot share in the power of My resurrection
unless you also share in the suffering of My crucifixion.
if it is with anger you go out to preach My gospel to the lost
and not the love-stricken grief that compelled Me to the cross,
YOU TAKE MY NAME IN VAIN.
I did not say, They will know you are Christians by your LAWS.
I said, They will know you are Christians by your LOVE.
You dishonor My Name when you present your laws as My good news,
If these lost lambs I love and My Holy Name you continue to abuse
On the day of reckoning you will hear, Away from Me Imposter,
For, indeed, I NEVER knew you!

On Top of the Globe

2007-06-22T18:57:00.000-07:00

The American stood on top of the globe
With his fingers in his ears and his eyes squozen shut.
And I heard a voice say,
If your fingers offend you, cut them off!
And if your eyelids do, cut them out too.
Better to see and hear what the Spirit says to the heart
Than to wind up in
Hell
With your members in tact.