His Own Did Not Receive Him

“The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” (John 1:9–13 TNIV)

“His own did not receive him.” It’s a sad little line from the beginning of John’s gospel, succinctly noting a reality that was true of Jesus in the time of Herod and that we see is still true today. The world doesn’t really want Jesus to rule it.Now, this isn’t a cue to get your protest signs out or to start throwing rocks…this isn’t just about the secular world. John wouldn’t have been surprised by the pagan reluctance to trading Caesar for Jesus. The real disappointment was that the people of Israel weren’t ready to allow Jesus the sort of messiahship he intended. Particularly, the religious leaders of Israel became Jesus’s most vicious opponents. The insiders couldn’t allow Jesus to set the agenda for their kingdom, leading them to resent Jesus rather than respect him, to show him hostility rather than hospitality. Jesus’s intent to disarm the powers of the world wasn’t just a foreign policy, but a domestic one as well—the way of Jesus shakes the structures of the oppressive religious world just as thoroughly as it fractures the foundations of the oppressive empire.Even his own disciples were repeatedly shaken, at the very places where they sought to establish their own thrones alongside his. In Mark 10, James and John begin with the sort of open-ended question everybody with wisdom resists: "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you." The whole exchange is tainted by the posture of this question, which requests (before their request) that Jesus kindly hand over control to them. They ask for permission to set up their thrones on either side of Jesus when he establishes his rule, but Jesus responds with a stunning reversal of their desires, capturing their misunderstanding of what it means to be a part of his kingdom. "Can you drink the cup that I drink? Can you be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?" He is always doing this sort of thing to them; Jesus shakes every foundation on which a throne might be built, whether it be their own righteousness, their wisdom, or even their loyalty to him.[bctt tweet="Jesus shakes every foundation on which a throne might be built."]Jesus still shakes us, even in the religious orders and communities that bear the Lord's name. Wearing the Christian label won't shield us from our tendencies to build our own kingdoms. Participating in a Christian church doesn’t insulate us from the desire to retain control over our lives. Baptism alone won't stave off the cravings of power and status that have driven so much of the evil in the world. Being a part of a Christian culture or subculture can’t protect us from that most basic and threatening of questions: will we submit to Jesus or not?I’m sure that question will come up for you sometime today. I find it challenges me constantly, if I’m paying attention. Following the Lord isn’t a one-and-done decision, but one that has to be made over and over again. It isn’t something only determined in the moment before we’re washed in the baptistry. It may not be framed explicitly, rather, the question of Jesus’s lordship is posed in a thousand different ways, and in the most surprising contexts.In my home, in the tumult of the bedtime hour.In the office, when we negotiate tasks nobody wants to do.In the community, when we meet rude, mean-spirited behavior.Online, where thousands chime in and listen, anonymously.In sport, while I play the roles of competitor, spectator, coach, and parent.In the marketplace, where my choices affect unknown myriads. .And yes, even in the church, where my sense of spirituality is challenged by flesh and blood.In all of these places, and in every other one, I still face the question: Is Jesus Lord, or not?

Honoring the Gift of Creation

“For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the spirit set their minds on the things of the spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace.”In our religious world, it’s difficult for us to grasp what it means to set our minds on things of the spirit. Paul speaks against living according to “flesh”; it’s all too easy to imagine that Paul might have meant for us to become detached from our material, bodily existence. It’s a short leap for us to assume he meant a sort of ethereal disregard for the physical, that he intends us to live with contempt for the created order and our place in it. And yet, when Paul turns to describing what life in the spirit actually looks like, it includes things like showing hospitality to strangers, befriending the lowly, feeding your enemies, celebrating with those who have cause to be happy, shedding tears with the sad, and paying your taxes (Romans 12-13). These are physical matters, matters of skin and bone that take place in the created world. For Paul, living by the spirit is not a denial of life, but a certain way of living it. It wasn’t a pining for the afterlife, but a claiming of the present one for the God who created it.The flesh for Paul is a way living that is enslaved by appetites beyond our control. It is a distortion of physical life that craves and is never satisfies, that seeks after strength only to be confronted by death and decay. It is a force that hollows physicality, leading to a way of being in the world separated from the creator’s will. It is existence totally turned in on itself, in which relationships to the creator and other creatures are sacrificed to the appetite and fear of the individual.For Paul, life by the spirit of God represents a different way of living in the world, a way filled by God’s own life. “Spirit” is one way of talking about God’s own person, but it can also be alternative orienting force. By attending to the spirit, we allow God to turn back our lives to a trajectory that includes attending to God’s will and presence. God’s own being defends against the pullings and pushings of our own appetites and other fallen powers which, left to themselves, corrupt life and dislodge it from its divine direction. “Setting our minds on the spirit” means orienting ourselves to that way of life which was the creator’s gift to us in the beginning, a way of living that allows us to experience communion with God and each other, and to live in peace with the rest of creation. It is a way of living not in spite of creation, but fully honoring the gift or creation and our place in it.God desperately wants to give us this life.The creation itself longs to share it with us.The question that remains is: do we desire this sort of life? Is it the sort of life that we are ready to accept, or have we become so accustomed to the way of the flesh that we are unwilling to be pried from it? Can we be persuaded that the way of the flesh is a sham, a poisoned apple drugging us and dragging us to the grave?Can we be persuaded that there is a life that is truly life, and a peace that is truly peace?May God’s own spirit make it so!

Remembering Restraint

 It's not the prettiest of the spiritual disciplines, and at this point in history, it's not the most fashionable. Of course, restraint has had its heyday—there was once a time when becoming a saint meant taking on all kinds of ascetic practices, moving out into the desert, living as a hermit on a few crumbs a day. If you want to move into a new area for a better living, consider reading the top out of state moving companies that may help you.But those days are gone. Now the pendulum has swung in another direction, and that's brought important facets of faith back into play—we're more inclined to think about the world as full of God's presence, and to perceive the created world as important to God—as we should. We tend to think of the things we receive as blessings from God, and if we think about our appetites at all, we generally just try to regard the things we use to satisfy them with gratitude. Only in their most extreme distortions do we regard the appetites as dangerous.John of the Cross, a sixteenth century Spanish mystic, has been relentlessly reminding me off the cost of allowing our appetites to run free. At Randy Harris's suggestion, I've been digesting John's Ascent of Mount Carmel a few pages at time, and I didn't have to wade very far into it before it got challenging. John considers one of the first steps in the spiritual journey to be the mortification of the sensual appetites (think broadly about what these are, by the way). He allows no quarter for prisoners on this matter:

“As the tilling of soil is necessary for its fruitfulness—untilled soil produces only weeds—mortification of the appetites is necessary for one’s spiritual fruitfulness. I venture to say that without this mortification all that is done for the sake of advancement in perfection and in knowledge of God and of oneself no more profitable than seed sown on uncultivated ground. Accordingly , darkness and coarseness will always be with a soul until its appetites are extinguished. The appetites are like a cataract on the eye or specks of dust in it; until removed they obstruct vision.” (1.8.4)

and later on he pushes even further:

“Manifestly, then, the appetites do not bring any good to person, Rather they rob one of what one already has. And if one does not mortify them, they will not cease until they accomplish what the offspring of vipers are said to do within the mother: While growing within her that eat away at her entrails and finally kill her, remaining alive at her expense. So the unmortified appetites result in killing the soul in its relationship with God, and thus, because it did not put them to death first, they alone live in it.” (1.10.3)

John doesn't mince words here: in his view the appetites serve no good in person's spiritual journey, and to progress we simply have to be done with them. That may sound harsh, and it probably serves a good bit of nuancing, but I'm not so sure that it isn't closer to the truth than our naive way of approaching our appetites. Don't you share the same suspicion that I do; that our progress in the spiritual life stalls out at precisely that point where drive for satisfaction overtakes our desire to pursue the Lord?I'm not sure that John's way should be taken as absolute...but I am absolutely convinced that he points us in the right direction, because it's a way that resonates with the story of Jesus. Jesus didn't abandon the world or scorn creation, and neither was he a man without appetites...but in the end, he mastered them. Jesus enjoyed creation and community, but never worshipped any object of his appetites. In the end, Jesus was a man of full self-control, a man full of the dignity of restraint, even in the shame of the cross.Perhaps it's time that we follow him by remembering restraint, and learning again the discipline of dissatisfaction.

Proportional Perspective

When I think about the skills I want my kids to have as they grow into maturity, one of the key things that keeps coming to minds is the ability to keep a proportional perspective. It's something we often repeat with a little mantra "Don't turn little things into big things." Normally we say that when some little issue is escalating into a big dramatic fight,or when some very little situation we're trying to correct gets blown up by their resisting discipline or something. (Pick up your book becomes "go to time-out" becomes "three consecutive time-outs" becomes "WHY OH WHY?!? WHEN WILL THE MADNESS STOP?!?!".  You know, normal family stuff.)When we're debriefing this sort of thing, we often have a moment when we try to help them understand that what started up as a little issue became a big deal, and we try to figure out what we could have done differently to keep from turning the little thing into the big thing.  I should go ahead and point out that this all works in reverse, too.  There are some issues that really are a big deal, and sometimes we want to minimize them and ignore them. That's not any good, either.What we want them to learn is how to keep things in the right proportional perspective—to give problems, challenges, and opportunities the proper weight and emotional energy.There's an easy reason why this skill of keeping things in proportional perspective is so important to me—I know too many adults who are really bad at it. It's a discipline, and if people who go years without practicing it, become people who have a hard time solving problems without destroying everybody in their path. They become people that nobody really wants to deal with, because you suck too much energy out of everyone along the way.  Others begin to think of things that involve these people (problems or opportunities)  as just not being worth the energy that's going to be required by messing with them.Everybody knows somebody like that. You know somebody like that. People that struggle to keep things in the proper proportional perspective. They drive you nuts.But let's thicken the soup a little bit. If you're thinking this is just a problem for the sheer villains of your life, you may want to stop and let yourself back on the hook.Proportion distortion is the sort of thing that not only the "worst" people do, but normal people do when they're being the "worst version" of themselves. When I'm at my best, I don't do this kind of stuff.  But I'm not always  at my very best. When I'm tired, hungry, or just in a foul mood, I let my discipline down. I exaggerate things that I think are important, and I minimize things that other people think are important. So this isn;t just an "other people" issue.I want to get better and better at keeping things in the right proportional perspective. I want to develop first the skill of noticing when I'm out of proportion (and listening to people who are telling me this!) and second, the skill of backing up and getting things framed better. I want to help my children learn as they grow up to keep pressing towards a proportional perspective, not only when it's easy, but even when it's elusive and everything in their minds wants to pull things into distortion.Of course, the secret to teaching them is is not what I tell them, although I like the mantra.What's really important is what I show them. It not only requires that I have the "right ideas" about what I want my kids to learn. It demands that I develop the discipline to model it as well. It demands that I keep learning, keep stretching, keep practicing, keep growing—and that's why parenting is hard work.

Homiletical Mirror-talk: Cleaning the House

Homiletical Mirror-talk: Cleaning the House(I’m working on doing a bit of analysis on my own preaching, as a way of improving. So this is kind of like a preacher doing film-study…I want to catch the places where I need improvement, and also just be able to look back and learn from the sermons themselves.)I’ve been working on migrating this site, and part of the process for doing so has meant moving over a bunch of sermon files. I’m trying to do a bit of archival work on some of those, so I can have easier access to them later. While I’ve been doing that, I’ve been listening to a few of my own sermons, which I think is an underutilized practice for most preachers, myself included. Doing some reflective critique on your own recordings can be an intensely formative exercise. (Also, doing so with another person! Basically, I’m in favor of most forms of intentional reflection.) This morning, I listened to a sermon from this summer, called “Cleaning the House” (July 20, 2014). It's from the Luke series, and revolves around the episode in Luke 19:41-48 where Jesus laments over Jerusalem and then clears the temple. I chose to include that lament with the temple story, rather than with the preceding account of the triumphant entry, because I think together the lament and the temple clearing create a fierce critique of the power plays of Jerusalem. Here's the sermon audio:[audio mp3="http://stevenhovater.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/7-20-14-AM-Cleaning-the-House.mp3"][/audio]Here’s a little bit of what I see in the sermon, looking back.

1. There’s a lot of wind-up. I chose to illustrate the idea of “Place as symbol” in multiple ways, and I think there might be a layer too many. I think it works okay, but I probably could have pared that down to be more efficient without really losing too much of the punch. As it is, it takes a while to really get to the heart of the text. The sermon weighs in at 27 minutes, and it could have perhaps lost 5 here.
2. This sermon is a bit pedagogical, and relies on a nuanced interpretation of the text. While I generally avoid selling the exegesis in the sermon, I think in a case like this it’s a little more important. I think one of the places this sermon needed a little more was in showing how the temple was a symbol that carried multiple meanings (as a sign of economic oppression, for instance). It’s implicit in the sermon, but I’m not sure if it would have really carried for someone who wasn’t already on board with that particular interpretive line.
3. I think the bit towards the end where it moves to talking about prayer as dependence on God is pretty useful. I also like that it returned to that piece of the text with the language of “the things that make for peace”. I think that the sermon gives that phrase the space to have some resonance. Ultimately, that’s the kind of thing I think I’m trying to do with a lot of my preaching…carve out some space for the text to echo around in, letting it play and find a place to do some formative work.

Calvin Stevenson: A Eulogy for Granddaddy

(I wanted to post this, if just to mark the moment if for nothing else.  What follows is a rough manuscript of the Eulogy I had a chance to offer at my Granddad's funeral this past Wednesday.  It was written to be spoken, and needed some ad libs along the way for support. It was hard to get through it without completely falling apart.  Perhaps someday I'll edit it for better reading, but here is the current version. Thanks to all of you who have been so kind to my family as we mourn this loss!)

Calvin StevensonJanuary 1, 1924 - December 15, 2014

FamilyAlthough we come to mourn a great loss, we do so with a spirit of celebration, knowing that Calvin Stevenson was a great, great man, and also with the joyful laughter that marks our family. The laughter in our hearts is part of the legacy of the man! He would light up when you were around him, smiling with his whole face, and he always had some little quip.  He would tell you he was hanging in like a rusty nail, or say something like “I used to use head and shoulders, but now I use mop and glow.” He was a man of great hospitality, and who knows how many poor souls came to him for the friendly chit-chat that came for free with your lawnmower tune-up. He was good at fixing mowers, but what he was really great at was making people feel like you were his absolute best pal in the whole world. One of my cousins told me about listening to Granddad carry on with somebody, and it made her feel like it must be somebody special. When they left, she wanted to know who it was, and he said, oh, I don’t really know”. But that was just part of his character…indeed, he never met a stranger indeed, but with his infectious smile and playful spirit, he was always welcoming people in.There is, of course, one exception to this that I must, in all fairness, mention. There was one shady character who Granddad would not abide, his one great remaining enemy after the fall of the third reich. There was a squirrel in his backyard that was always conniving to steal from the bird feeder, and granddad was always devising new ways to keep it out. By the way, if you want to improve the look of your backyard, read some tips at brandon foster tulsa website. From building on little shields, to greasing the pole, and then the power cables, there was often a new chapter in this ongoing chess match, although it seemed like that squirrel was always just one step ahead.On the other hand, at Christmas is seemed like Granddaddy was always one step ahead of us. It took a while for the family to open presents, going around and around the circle. But if you didn’t keep a close eye on him, grandaddy would slip out his pocket knife and slit the tape on his next package, and probably had the gift out of the box. So many times, our gift-giving was interrupted with laughter as granddad was caught, and one of the kids would be moved next to him to keep a better eye on him, and off we’d go.These are the sorts of tales that always filled the air around the table on N. Weakley street, and they sealed our family with a spirit of joy and laughter.  He loved to have the family all together.HardworkBut don’t get the impression that Calvin Stevenson was an idle fellow…he was a hard working man, maybe the most hardworking man that any of us will ever know.He could do anything with his hands, whether it be his work at Ford, or the second job he took at the butcher shop, he had the soul of a craftsman. He took on the carpentry work of adding an addition to their house when his father came to live with them, and I’ve even heard it told that he tried his hand as  barber once upon a time.  And of course, nothing exemplifies his hardworking nature to me as much as the oily smell of the lawnmower shop.  It was a great retirement for him, and he was good at it. There was even a time or two when he had somebody’s mower fixed before they even got all the way home, and I think he enjoyed being able to call and say, “Hey I got it fixed already…you know, to make these things work, you have to put a little gasoline in the tank…” It was really the only kind of Retirement options possible for him…he was a doer, and needed something for his hands to do. Speaking of retirement, know about the benefits that you can get when you retire and be informed about the social security locations near you by visiting socialsecurityretire.org. Mark told me that he thinks it won’t be long after meeting the Lord in heaven that Granddad will ask for a job to do, and I think he’s right. The man was made for work, and he believed in doing his work well. LoyaltyHe was a man of intense loyalties. From his football team to his brand of bologna he had a way of sticking to the things he loved.But he he had the wisdom to understood that different loyalties carried different weight, and his greatest loyalties always belonged to his God, his family, and his country.He served his country well during the second World War. He was in training when his own mother died, and missed her funeral. He was injured at the battle of Metz during the allied advance that led to the battle of the bulge in the fall of 1944, and was awarded both a purple heart and a bronze star for his service. For the rest of his life he bore the scars of war both on his body and in his heart. He didn’t talk about the experience of combat, but proudly carried his identity as a veteran. Perhaps the proudest moment of his life was getting to Washington a few years ago to visit the World War II memorial, what he called “His memorial”. We all have such great respect for the sacrificial loyalty he carried for his country.He was also fiercely loyal to his family. His love for all of us was full and warm, and being a part of his family is one of the great blessings of my life. Whether born into the family or married into it, he would do anything for those who were his, and you never had any doubt that he wanted what was best for you.We were richly blessed by the legacy of love that he shared with Grandmother. Some 70 years ago they had been dating for only six weeks when he talked her into going with to Mississippi to be a witnesses for one of his cousins that was getting married.  By the time they were halfway home, they decided to turn the car around and just go ahead and get married themselves. That sounds a little whimsical and downright dangerous to me, and our girls better not even ever think about doing such a thing, but on the other hand, how can you argue with a sixty year message that bore such joy and love. As rare as it may be, there was never any doubt in anyone’s mind of their deep love for each other. They were such a pair, and we all know that his life was never really the same from the day she died. Their reunion in the Lord is something we celebrate today!His loyalty to the Lord extended far beyond the second pew over there, where he worshipped for decades. In his mind, if you knew there was something that was right, something the Lord would want you to do, you may as well consider it done. Whether service through the church or the silent and secret kindness done to neighbors and strangers, his busy hands constantly found themselves serving God and serving people. Guide, Guard and DirectI often think about the times when our family would gather around a table to share food and laughter together, and the time was always punctuated by a moment of prayer.  The text of the prayer never varied much, he would always thank God for the family, for forgiveness when we fall short, and would pray that God would guide guard and direct our steps through future walks of life.Over the past few weeks I’ve realized something that I think would surprise even granddad…that in large part, it was he himself that the answer to that prayer. The mysterious grace of God is that we were indeed granted guidance, protection, and direction through this great and faithful servant, Calvin Stevenson, My Granddaddy. He was the greatest and best man I have ever known, and I loved him dearly. Psalm 89:1-2His great loyalty and love were mirrors through with we have seen the great love and faithfulness of God.  Psalm 89 says:“I will sing of your steadfast love, O LORD, forever; with my mouth I will proclaim your faithfulness to all generations. I declare that your steadfast love is established forever; your faithfulness is as firm as the heavens.”(Psalms 88:11; 89:1–2 NRSV)I will indeed sing of the love and faithfulness of God.  I have learned them both from this man.

Converting Keynote Files to Powerpoint without Formatting Problems.

I'm a little bit of a slide design geek.  I actually love the process of crafting slides, and since I get to preach/speak regularly, it's something I've spent a fair amount of time doing.  My favorite tool for doing this is Apple's Keynote.  It's presentation software with a design-centric user interface—making it much easier and more pleasant to work with than the mac version of Powerpoint. It puts thing like transparency, adding shapes, text, changing layers, and all of those sorts of things at the forefront of the interface, while powerpoint seems determined to bury them beneath layers of menus and options that I never use.The problem, of course, is that I'm often creating the slide deck on my machine, and then running them on a different one...a PC that can only use .ppt files.  So every week I have to come up with a powerpoint version of the slide deck I've created. And if I just export the keynote file straight into .ppt, I'm asking for all kinds of problems. For instance, I'll be limiting my font choices, because I can then only use fonts that I know are on the other computer.  If I don't limit them, then invariably the font will simply be rendered by a stock font like Ariel or Calibri. Even beyond the forced font-ugliness, this causes a cascade of format and design issues—the sizing of the fonts will get out of whack, and the spacing of the characters on the page will go nuts.  This is amplified by the fact that I use huge fonts sizes, which you should always do in presentations. That little bit of character spacing or line-height difference gets nasty when you're looking at a 120-200 font. Over time, I've come up with a workflow that pretty dependably manages the.keynote -> .ppt conversion process, and minimizes formatting problems.  It works by flattening out the slides'  layers into images, and making a new slideshow from the image files. Here's the process:

1. Design the slides in Keynote.
2. Export the file to .jpg by choosing File -> Export To ->Images. (I save this on my desktop)
3. Create a new Keynote File.
4. Drag the images created in step 2 into the slide navigator (left column of thumbnails) on the new file. (You can drag them all at once.) This creates a slide for each image where the top layer is the image. Assuming the size of the slides in this presentation are the same size as the one in step 1, what you now have is a new presentation mirroring your first one, except that now the fonts are flattened into the image!
5. Convert the file to ppt by selecting File -> Export To -> PowerPoint.  Save it where you want it.
6. Delete the folder (on my desktop) where I create the image files.

So this is all well and good, and if you're content with a foolproof six step method, read no further. However, I've had a nagging suspicion that I could script a way to do this in one step, and I finally got some help in making it work.  So here are some one-time steps to setting it up on your mac...after you do these, you'll be able to use it with one click from now on.

1. Open the Applescript Editor on your mac.  (You can just find it with spotlight.)
2. Create a new document.
3. Paste the following into the new document:

   set v to ("Volumes" as POSIX file) as aliastell application "Finder" to set f to (make new folder) as text -- create a temp folder to export imagestell application "Keynote"tell front documentexport to (file f) as slide images with properties {image format:JPEG, compression factor:95}set {h, w, tName} to {height, width, name of it}end telltell tName to if it ends with ".key" thenset newName to (text 1 thru -5) & ".ppt"elseset newName to it & ".ppt"end ifset jpegs to my getImages(f)activateset newFile to choose file name default name newName default location v with prompt "Select the folder to save the PPT file"set newDoc to make new document with properties {width:w, height:h}tell newDocset mSlide to last master slide -- blankrepeat with thisJPEG in jpegsset s to make new slide with properties {base slide:mSlide}tell s to make new image with properties {file:thisJPEG}end repeatdelete slide 1export to (newFile) as Microsoft PowerPointclose saving noend tellend telltell application "Finder" to delete folder f -- delete the temp folderon getImages(f)tell application "Finder" to sort (files of folder f) by nametell application "Finder" to return (files of folder f) as alias listend getImages

4. Save this file into your Scripts Folder. (thats ~/Library/Scripts. Make sure it's the Library folder for your username.) Call it what you want.
5. Open Script Editor preferences. Check the box "Show Script Menu in Menu bar"
6. You should now be able to see a scroll-looking icon in your menu bar. If you select it, you may already see the script you just made listed.  If not, take the "Open Scripts Folder" menu item, and choose "Open User Scripts Folder". If you run the script here (with a keynote file open), it'll work through its sequence, ad next time you take the menu item, it'll be listed below.

Okay, whew.  You made it.  Now, next time you have a keynote file open that you want to convert to a powerpoint file comprised of flattened images, with no format issues, all you have to do is select the scripts menu item, and run the script. Choose where you want the new file.  Voilà.Now that's a pretty sweet hack.(Note: This will not preserve any transitions from Keynote, only the final visual appearance of each slide. If your original slide has staged builds in it, you probably just need to go the manual route outlined above!)Updated 11/29/2017I ran into a problem with the slides being out of order in OS X 10.13 (High Sierra), so I added a line to the code above, ensuring that the finder sorts the slides correctly before adding them back in to the new ppt file. (tell application "Finder" to sort (files of folder f) by name). If this is somehow not working for you, you may want to delete that particular line.

Different

This past week's sermon was from Luke 18, specifically the part where Jesus tells a story about a Pharisee and a tax collector who go to the temple to worship, and whose prayers evidence that they are miles apart—only not in the way that both of them seem to assume.Scripture seems full of stories like this. Lately that theme has relentlessly pushed me toward the conviction that disciples of Jesus have to change the way we see our neighbors. Naming on the basis of categories like class, race, or any external factor just isn't an option for us—Jesus seems bent on teaching us how to to see people differently.One effect of this in my own life is that over time, God has been bringing me more and more friends whose lives aren't mirror images of my own—they have different starting places, different twists and turns, different challenges and obstacles, and echo with different tones. All of that may not seem unusual to you, but—and here's the big point—it is different to me. Much of my life, at times intentionally and at other times just by force of habit, has been lived in the midst of similarity— real, assumed, or pretended. My experience of church has been set in homogeneity; my brothers and sisters had often seemed to have had backgrounds that looked a lot like mine, and followed a similar plot.I don't think of myself as a closed person. Indeed, I'm often fascinated by hanging out with people from different backgrounds, who have different stories—but lately I'm realizing that these aren't the same as having forged friendships. I wonder what it will take for me to develop that capacity.

The Bible's World: Essentials

The Bible is a daunting book to study, and very imposing in its scope, size and nature. The  barriers to getting into it present real problems—problems that we have to deal with if we hope to help people find nourishment in the scriptures.One of the most significant barriers is that that there is a lot of background stuff that you have to absorb if you're going to be able to pick up what's going on in any text—and lots of texts have different background pieces that inform them particularly. If you're a historical nerd who loves geeing out on facts about the ancient world, this is great news for you—people like you and me love this stuff, and it is absolutely endless. You'll never learn it all.But what about everybody else? One of the big questions of how the church studies scripture is: What's the baseline of background detail that people need to understand? What do people need to grasp in order to begin to wade into scripture without feeling like they're drowning? How can we set up people to learn well, and feel capable of going further?It's an open question for me, but I want to suggest a set of areas in which having a basic understanding of the ancient world can really help people get some traction.

1. Geography. I think it's helpful if you can put ancient Israel, Egypt, Babylon, Nineveh, and Rome on a map. Probably Syria, too.
2. The Exile. A huge part of the Old Testament revolves around the events of the Babylonian Exile. If you get that story, and the problems it presented, a large part of the canon opens up.
3. Pharisees.  A better understanding of what the pharisees were about is exceptionally helpful in understanding the stakes of the conflicts in the gospels. It needs to go beyond "Pharisee = Bad", too.
4. Economics. I think having a little understanding about the scale of the ancient economies really helps as well. What was the relationship to having land and being self-sufficient? What about ancient wealth distribution? It doesn't get talked about in most sunday schools, but it's an eye-opening subject.
5. Honor/Shame. These categories were incredibly important to the identities of ancient people. Get this and their motivations make much more sense.

Overlooking the Plain of Sodom—Advocates of Righteousness and Justice

The Bible's story hinges on what God wants to do and what God can do with Abraham's descendants—and neither is particularly clear in the early chapters of the saga. God and Abraham seem to both be feeling their way through the new relationship, and I'm beginning to take more seriously the language of Abraham as God's friend—it's kind of easy to read the story almost like Abram and God are pals, traveling around together just for the sake of it.There are of course moments when something else shines through all of the odd episodes of Abraham's story. The narrative reaches outside of itself and shows itself to be more than a story about one man's weird relationship with God. In these moments, the Abraham saga becomes a critical piece in the story of God and Creation. One such moment takes place in Genesis 18.Here is a well-worn story of Abraham bargaining with God, negotiating on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, or at least on behalf of his kin who live there. I won't retrace the story here, because I want to focus in on one particular facet of the episode—the terms of the negotiation. We'll pick up with God's internal monologue (dialogue?) regarding whether or not he'll let Abraham in on what's about to happen:

 The Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, ¹⁸ seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? ¹⁹ No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice; so that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.”

Here God opens up, just a smidge, about the long-term plan for Abraham and his descendants. They are to become a great nation which will bless the world, (just as God promised Abram in Genesis 12. But also, catch the important added note here:  What kind of nation will they be? What does God want to become the characteristic mark of Abraham's children?  They are to be a people who keep the way of the Lord by "doing righteousness and justice".This is a pair of Hebrew words, Tsedakah and Mishpat, (צְדָקָה וּמִשְׁפָּט ), which become particularly important for the prophets and which are loaded with meaning, most of which I'll leave you to unpack on your own (big hint: as a pair, they almost always connote social justice concerns for the poor). This little aside by God is the first time we really meet them in the Bible, and that would be remarkable enough in its own right, except note further how the words actually function in the story that follows. While God intends for Abraham to teach his children about Righteousness and Justice, they actually become the critical words that Abraham leverages to bargain with God:

²³ Then Abraham came near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? ²⁴ Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? ²⁵ Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”

Abraham is even more shrewd than we give him credit for: he effectively uses God's own words and intentions against God, holding God to a standard.  Abraham takes his vocation as an advocate of righteousness and justice so seriously that even God has to own up. In this story, Abraham becomes a force for Righteousness and Justice, even with God. The implications of this are tremendous, even if the story won't do all the work to unpack it for us. What might it mean for us to enter into such advocacy? What might it mean as people who act and pray, people who have become children of Abraham?The end result of the story is the sad destruction of the two cities, and while the narrative certainly paints this as justified, even within Abraham's bargain, there is a final haunting image in the Genesis 19 I'd like to point towards:

²⁴ Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven; ²⁵ and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground.²⁶ But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt. ²⁷ Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord; ²⁸ and he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the Plain and saw the smoke of the land going up like the smoke of a furnace. ²⁹ So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the Plain, God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot had settled.

That image of Abraham, alone, looking down on the burning wasteland is a poignant image, one that stands in my mind as both mourning the brokenness and wickedness of creation, as well as pointing towards the unfinished business that God and Abraham have with each other. If God's intent is to bless the world through Abraham's descendants, and we are willing to accept that mantle ourselves, then the end of this story calls us to look around us, smell the sulfur, and dive into the work left to do.