Author: Steven Hovater

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: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.
December 20, 2014
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. (more…)

December 19, 2014
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.
October 30, 2014
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.

May 19, 2014
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.
April 9, 2014
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, ¹⁸seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? ¹⁹No, 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”. (more…)

January 30, 2013
Vulnerability: Newtown and Nouwen

Last week’s tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut hurts. It hurts badly, troubling us at multiple locations of doubt, hope, fear, and love. Survey the landscape and see what has been scorched: the innocence of children, the space of the schoolhouse, our duty (and capacity) to protect children, our general sense of security in the midst of community, a myriad of assumed rights and responsibilities, ideals of parenthood and the resiliency of children, our blind spot toward mental illness, perhaps even our tacit acceptance of public risk.In the destructive wake of the violence, many voices have rushed in to offer solutions–a not unhealthy impulse, even though many of the solutions are misguided, I think. Many of them reflect views that are not new judgments, but old commitments given new urgency, and these have been immediately met by other old commitments fueled by the urgency of any defense played at critical junctures. Political pundits, theologians, pastors, social scientists and community leaders are all having their say, and I suppose that some of those discussions may well bear fruit, if they are pursued with honesty, courage, and wisdom. In the end, now that the idea of this type of violence has been seeded in our communities, it may not ever be eradicated from the consciousness of those deeply broken people who might consider it a live option. Becoming more intentional about addressing that deep brokenness, addressing the systemic devaluation of human life in our society, limiting how well-armed such individuals might come to be, and making sensible decisions about security and emergency procedures may well combine to save lives—I would hope many—but eliminating the seed itself may be beyond our grasp. (This is not to say that such pragmatic conversations should not be pressed forward! Even if we can spare but a few families this sort of deep horror, I hope we will courageously engage the questions.)Beyond the immediately pragmatic, the deaths in Newtown have again exposed a conversation that we are scarcely willing to pursue, namely our extremely fragile ability to experience community with other humans. When we join in others for any public endeavor or experience of community, we always experience danger, whether that be in the market or workplaces, in the schools or mass entertainment venues. Such events raise our awareness of the willingness of others to abuse our trust and do us harm in exceptional ways, although we most commonly encounter such abuse and harm in mundane, petty things. Whether they do so out of rage, greed, or some other vice, our experience of such danger threatens our willingness to be full participants in community, and in exceptional moments of violence, even at the hands of madmen, we can be pushed further into retreat mode.I say “retreat”, but as I mean that, the impulse to ratchet up security and devise better schemes for protection, and to make ourselves stronger is also a “retreat” from community, in its own way. Those impulses are a way of insulating us from the sense of vulnerability that we have in encountering “strangers”, people who are really our neighbors, but who have become “estranged” from us. Whether they have become strangers to us through their own failings or ours, through the broader directions of culture, or through some innate human “fallenness” is one of the central questions of theology, as is the cure. Put simply, these questions ask, “How did we become this broken?” and “How can we be fixed?” And so, moments like this can be deeply theological moments, because we experience in an acute way the condition of humanity, They strip away the illusions that we hold of ourselves, whether those illusions reflect to false invulnerability, a cavalier sense of immortality, or the pretenses of faux community.All of this has called my mind back to Henri Nouwen, one of the most formative influences on my own life. I think Nouwen has a lot to say to our world in this time, particular in his great theological insight that honestly owning and living in our vulnerabilities is a more fruitful way to live with God, other people, and ourselves than our endless maintenance of the illusions of security and strength. Nouwen writes about the roots of our loneliness, a symptom of our estrangement from each other, when he writes, “The roots of our loneliness are very deep, and cannot be touched by optimistic advertisement, substitute love images, or social togetherness. They find their food in the suspicion that there is no one who cares and offers love without conditions, and no place where we can be vulnerable without being used.”For Nouwen, the way to deal with that suspicion was to avoid the natural impulse of adding layers of security around it, and to confront it head on through radical hospitality—creating space in our lives for others despite the real danger that they would somehow harm us. Creating free spaces inside our perimeters of supposed invulnerability allows us to discover community with each other because it allows us to be honest and free, despite being “threatened”. Dealing with our sense of vulnerability also helps unmask the illusions of immortality and invulnerability which, being idols, stand between us and any relationship with a free and loving God. For Nouwen, God’s own actions in the story of Jesus represent just this sort of radical hospitality, and thus create space for us within the story of God within which it is possible for us to inflict harm upon God, but also to freely know and be blessed by God.As a framework for policy, radical hospitality sounds like a recipe for disaster. As a framework for really building community between broken people, it may be the only way forward.

December 19, 2012
The Broken Earth in Genesis 1-6

Tonight, in my class on the Torah, we wrapped up by observing the tight connection between the moral responsibility of humanity, the human descent into wickedness, and the effect on the earth itself in chapters 3-6. Hearing the church’s common conversations, you could get the impression that the problem with the “fall” is simply the rift human sin and pride creates between people and God. In reality though, the consequences of humanity’s fall is multifaceted. For instance, as demonstrated in the Cain and Abel story (and the Lamech one that follows), relationships between humans break down due to sin and violence, and we may easily observe the conflict that arises between the sexes on the heels of the tragic episode in the garden.One of the too often ignored facets of the human fall is the curse that it brings on the earth itself. Although God’s initial directives to humanity were to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it”, as the story plays out, it’s as if the earth itself suffers the sin of humanity in the early chapters of Genesis. Read chapters 3-6 with a ready eye, and you’ll see the motif show up repeatedly. It’s in the original garden fallout scene, and the language that contains the motif in the Cain and Abel saga is some of the richest in the Old Testament:

⁸Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.”^[b] And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. ⁹Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” ¹⁰And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!¹¹And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. ¹²When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” ¹³Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! ¹⁴Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” ¹⁵Then the Lord said to him, “Not so!^[c] Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. ¹⁶Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod,^[d] east of Eden. (Gen 4:8-16, NRSV)

See how the motif functions here? It begins simply enough, with “the field” being the site for the murder. But as the story develops, the ground or soil is almost a character in the story, bearing testimony against Cain, even cursing Cain. Cain’s punishment involves being hidden from the face of God, and social exclusion as well, but note that this layer of being driven away from the soil itself seems to be Cain’s most agonizing consequence.The motif continues to develop in the early chapters of Genesis, perhaps culminating in the flood saga. In the build up to the Flood story, Noah is introduced by a reference to the curse upon the land: “[Lamech] named him Noah, saying, “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.”(Gen 5:29, NRSV) In the next chapter, God’s actions in the Flood are repeatedly attributed to God’s observation of how the wickedness and violence of humanity has corrupted the earth:

¹¹Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. ¹²And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth. ¹³And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth. (Gen 6:11-13, NRSV)

On the other side of the Flood, the focus shifts a bit, returning to the original command to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…”. God returns to the project of filling the earth with rich human life, scattering humanity across the world. This eventually leads to the strategy of blessing the scattered peoples of the world through the people of Abraham, but that’s a subject for another day. For today, it is enough to not how tightly God’s purposes for the earth were connected with God’s purposes for humanity. Perhaps this shouldn’t be that surprising, unless we have forgotten that God indeed made the man (hebrew ‘Adam’) from the dust of the ground (hebrew ‘Adamah’), and that we are connected to the earth through our work until the moment that we are returned to the ground. “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Gen 3:19, NRSV). given this, how could our sin result in anything but estrangement from the very earth which is our perpetual context?

December 13, 2012
Not Native—A Meditation on Matthew 1:1-17

This week, I was thinking about how the book of Matthew starts, and meditating on what it means for me and my neighbors to read that text. I’ve talked and written about the passage before, but it became clear to me that I’ve often glossed over what may be the most significant feature of the text for me, and for many readers like me, a feature which seriously affects our experience of reading the text: the names are weird. Of course, “weird” isn’t an objective term, but names something important, even if subjective, that we experience in reading the Bible, particularly in texts like the genealogies. These texts are just chock full of names that are weird to me, that would be weird in our culture. By my count, of the 48 names in the genealogy, only about 10, a fifth, are regularly used by people in our culture. For every Jacob in the list that sounds familiar, there is a Zadok, a Jotham, an Abiud, a Nashon, and a Salathiel. My wife are in the process of picking baby names, and there is no way on God’s green earth she would let me use about eighty percent of these.The fact of this unfamiliarity becomes abundantly clear in any type of group reading setting. Almost any reader will struggle through pronouncing all the names on the list, which makes sense given that nobody in our churches knows anybody named Jeconiah or Zerubbabel.So what does that unfamiliarity do to us? I think it reinforces to us that we are non-natives when it comes to the world of the Bible. Even those of us who grew up hearing the names in Sunday School have to admit that for all our time as visitors to the Bible, or even as immigrants who have lived in its world, we are still a bit out of our own water.It strikes me that this has long been true of Christian readers of the Bible, at least since Cornelius, the first non-Jewish convert. After all, I suppose many of these Semitic names would have sounded strange to the Gentile Christians of Rome, Ephesus, and Athens, just as they do to me. Even in those cosmopolitan centers of the Mediterranean world, the gospel message was cross-cultural, wrapped in strange and foreign garb. Quickly translated into greek, these Hebrew names signaled to our early brothers and sisters that they were joining a story that arose in another people, with another language and another culture. And yet, somehow, they found a home in that foreign text. They willingly immigrated to the narrative world of the Bible, learned to speak its language of faith, and made some version of it their own.Even though we often ignore it, it’s a good thing to be reminded of the foreign weirdness of the scriptures from time to time. First, it reminds us that we have some translation work to do if the gospel is going to be intelligible to our neighbors—they may not be as used to moving through the Biblical weirdness as we are, glossing over the odd names and applying the bits and pieces of cultural information we’ve picked up along the way.Second, it keeps us from pretending that we own the book. We take a little too much ownership of the Bible sometimes; it can be our way of domesticating it, pretending that we are fully aligned with it. In reality, we are always learning what it means to live in its world. Hearing and recognizing the weirdness of the names may also prepare me to read with humility and a little healthy caution about my ability to easily and naturally understand what is happening in these texts that come to me from another culture.Finally, recognizing the foreign character of the scriptures prepares me to have a more cosmopolitan faith, one that can be conversant with other cultures besides my own. Recognizing that my faith is really an ancient Hebrew-Greek faith spoken in a Southern American accent prepares me to hear that faith spoken in other accents as well. The faith of the Bible is not an American faith, at least not in origin. So, when I hear other accents struggling to pronounce the genealogies, I can lay down any presupposition of superiority, knowing that I too had to learn how to say names like Hezron and Abijah, and that I too am a non-native to the language and faith of the Bible.I have much to learn.

July 11, 2012
The Strange and Formative Word

The Bible is a strange book.Written over hundreds of years by a collection of named and anonymous authors, it spans genres and themes as diverse as power and money, family and sexuality. It alternates between genealogical lists and colorful histories, ritual law and love poetry, all managing to say something important about what it means to be human, the nature of the world, and God.Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how the Bible is both a product and a means of God’s mission in the world. It is a witness to the things God has done in the past to shape and recreate people, and it is itself a part of the process of shaping those who read and receive it.For instance, take the story of Nathan confronting King David (1 Samuel 12). It’s both a witness of how God was confronting and shaping David to be the king he was supposed to be. But at the same time, as we read the story and allow ourselves to live in it, the story shapes us as well, challenging us to think about how we use power, or our own tendency to cover up our sin with even more sin.As we read stories like that, or meditate on the poetry of the prophets, or read along with the first century churches in their letters from Paul, we’re pulled into the story of God through time, and are shaped to be more like God, and less like the world. We become gracious where the world is judgmental. We become joyful where the world is bitter, and mourn in the places where the world wants to celebrate. We become peaceful in the middle of a world at war, or we become generous in a world of selfishness.The Bible is a strange book.But, that’s okay. We’re a strange people.By God’s grace, and through God’s word, we’re becoming stranger every day.

February 17, 2012