Steven Hovater

Tag: Bible

  • My Psalms: Developing a Personal Repertoire of Prayer

    An important step in tightening your relationship to the Psalms and engaging them as a spiritual practice is coming to think of them not in terms of the vast collection that they are as a whole, but in terms of a collection from which you collect a smaller repertoire. By repertoire, I mean a smaller, curated collection of the psalms that you know more intimately, that you mediate on with regularity.

    I don’t mean to suggest that you write off the larger collection—indeed, I hope my own personal repertoire of Psalms grows over time, particularly as I pray through the book month by month. But I suggest that it will do that slowly; psalm by psalm, as I give attention to nurturing my relationship with a few psalms before expanding to others. Here are three simple steps for that process:

    1. Evaluate

    The first step is to evaluate what your current repertoire of Psalms is. An easy way to do that is to think about what psalms you can easily match to a concept, remembering at least some of what is there. For example, if given Psalm 23, you can match it to the idea of the “shepherd”, or maybe if you’re given Psalm 1, you can match it to the image of a tree bearing fruit.

    Take some time to take an inventory…running through the psalms numbers 1-150, which can you more or less identify with a concept? Which are the most important to you, or contain something important to you? Make a list of the ones that make up your current repertoire.

    A final piece of evaluation: How intimately do you know the psalms in your current repertoire? Consider investing a season in nurturing your relationship with these psalms.

    2. Curate

    The second step is to be on the lookout for a few to add to your repertoire. This is where having a regular practice of praying through the psalms can be very helpful, because you’re constantly enchanting the breadth of the psalms. As you do, you will likely find that there are psalms that call for fuller attention. Take notice, and begin cataloging a list of psalms that you want to spend more time meditating on. What is next on the list of psalms to add to your repertoire?

    As you curate, be aware of the different kinds of psalms that make up your personal stockpile. No doubt you’ll see common affinities between them—it’s natural for us to be more attracted to certain types of psalms than others. So be on the lookout for ways to diversify your repertoire, adding some that are a little different than what you’ve already found useful.

    3. Meditate

    Finally, be intentional about spending time meditating on both the psalms that already make up the core of your repertoire, and those that are right on the edge of being included, psalms where you notice the Spirit luring you into a fuller depth.

    Developing Depth

    The ongoing prayer practice—whether on single or double-month terms—will expose us to the breadth of the psalms. This practice of developing a curated repertoire is about leaning into depth. Both are transformative!

  • Rejected

    “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” -Mark 8:31

    That the Messiah suffered is something that we grasp—Jesus’s suffering, as brutal as it was, could perhaps be comprehensible or even regarded as noble. Bonhoeffer notes the possibility that it could be celebrated as that tragic form of suffering we sometimes regard as having its own honor and dignity.

    But the cross was not just suffering alone, not just a physical attack, but was suffering accompanied by vicious rejection. Christ is not only physically victimized, but it comes at the hands of those who reject him. They reject his messiahship. They mock his authority as a king. They humiliate him, stripping away not only his clothes, but also his human dignity.

    The great irony of the cross is that Jesus, who had already acted in humility in taking human likeness, is then dehumanized through cruel humiliation. They seek not to just pierce his body with nails, but his soul with insults. They not only ravage his back with the flail, but they ravage his humanity with shame. He’s not only beaten, but spat upon.

    Spat upon!

    The Lord of the cosmos is spat upon!

    It is this mockery, more than the physical brutality, that Mark takes great pains to emphasize. It first shows up in the account of Jesus before the high priest. The trial there, full of false witnesses who can’t get on the same page finally builds to this conclusion (14:60-65)

    Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, “Have you no answer? What is it that they testify against you?” But he was silent and did not answer. Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” 62 Jesus said, “I am; and ‘you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power,’ and ‘coming with the clouds of heaven.’” 63 Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, “Why do we still need witnesses? 64 You have heard his blasphemy! What is your decision?” All of them condemned him as deserving death. 65 Some began to spit on him, to blindfold him, and to strike him, saying to him, “Prophesy!” The guards also took him over and beat him.

    Jesus is taken to another trial, this time before the Roman Governor Pilate. The trial deadlocks, and Pilate seems ready to release Jesus. He’s even given a chance to release him when the crowd calls on him to practice his custom of granting mercy to someone at the time of passover.

    • Jesus us calls us into rejection.
    • just like death ives way to resurrection, so does rejection lead to new community.

  • 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.