Verse of the Month‚December 2009

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

— John 1:14

Cloture

The Senatorial grindstone has produced a slow-mo show.
Is it health care for the masses, or the end of the world we know?
Will it save us lives and dollars, as the months stretch into years,
Or are tea-bag shouts and hollers right to call forth all our fears?

There’s a battle raging, surely, for the public heart and mind.
Pundits, pollsters get up early in the hopes that they will find
Your opinion turning slowly toward support or toward rejection
Of the most important matter: not your health! The next election.

Reverse Corporate Taxation, anyone?

Bloviation warning: I’m getting some opinions off my chest below, in the form of a disjointed series of rants. <political bias>

Everywhere in the air today is a swirl of comment about health care reform: insurance, individual mandate, employer mandate, public option, yadda yadda — these buzzwords are all over the airwaves. A couple of nights ago the House passed a bill, and now debate goes back to the Senate. It’s time for this blogger to put in his highly inflatable $.02.

Opponents of comprehensive reform worry about a government takeover: that the “public option” is merely the first step toward a “single payer” plan. Progressives, looking at Canadian and European models, agree, and some are willing to settle for a public option, this year, because it is a first step toward their goal. I lean heavily toward the latter camp. Let me unpack some of the rhetoric I have heard and try to explain why the individual mandate without at least a public option is the worst of all possible worlds.

One complaint is that a public option will have to be paid for with taxes, or, more directly, that the premiums paid toward such a plan amount to a tax. Sure. But at least those tax dollars go to the government, which is ultimately responsible, however unwieldy our system is, to the people. I can vote the decision-makers in and out of office, raise a public outcry to persuade people to join such a cause. Clearly Congress has the power, constitutionally, to raise taxes. But does Congress have the power to require people to put money directly in the pockets of private corporations? Money that is required by law to be paid out of people’s incomes is a tax, any way you cut it. Why should my tax dollars go, not to my government, run (however imperfectly) by people I can vote for or against, but to a company, whose primary motivation is profit, which has every incentive to provide denial of service to its customer (me), and which lives in a culture that thinks it is just fine to pay its executives millions or billions of dollars, and feels it must do so in order to retain such “talent”?

Christ-centered Bible reading

A worthwhile thought-starter here on the difference between modern ways of reading the Bible and the approach taken by the ancient Fathers, including the writers of the New Testament.

Here’s an excerpt, but I really suggest you follow the link and read the excellent comments as well:

….several key points about the Fathers’ nonliteral and image-laden reading of the Bible.

1. The New Testament authors clearly applied Old Testament texts in ways that departed seriously from the plain, surface meaning of the text. When Paul cites Psalm 19 in Romans 10 (“their voice is gone out into all the world”), he applies the Psalmist’s statement about the heavens to the preaching of the apostles. This runs against the plain meaning, said Wilken.

2. The books of Scripture do not bear their own significance. They must be united to something greater, which is Christ. Thus Paul interprets the creation of man and woman as a great mystery, which is Christ and the church; and he interprets the water-giving rock in the Sinai desert as Christ.

3. Typically, such creative renderings of the Bible are focused on the Old Testament. That is because the Old Testament text signifies Christ, but the New Testament text does not signify another Christ. It requires no allegory or analogy to reveal the Incarnate Word.

4. The Fathers also understood the interpretation of Scripture to require the reader’s participation in the spiritual reality of the text. Thus it is not enough to say that Christ was crucified. We must also say, “I am crucified with Christ,” and thus also I am raised with Christ.

On point #3, above, I’d like to make a further comment.  While it is true that it is not “another Christ” that the NT signifies, we do see Paul saying, “even if we had known Christ according to the flesh, we now know him [in that way] no more; therefore if anyone be in Christ there is a new creation… (2 Corinthians 5:16-17),  Thus Christ in the NT is not just the historical figure of the rabbi from Nazareth, but is the salvation of the world, good news to the nations (ethne, Gentiles), the beginning and end of history.  As such, the full application of the meaning and presence of Christ in all situations, “in whom is hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” requires, it seems to me, a continual re-envisioning of the world as it is (not just as it was in the first century) and, it seems to me also, we have ample precedent in scripture and in the work of the Fathers for  applying by extension and analogy the truth of Christ to emerging circumstances, just as the Fathers and the NT writers did with respect to ancient Hebrew texts.

Jabez revisited

One of my online friends has posted a very thoughtful take on the Prayer of Jabez.  You should read it. An excerpt:

Many people interpret this as, “If you ask God to bless you, He’ll shower you with material wealth and whatever else you want.” But as I learned Sunday at Amy’s church, that’s not the case.

Did you notice verse 9 when it says Jabez got his name because his mother “gave birth to him in pain?” As the pastor explained, the name Jabez basically means “pain.” Can you imagine being called “Pain” all your life? That’s where verse 10 comes in, where Jabez prays that he would be “free from pain.” He wasn’t asking God for a life free from trouble (which is dumb, because Jesus said in this world we’ll have trouble), but that He would be able to turn Jabez’s curse into a blessing. And He did.

I like it when people think.  Especially preachers.

November Rose

God and Mammon

One of the pastimes that goes on in my feeble brain, almost without me noticing, is coming up with titles for books I would like to read, or would like to know how to write.  I’ll toss this one out in the hopes that somewhere in the ether-tubes will be a person with the right expertise to actually put it together.  Ready?

God and Mammon:  The Big Business of Evangelical Religion In America

Or, for a slightly different emphasis:

God and Mammon:  Christianity and Capitalism in America

This book would review the history and current state of churches, denominations, individual religious superstars, and mega churches, and would provide analysis of how much money is involved in these various organizations, where it comes from and especially how it is spent.  Under the second title it might actually go broader, dropping the rubric “evangelical” from the subtitle, so as to also look at mainline churches, the Catholic Church and its various organizations, questionable cults, non-Christian religious movements, and so on, but that would be a much broader project.

One focus of such a project might be to try to understand how it is that somehow in the United States Christianity has become wedded to capitalism, whether that has always been the case, exceptions to this rule, and how such an emphasis has developed over time. I would definitely buy and read such a book. It could also,of course, do some analysis of the extent to which funds are actually spent on human development, healthcare, housing, education, nutrition; how much on political activism, left and right; how much on real estate, salaries, and other measures of institutional maintenance.  Then, of course, the question would have to be asked, to what extent these things map to the priorities actually laid out in the New Testament by Jesus of Nazareth, who said:  ”where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Verse of the Month — November 2009

Thanksgiving

O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever.

Psalm 118:1

Associated Baptist Press – Fear Not: What does virtual rumor-mongering say about Christians?

Associated Baptist Press – Fear Not: What does virtual rumor-mongering say about Christians?

So, why are Christians so willing to believe unsubstantiated rumors? And more troubling, why are Christians, who should hold the highest standards of truth-telling, so eager to spread such rumors — and even downright libels?

A detailed, thoughtful review and analysis of a disturbing, ongoing phenomenon in American culture.  Recommended.

Stories

Over on a friend’s blog, I saw some musing which included comments about the purpose of stories, and it got me thinking. I actually stopped reading, mid-paragraph, so as to see where this thought would lead me, so here it is, after mulling for a few days. I’m going to make a rather sweeping generalization, but I think I can defend it. Here goes.

The purpose of every story is to create community.

Each of us, as a human being, which is to say, an animal that talks and thinks in words, or, if you will, is reflective of the Divine act of creation that begins with a Word (as above, so below), lives inside a story, or really a vast cycle of stories, partly of our own making: The story of my life, my family, my tribe, my town, my county, my valley, my nation, my planet, my dog, my dreams. This personal story in all of its particularities is what we are talking about when we talk about personal identity. It is of the intersection of personal stories that community is forged, and it is the overlapping of communal stories that creates a sense of individuality. We tell stories, we hear stories, and a person who does not have a story does not yet feel like a person, does not yet have a place. Some stories are powerful, and shape us. Religions and mythologies are essentially the stories that are broad enough that hearers and tellers see themselves as living inside of them; the same with political ideologies.

Of course there are larger stories and smaller stories, just as there are larger communities and smaller communities. Stories within stories. Variations, versions. But having a story in common is what binds people together. Marriages dissolve when the story of his life and the story of her life begin to diverge from one another into mutual unrecognizability, it is said, then, that they have become estranged.

When the stories a person tells himself are unintelligible by anyone else, that person becomes —has become — isolated, alienated, alone. When such a person is able to bring someone else into the circle of those who can understand, you have something else: a new community, a cult, perhaps.