Bible Study

I find it astonishing how our minds can twist simple facts to suit our prejudices.  “Bible study” comes to mind in this respect. 

Reading a document is one thing.  Studying a document is entirely another thing.  For me, reading the Bible is not studying it. 

Study is a search for truth, and in searching for truth the student who has any degree of integrity will examine any and all sources of information available and being honest about her/his personal inclinations. 

But nobody can do that entirely.  Bible study involves bringing up issues of language, history, culture, and the knowledge and opinions of today’s scholars and their predecessors from centuries before.  That may be why a lot of people are put off from even reading the Bible.  Yes, there are good faith-building stories there, and comfort, encouragement, even direction; but there are also some zingers to one’s faith and there are ancient cultural mores that do not conform to the spirit in Jesus’ teaching.  Not a lot of us want to struggle with such a mixture.  That dusty book on the shelf is dusty for a number of reasons. 

Take the story of Sodom for instance.  That was God’s judgment on homosexuality, correct?  Not.  We certainly hear plenty of that interpretation from Americanized Christianity, but wait… Would the interpretation of another writer from the Bible itself carry any authority?  It should, but nobody seems to pay attention to the prophet Ezekiel who, in condemning Jerusalem in the 16^th chapter says, “The crime of your sister Sodom was pride, gluttony, calm complacency… they never helped the poor and needy; they were proud, and engaged in loathsome practices before me, and so I swept them away as you have seen.”(Jerusalem Bible)  “Loathsome practices” is listed as a repeat, for emphasis, on the social injustices of the city.  Homosexuality is not even mentioned, nor was it even known as a “condition” by that Biblical author.  And yet, our homophobic culture today actually uses “Sodomy” as a legal term to describe sexual practices that offend some people.  I am so delighted to see the credibility of this mindset slowly melting away.  And I don’t think it happened as a result of “Bible study” by Americans.  It has more spiritual roots. 

This may hurt our Christian pride, but people of all religions, and people with no religion, all normally have a sense of justice.  The atheistic communist, the pagan, countless others, all possess that same kind of sight.  It would seem that Americans, whatever their spirituality, have come to see the illogic and intrinsic wrongness in our homophobic culture and are moving to correct the problem, sometimes in direct and public opposition to their own churches’ policies. 

I’m certainly not saying that the Bible has no value.  I’m just saying that we must be aware of a greater source. We should likewise be aware that our congregations and religious institutions have similar status.  Ideally they are places of both mutual support and challenge and whose real life comes from the spirit of Christ.  There’s more to do.  Perhaps next on the list should be: Stewardship of God’s Creation, and Stopping the War on the Poor. 

There’s hope after all.  To paraphrase more than one great person of faith, “Without God, we can’t; and God, without us, won’t.”  (attributed to Nelson Mandela, Augustine of Hippo, Desmond Tutu, and others in various forms)

You Can Do Anything

Getting old has made me more brazen.  I care a (little) less about what people think of me.  I don’t have time to jack around with stuff I consider trivial and I don’t have some kind of compulsion to fix every little thing I see going wrong. 

Peter Kjeseth, if you are reading this I still remember sitting in your office and hearing you say, “Neal, you can do anything.  Why don’t you consider the mission field for your first call?”  

That was good advice and Rhonda and I had five delightful and adventurous years as a result.  And the villagers taught us as much as we taught them.  

We all knew that I really couldn't do everything.  I just took that as encouragement.  But I have learned another thing, Peter, and that is the ability to accept and even celebrate the things I can’t do.  I am driven by the command of Jesus to seek justice for the disempowered and pray that I will do so, as I am gifted, until I have no more energy.  As for how that’s done, I have to explore.  I will “push the envelope” for the gospel, but I truly believe now that, when seeking out God’s will, I occasionally do people more good by not doing because it’s not about me.  

My voice is failing.  I've also come to realize that I have a genuine disability in “reading people.”  That is, I can’t get past face-value when people speak to me.  I can’t read between the lines.  It’s a little like being color-blind I guess.  

Albert Einstein supposedly said, “The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he(she) has attained liberation from the self.”  None of us need to have an IQ of 160 to accept ourselves as we are and know that the greatest force of love in the universe is one with us too.  That’s salvation for me.

~ Neal

I'm Not Afraid to Die

“I’m not afraid to die.”  

How often do we hear this?  Have we said it ourselves?  

And smaller “passages”: Letting go of a possession can be, in a sense, letting go of a little bit of one’s life.  Are we becoming a nation of people clinging to money and possessions as some sort of entitlement?  

Let’s say we accept the idea that possession of many things separates us from genuine peace.  In moments like that we can say, from the heart, that we could part with these things and be better off.  

But watch what happens when the time comes.  

It’s entirely another matter when the doctor tells me that I have to give up salt, now, or die.  Perhaps I had been saying that I was cutting back, hopefully, eventually, to the point where I regained my health.  But now??  I’m not ready for that big step.  The time is wrong. 

Here’s where I discover that it’s not the intention that counts so much as the timing.  This has to be my idea.  I have to be ready. It is going to be dreadfully unpleasant, frightening, if I’m not prepared to some degree. 

A mortal injury, an incurable disease, unexpected loss of a loved one, the fire that destroys our property… let’s be honest.  The timing is never right.  I know of only one way to live with this.  

We have made all this stuff a part of ourselves, which is actually a good thing.  But in taking the next step, the feeling of possession, we begin to lose our spiritual health.  By “possession” I mean the exclusion of others.  

How about… making it a habit to pass things on, not letting them sit around and begin sticking to us.  Let’s not just accumulate things, let’s give things away more than we have been doing – a gift to a darling niece or a beloved charity.  Sell stuff, at a profit or a loss, as a frequent habit.  In this way we give of ourselves.  In this way the timing is frequent and joyful and that final act of giving up our life here, is just the last of many.  Perhaps then, when the time comes to go through the gate we won’t have so much baggage holding us back.

~ Neal

The Devil Walks the Streets

It’s Halloween and the Devil walks the streets.  

A preacher tells her flock that Halloween is a pagan festival.  

A priest tells his flock that Halloween, the eve of All Saints Day, is connected to a celebration of people who have built up and influenced the Christian faith, and who have died in God’s grace.  

In my opinion both of them are right.  

Some of our Halloween customs are connected with the pagan celebration of Samhain at this time of year, when it is believed that “the veil separating life and death becomes thinner.”  And it has been the practice of the Christian church in new venues to appropriate locally held customs and beliefs and apply those very pagan elements of a culture to Christian teachings and customs – hence Halloween as it is now.  

Taking a people’s previous religious customs and adapting them to Christianity is a gentle way to bring people to an understanding of the Gospel, and yet some people vehemently oppose this practice, calling it “syncretism.” 

So the devil walks the Halloween streets and the devil is not a ghost or a corpse; the devil is a bigot.  If I want to feel superior, I need to separate myself or my belief system, from others and then declare my beliefs superior.  I don’t think Jesus’ intent was ever to instill a sense of superiority in his followers so when I hear Christians railing against someone else’s beliefs I immediately doubt the hearts of the accusers.  

When we, with prejudice, make a blanket condemnation of other religions and try to exercise control in our own favor we are only exposing the frailty of our own faith in the presence of another, when in fact that other faith can inform us about our own.

~Neal