Joseph

Matthew 1: 18-24 (NLT):

18 This is how Jesus the Messiah was born. His mother, Mary, was engaged to be married to Joseph. But before the marriage took place, while she was still a virgin, she became pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit. 19 Joseph, her fiancé, was a good man and did not want to disgrace her publicly, so he decided to break the engagement quietly.

20 As he considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream. “Joseph, son of David,” the angel said, “do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit. 21 And she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

22 All of this occurred to fulfill the Lord’s message through his prophet:

23 “Look! The virgin will conceive a child!
      She will give birth to a son,
   and they will call him Immanuel,
      which means ‘God is with us.’”

24 When Joseph woke up, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded and took Mary as his wife. 25 But he did not have sexual relations with her until her son was born. And Joseph named him Jesus.

In these opening verses of the gospel, as written by Matthew, Joseph is named five times, and Mary, three times. There is purpose and precision in the writing of the gospels, and this emphasis on Joseph by Matthew is not coincidence. The first seventeen verses of Matthew, in fact, trace the genealogy of Jesus, not through Mary, his biological parent, but through Joseph, his step-father! The genealogy establishes Joseph’s relationship to Abraham, the founder of Judaism, and to King David,the star of Judaism. So, what’s up with that?

It’s called patriarchy and Judaism was a patriarchal religion. Jews were the intended audience of Matthew, so from the genealogy to the picking and choosing of quotes from various prophets, Matthew was nailing down the Jewishness of Jesus.  It was important from the start to do that, both for his intended audience, and for the flavor of the story he was about to tell them.

It’s not hard to imagine Matthew sitting with the scrolls of the prophets, a copy of Mark’s gospel, and the other various quotes and vignettes concerning Jesus collectively called the “Q” source. Let’s face it,he was picking and choosing: the first prophetic quote above- highlighted in green- is a compilation of pieces of verses from Isaiah 7:14; 8:8, and 10. And some of Matthew’s later prophetic quotes will be even more complicatedly constructed than that.

Which leads to the point that Matthew, like the other gospel writers, was telling a story, not reporting. A story about an event is a collection of facts with soul, spiced by the storyteller’s  own personality and intentions. Think of Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men, or Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Both are stories, in different genres, about cold, straight-forward facts arranged and presented in such a way that the events they describe can be understood in larger contexts.

Joseph- good man- carries the first part of Matthew’s story of Jesus. Just as a man would have led Shabbat, worship at the temple, and leadership in all family and civic affairs. The story, to have any credibility with Matthew’s readers, had to be begun that way. That Mary was named, and that other women were named within his gospel’s later chapters, is a portent of the status of women that was already beginning to change because of the way Jesus regarded and treated them.

Something stirring and revolutionary was in the air! And Matthew wanted to share the excitement with the people he most loved. Naturally, he told the story in the colors and shapes they would most easily understand.

 

The Nativity- according to Mark

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nope, he doesn’t say a thing about it. Nor does John. For them, the story of Jesus’ birth, as told by Matthew and Luke (in different ways), was not a part of the story which needed to be told.

Now, given the big deal we make over Christmas, doesn’t that seem odd? It might be argued that each gospel was a part of a whole, since that’s how we read and apply the four New Testament books. If that was truly the case, though, wouldn’t the Matthew and Luke stories about the birth, or about numerous other episodes in Jesus’ life, be a bit more congruous? Wouldn’t you think that all the facts they wrote about would line up in perfect agreement?

In fact, each gospel was a stand alone project. There is no reason to assume- none!- that gospel writing was a group endeavor. Each was written by a different person, for a different audience, with differing motivations. Obviously, Luke and Matthew shared some source material for their gospels- the book of Mark and a collection of stories and sayings about Jesus known as the ‘Q’ source- but even those sources were specifically reshaped for the particular messages Matthew and Luke were writing.

For Mark and John, the Messiahship of Jesus began at his baptism; thus, no ‘away in the manger’ stories. That is not a minor point to be passed over on our way to Luke 2:1 or Matthew 1:18. For Mark and John, “becoming” the son of God was the important part of the story, not being “born” the son of God.

Personally, I like that viewpoint because it gives me a shot at the same status.

Permission Granted

1 Chronicles 1

1 Adam, Seth, Enosh; ²Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared; ³Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech; ⁴Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

5 The descendants of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras. ⁶The descendants of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Diphath,^* and Togarmah. ⁷The descendants of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Rodanim.^*

8 The descendants of Ham: Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan. ⁹The descendants of Cush: Seba, Havilah, Sabta, Raama, and Sabteca. The descendants of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan. ¹⁰Cush became the father of Nimrod; he was the first to be a mighty one on the earth.

11 Egypt became the father of Ludim, Anamim, Lehabim, Naphtuhim, ¹²Pathrusim, Casluhim, and Caphtorim, from whom the Philistines come.^*

13 Canaan became the father of Sidon his firstborn, and Heth, ¹⁴and the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, ¹⁵the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites, ¹⁶the Arvadites, the Zemarites, and the Hamathites.

..and on and on and on for the next 37 verses and 29 chapters, before turning to II Chronicles..!

Here’s my point, and it’s one my main points about studying the Bible:

You don’t have to read the whole thing!

There are books in the Bible that are irrelevant to all but the Hebrew historian or Talmudic expert. Like I and II Chronicles. If someone is trying to read the Bible from beginning to end, and they have actually made it through Leviticus and Numbers without deciding the garage needs cleaned, the Chronicles twins will send most of them, however well-intended, running.

Genesis and Exodus are full of the stories we are all at least a little familiar with. There are magnificent depths to be explored within those stories, but even a superficial reading can be interesting. Too bad most of the stories end there, because without their familiarity, the going from Leviticus onward through the next several books, can be difficult.

So why bother? All of those books and verses will still be there when you really need to reference them. There is nothing to be gained spiritually by plowing through names, places, and rules that simply are not relevant to anything about our lives!

Get to the good stuff quickly if you’re just beginning to read the Bible! For those who follow Jesus, here is my quick list of a suggested order (and watch this space for a longer guide which I hand out in jails but which I need to find the file of here):

John, Genesis, Mark, Luke-Acts, Matthew, Exodus, Ruth, some Psalms, Song of Solomon, Romans, 1 and II Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, the last 1/3 of Isaiah, Micah, Amos, and then Hebrews. When you’re ready for some big bites of Bible that are just flat-out weird and interesting, go for Ecclesiastes and Haggai. Don’t mess with Revelation at all for awhile, and don’t mess with it at all if you’ve got some “Left Behind” rapture teacher trying to lead you through it. You’ll be wasting your time and miss the extraordinary beauty of that book.

More about all of the above, soon.

Thanks Giving

Psalm 95

1 Oh come, let us sing to the LORD!
         Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving;
         Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms.
3 For the LORD is the great God,
         And the great King above all gods.
4 In His hand are the deep places of the earth;
         The heights of the hills are His also.
5 The sea is His, for He made it;
         And His hands formed the dry land.

There are so many things to be said about the authorship, purpose, and temporality of the psalms. But I want to look at the substance of these five verses, because in them we can see much of what we must see when studying any ancient biblical manuscripts.

The writer was deeply moved, that’s obvious! He (maybe she, but probably not) needed to express his awe, his feelings of gratitude for the world he was a part of. He uses a familiar metaphor to express the most basic understanding he has of the nature of God (originally YHWH, translated as LORD, using all caps): Rock.

The writer lived in Israel, probably near Jerusalem. Walking out of his home each morning on the way to Starbuck’s for his grande latte, he would have looked up, around, and down at what he was passing over, under, and beside and drawn certain conclusions about what he saw. Later, reaching for some means of describing God, the indescribable Mystery, he would have- as all of us do- grabbed a metaphor in an attempt to say what he wanted to say.

Metaphors take something we do know about and liken it to something we do not have adequate words to describe. God is a Rock? Of course not, but the writer took the largest, heaviest, most permanent thing he saw on his morning walk, and likened God’s attributes to the attributes of that thing- a Rock.

Then he looked up and out with his eyes and saw other magnificent things, from his vantage point: hills and valleys, hewn of Rock, just as if God the Rock were holding all the dry land in his hands. Again, the writer is extending his metaphor, and successfully so: we are able, because of his word choices, to feel something of what he is feeling; we, too, can appreciate his beliefs and observations about God’s size, power, and eternality. They give voice, perhaps, to some of our own beliefs and observations.

In conversations over time, metaphors are fluid: they change. An enemy in 1900 may have described as “dangerous as a lion.” Today, an enemy could be described as being as “dangerous as an envelope filled with anthrax.” Because the Psalms have been written down and printed, however, they have been removed from an evolving dialogue which would have caused many of their metaphors, and some particular objects of adulation and wonder, no doubt, to change.

Sooooooooooo…dare we make some changes, at least in our own Thanks Giving dialogue? OK, I will:

Oh come, let us sing to the LORD!
Let us shout joyfully to the Great Universal Gravity that gives us being .                                                                              Let us walk in Continuing Creation with thanksgiving and awe for the Continuing Mysteries;
Let us shout joyfully to Spirit with psalms, electric and acoustical, modular and digital, loudly and quietly.
For the LORD is the great Spirit who permeates everything,
And the great Source of Spirituality above all religions.
In the Spirit’s hand are the farthest cosmos of the universe;
The mysterious heights of the constellations are also the Spirit’s realities.
The oceans are the Spirit’s reflection, and all matter
is the great Spirit’s language of praise.

Works for me..!

 

 

Inspired Scripture

2 Timothy 3:16-17  “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, ¹⁷so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (KJV)

From a letter of Paul, to his helper and fellow pastor, Timothy, this quote is one of those oft-spoken biblical admonitions that screams for context! We can assume that Paul wrote it sometime in the 60′s. (The 0060′s, that is!) So what, at that time, would have been the Scripture about which Paul was referring to as having been God-breathed?

At that point, the Gospels themselves had barely made it out of the small circles of new believers in Jesus Christ they were circulating in. Still in handwritten, copied forms, and still being read by those few who could read for the benefit of the majority who couldn’t, the gospels had barely created a ripple at this point in the building of the Church. Word of mouth was still the main basis for knowledge of the obscure Jewish rabbi who been executed by Rome, but who, his followers claimed, was still alive.

Paul’s letters themselves had yet to be gathered together in one place from the various churches and individuals he had written them to. That concerted collection effort was still 60-70 years away and resulted from a church in-fight between two early Christian leaders who were arguing over the seemingly different natures of God presented in ancient Hebrew writings and by Jesus. Marcion said the God of the Hebrews was different than the God of Jesus. Tertullian said it was the same God, and gathered together as many of Paul’s still existent letters, including several to Timothy, to support his contention.

When Paul wrote the letters, the books of Hebrews and Revelation, had yet to be written. Collecting the books themselves that make up the New Testament was still at least a hundred years, and countless committee meetings in the future. There was no New Testament that existed when Paul wrote that all Scripture was God-breathed, so- again- what was he referring to?

A good case can be made for the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and the Prophets. Those are the Scriptures that Paul, Pharisee, would have had easy access to and would have known very well. But even then, the Greek word translated as God-breathed is much better rendered as inspired. And therein is the key to my understanding of what Paul was telling Timothy (and anyone looking over Timothy’s shoulder):

All Scripture- whoever wrote it, whenever they wrote it, and whether or not one of the various Church committees stamped it APPROVED or not- all Scripture is inspired. Someone was moved through the stories they’d heard about God, or was motivated by conclusions they’d made about God, to share those stories and conclusions with others, by writing them down. Paul had something very important to say to Timothy, so he wrote it down and sent it. He was inspired to do so.

Now, of course, by those definitions, I could claim this blog as being inspired. And you could claim your thinking or writing about God was inspired in the same way Paul, Mark, Moses, David, or John were inspired.

We could do that.

And I think we’d be correct in doing so.

Generosity

Matthew 6: 22, 23- “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”

In Jesus’ day, a ‘healthy eye’ meant generous. It was an idiom, a part of speech like when we say someone “hit the ceiling.” People would have heard what Jesus said simply, exactly as he spoke it. Listen how simple it is: “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if you’re generous, your whole body will be full of light; but if you’re stingy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is dark, how great is the darkness!”

It is not hard to take these simple and elegant words of Jesus and turn them into a testimony to our own intellectual abilities. We can turn that which is divinely simple into something complicatedly human. We can analyze the words endlessly from a 21st century, western point of view and turn them into a theological treatise on healthy morality. Or we can- simply- take Jesus at his idiomatic best: Generosity = Light.

And Light, in the Bible- and in our lives, is always a good thing.

a couple basic premises

Whenever I lead a Bible study, I make sure everyone there knows the basic assumptions I make that will influence what they hear me say. I don’t want anyone to think I have a lock on truth; nor do I want to spend any time at all arguing about these basic positions. I invite them, as I invite anyone, to leave this discussion now if it will bother you to no end that:

1. I do not not believe the Bible is the Word of God. It is words about God, written by persons of very different cultures than ours, in their desire to express what they had been able to discern and understand about their interactions with the Mystery around them. The Bible did not come floating down from heaven in a zip-lock baggie; it came from the minds and pens of people who were looking, exploring, wondering, and sometimes finding, just like we are.

2. I believe Jesus is the Word of God. John 1:14- The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. You can hang all the dogma you want to on that statement, and I’ll probably disagree with most of it, but I do believe that Jesus is the best expression we have of what God is like. (At the same time, there some other really good expressions of God, as well! Much more about them, later.)

3. I believe the palette of God is found within the evolution of all things, from the universe itself, to the conception, hatching, and growth of a daisy or a tadpole. If you want to think God is a magician on a stage pulling stuff out of a top hat, so be it, you’ll hate what I have to say. Leave. Spare the challenges to your intellect. And the assault on mine. (I’ll still love you!)

Argue all you want with me about everything else, I’ll always listen nicely! But not about those things. We’ll never agree.

Bon apetit! See you back here Monday!

In the beginning..

Genesis 1: 3 Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.”

John 1: 6 God sent a man, John the Baptist, 7 to tell about the light so that everyone might believe because of his testimony. 8 John himself was not the light; he was simply a witness to tell about the light. 9 The one who is the true light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.

The light preceded the sun, and John the Baptist preceded the Son. That’s how it was written, and those verses will be the foundation for every jot and tittle of analysis, speculation, reaction, and investigation of the Bible which follows.

It is about the Light- the Light that preceded everything that followed (in the Genesis account), and the Light that precedes every person who follows it (in the gospel of John).  I’ll be looking for understanding and knowledge about God, and (be warned) I don’t mind at all treading on the edges of human intellectual limitations, especially my own.

But, most particularly, this study will be about following the Light whom John the B was announcing: Jesus. It will never be about discovering doctrine. It will never be about proclaiming, establishing, or defending dogma. The Bible was written by humans as they reacted to their environment and to the Mysteries of that environment. They used the best tools they had available to them at those times to do that: their eyes, minds, and imaginations. The Truths they discerned were part of the foundation for all the Truths which subsequent generations have discovered, using a continually growing repertoire of other tools.

I choose not to relegate all that I might discover about God to a box that is no larger than my personal and immediate ability to think. I choose not to follow Jesus in the footsteps of those who have turned his Light into thermometers and yardsticks and billy clubs.

I do choose to use my own eyes, mind, and imagination, along with the recorded words, telescopes, microscopes, sacred writings, speculations, poetry, criticism, and behavior of others- including the birds of the air and the lilies of the field- to do what I am intending to do here.

That said, watch this space. I’ll begin, with regularity -after the weekend- to share whatever Light I’ve been finding,  with this part of the Continuing Creation.