OT Notes Dt. 26:1-11

1) Dt. is often a neglected resource  I first point us toward a fine book by dennis Olson of Princeton Seminary, Dt. and the Death of Moses.He reminds us tha tthe book is not only a recapitulation of the 10 Commandments but a long commentary on them. By this point, we are looking at the coveting issue. As Olson says (115) we are in the place of stewardship being an antidote to coveting.

2) this passage stands against american individualism  or the Romney version in the last insipid campaign,   I built it. It shows the social corporate nature of possessions and our responsibility toward inheritance (nahalah) of all types.Look at how v. 6 incorporates the praying people into the story itself.

3) first fruits can be a provocative image. In our time, what would be the equivalent? Note tha tit is a ritual offering that seems to be returned to the one offering it in ch. 14.

4) The almost credal recitation af the offering is a remarkable attempt to bring past tradition into the present and the future. Indeed, that is one of the goals of the entire book, is it not?

5) Gift pervades this passage. What sort of relationship exists between giver and receiver? the book, the Giver keeps rattling around in my mind as I write this. Valentine's Day just happened before this passage is read. One could do a serious or hilarious bit on the giving and receiving of Valentine's day presents.

6) Notice at the end of the passage the community nature of a celebration and who gets invited.

7) how are we still wandering Arameans? Where are we treated harshly? Where could people pray this against us? What would the land of milk and honey look like to you right now? (Now I think of Springsteen's evoking of the promised land in some of his songs)

Devotions Week of Feb. 10

Sunday February 10-Ps. 99 shouts to God the king, Holy is he. What does holiness mean to you? How would you explain it to a six year old child? For me, God’s holiness is god being set apart in both degree and kind. We recite words of the holy church, but what do we mean? To me, the holy has a sense of the numinous, the awe-inspiring, the reverent. Where do you encounter the holy. where do you seek it?

Monday-February wears on me. Resilience is a virtue that seems to me to decline a bit as we age. Not only do our muscles refuse to have the spring that they once enjoyed, but the wear and tear of life’ troubles make sit harder to spring back from adversity as well. Sometimes, nothing more than a break can restore our resilience. Sometimes, looking back at past success gives us renewed strength.

Tuesday-Lincoln’s Birthday used to be a separate holiday for schoolchildren when I was young. To tell the truth, I don’t recall that we did nearly a complete a job as we could have to explain why we felt compelled to honor him so. I keep going back to his astonishing skill with words and the depth of his moral reasoning. This day, please consider reading some of his work or read of him and allow yourself to marvel at the growth in this frontier youngster toward Mt. Rushmore.

Wednesday-Ash Wednesday starts the period of intense spiritual preparation that we designate as Lent. I love the name, as it refers to spring and spring planting. What spiritual seeds would you like to see grow in your life this year? It may well be that a spiritual New Year’s resolution has fallen along the roadside. Perhaps then we could do some re-planting. Sometimes a cold snap will kill off the hardiest of plantings, and we start again. In our frequently spiritually undisciplined lives, we all need some structure. let lent provide some this year.

Valentine’s Day always alarmed me a bit. I never felt as if I had a handle on what a properly romantic card and present should be. After all, what card, what present can seek to express the fullness of romantic love? I never felt as if I hit the nail on the head with the presents. It cannot be an accident that Song of songs was turned by the church into a way of approaching divine love through the template of romantic love: its intensity, its yearning, its sheer power.

Friday-The Wiseman Bible Group looked at psalms of lament last week. the study materials noted that laments are not reflected in the liturgy as much as their prevalence in the psalter would indicate. To me they are the great example (see 13, 22) of putting anything in our life into the safe envelope of prayer addressed to our God. What are some hurts that you would do well to include in prayer? What are some community, even national or global hurts that drive you to your knees?

Saturday-I’ve been reading a book on changing habits in my attempt to lose some weight. It suggests a variety of simple tools to help the process. One is merely telling someone in an e-mail how the day went for the goal. In our minds, when we see a succession of successes that helps our perseverance. When we note that we did not do so well, that helps us distinguish between a slip and a fall.

column on vacation to san diego

A while ago, I decided to flee winter for a bit, and I did so this past week. I thought of going on a cruise, but as cheap as they are, they were not at the bargain basement level I desired. Our lovely youngest daughter told me that at my advanced age, I need to start checking things off the bucket list, so I thought of going to the Florida Keys, but I again balked at the price. The, I heard the siren call of San Diego, and off I went.

I love going to new places, but dislike getting there. I am constantly amazed at the surliness and disrespect of the TSA folks in a service field. I remember when flying was considered to be glamorous, but now it seems as if we are herding cattle on to the well-named air bus. On our airline, they first boarded passengers form their peak list. Those of us who flew coach seemed to be in steerage, or the nadir and descent level. On the other hand, I was so grateful that the planes were on time, especially, as I had to change planes to arrive.

On Monday, we went whale watching. Not only did we encounter three grey whales, but we witnessed what the biologist assured us was mating behavior. I wondered if whales had trouble with aging, and if they had to consider Valentine’s Day presents. An unexpected bonus was a huge school of dolphin, (the biologist called them a pod) where we saw hundreds of them, young and old, filling the sea around us. We saw sea lions lazing on buoys, and saw pelicans and al sorts of aquatic birds skimming the water and floating on the currents. As a minister, I often see things through a religious lens, and these wonders of creation needed little help from that reference point.

I laughed as the local weather was bemoaning that we would have some drizzle and htat temperatures would be below 60. They were demonstrating the type of warm clothes children would need to wear if the evening temperature would dip below forty. I changed my plan to go kayaking along the seashore, as the thought of me in a wetsuit was appalling. So, I shifted plans and went to Balboa Park, so I could duck into one of its many museums if it rained a bit harder.  What a wonder it is, as it uses some of the natural environment but human skill makes a variety of gardens to decorate its landscape.

One day I marveled at natural creation in the open water, but the next day I marveled at the parade of human creativity that could build such a modern Eden that honored everything from the arts to air travel. I was at the perfect age to fall in love with space travel, as I was just starting school during the mercury program and followed it fairly closely until the first moon landing. Even at 15, I was amazed at how quickly the bloom was off in time for the second moon landing. To see the tiny Mercury capsule and the small biplanes that started the era was thrilling. We got to see the heat-scarred Apollo 9 craft, so tiny to be designed for a lunar flight. The smart phones we carry have more computing capacity than that capsule.

Then I looked above and saw a model of a predator drone. It does seem part of our condition that we turn blessings into curses with startling immediacy. Vacations take us away form the everyday, but we carry our perspectives with us in new places. Yet, vacations blast us out of the rut of the walls closing in and let us walk in a wider world. 

Feb. 3 Notes I Cor 13.

We are a bit ahead of the calendar for Valentine’s Day. This morning we heard a passage that has been used in wedding after wedding, this great hymn to love. It is a hymn of more than pretty sentiments though, as it looks squarely at obstacles to love as well as its manifestation. It sees arrogance in attitude and rudeness in action as real impediments to its life, and perhaps poison that threaten its very life. It is a testament to the sense of community in church that we so easily switched this passage to the intensity of newly married love and can barely conceive it as a message to a church community.

Love often moves toward an exclusive special quality.That’s why Jesus  almost gets lynched after his sermon started so well in Luke.(I must admit that Jesus’s sermon getting a bad reaction has given me some hope at times). Recall that he is doing this sermon for the home folks. Instead of being told how special they are, they hear about the love of God that spreads out beyond the constricted borders of an unsure heart.With their hearts and minds constricted, they are fearful that God will be as stingy as they are; there will not be enough blessings to go around.They cannot bear to hear that others will get blessings as well as them.

Even though we use this chapter for weddings, it is addressed to the church in an aspirational vein for the fractious Corinthian community.This morning let’s just pick two to emphasize in our community here. We don’t emphasize the virtues for living in Christian community or family life, for that matter, nearly enough.After all, the couple is not hearing the words of their wedding sermon, so Sunday may be a better place to dig into the chapter a bit more fully. Let’s start with the very first set of virtues patience and kindness.Paul is about building up the bonds of community. Look at most of what he says as that which supports loving relationships or threatens to undermine them. Both these virtues help produce an environment for love to grow and deepen over time. Here patience is makrothumia, being forebearing, putting up wiht the foibles of another.It has a sense of constancy, of longsuffering( in older translation), of being slow to take offense or seeking revenge. As my mother declined in her oind, my patience was sorely tested. the biggest thing that helped my patience was to stop expecting her to be the woman I knew but to see her as becoming more childlike.

In Greek, kindness is chrestotes, and a number of people must have heard a similar sound to Christ. It had the sense of someone looking out for you, of someone being a good person of integrity, so by extension to do good things for you, perhaps where the walk matches the talk. Kindness is a word that has lost a lot of its punch over the years. I keep coming back to its linkage to the word for kin, or maybe child. How should we treat family and by extension, others, would be kindly.A recent piece in Christian Century took some real care with the notion of kindness.We speak of a kindly disposition and of acts of kindness. People continue to hold on to the idea of random acts of kindness being an antidote to random acts of violence. I enjoyed a recent collection by Pete Hamill and he recalled a bus driver letting him ride on the NJ turnpike for free. Every time he sees a bus, he remembers that act of kindness.Love is the chain that connects and maintains constant acts of patience and kindness.

Transfiguration 2013 Lk. 9, 2 Cor. 3, 4, Ex. 34

Before the internet, I heard an expression, you can’t judge a book by its cover. For intorverts, we said that still waters run deep. Our vision and ability to judge is severely limited. Here we are in the season of epiphany, the season revelation, of manifestation.It hit me hard this year that this Sunday forms a frame with Epiphany Sunday. the Magi did not grasp fully what was revealed to them through the stars, but now the disciples see firsthand a revelation of the full reality of Jesus through resurrection eyes. So we move back to Epiphany and forward to the resurrection. I think of transfiguration as an inner change made visible to others. Quite simply, Jesus Christ unveils, reveals the nature of God and of being fully human in this tough, but wonderful world.

Moses was in such close contact with the deity that his face shone, so he veiled the luster. It was a protective device to allow the people to quell their fear. Paul twists the story a bit and sees it as keeping the people in the dark. We live in a time when we have seen the thick veils placed over the heads of women in Afghanistan. the veil obscures their sight and of course obscures the sight of those looking at them in public.Paul goes on to make the excellent religious point that we all have the full relgious truth veiled from us, due to our mortality, the limits of our understanding and ability to apprehend the gravitas of God.In more stark negative terms, sin is a veil over our hearts and minds. It prevents us from seeing things with any sense of objectivity.It is at the root of our willingness to accord personal virtue ot our successes and personal fault to the fialures of outhers, the blaming of situation for our failures and attributing luck to the success of others.

Paul then says that we are on the road to clarity due to the way of Jesus Christ. The burka is gone, and we what we are meant for:freedom, freedom to live as god has envisioned us.Where the spirit of God is, there is freedom-Freedom transfigures people and whole societies. The very word freedom is a transfiguration of the meaning of the human. We are not made to be slaves but free people. years ago in a Star Trek episode they encounter a primitive group of people and the leader says, “Freedom-that is worship word.” Yes, given human nature, we often abuse it. Do we mean freedom from, or freedom to? What opposite of freedom would God’s spirit be opposed to? Christian freedom is exercised in the freed from bondage to powers other than God. Christian life is not only the moment of conversion, but it is the lifelong transformation of the self to more and more resemble Jesus Christ. It affords us the opportunity to become whom god envisions us to be at our best.

Freedom reveals who we are and meant to be. Years ago a project was called Free to Be, You and Me. We rarely live that out, do we? Instead we lived behind veils as impenetrable as any awful burka. We build up so many defenses, so many facades, that we don’t recognize ourselves after a while. We are convinced that no one can accept us as we are, who we are, so we hide behind a variety of veils and try to match them to what we think they may want of us.We then go so far as to try to deny to others the freedom to be themselves, the people God intends.

Week of Feb. 3 Devotions

Feb. 3 Sunday-Ps. 71 is one of the few psalms written explicitly from the perspective of growing older. This psalm has a great sense of God being with us in all periods of our lives. it also sees aging as an important place for continuing to  be able to speak of God to others. I often say that the relative quiet of aging permits more fervent prayer than the harried lives of the middle-aged. As you have grown older, where have you noticed improvements or decline in the quality of your spiritual life?

Monday-Patience is a virtue I continue to work on. One of my issues is that I have a little timer in my head that goes off when I think someone should be finished with some task. I also seem to be overly sensitive to what I consider rude behavior when people in a line seem to act as if they deserve special treatment. One starting point is to admit the impatient feeling and then have some ways to counter it. Often my impatience is a symptom that I am feeling stressed about something else.

Tuesday-I’ve been thinking about politically correct speech lately. I do realize that words do hurt. I realize that words create stereotypes. It seems to me that we sometime equate words with actions. Speech with which I disagree, to paraphrase Jefferson, “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” It seems ot me that actions or behaviors are of more concern. Isn’t that why we seek integrity, as in walking the talk?

Wednesday- We talked about boundaries in church yesterday. Yes, we are social creatures, but if we permit others to invade our privacy, our choices, even our attitudes, it confuses things. We can keep our boundaries to tight, impermeable and then buffer ourselves from life. We can keep them too porous and act as if everything is our business, our fault, our concern. What should we let in and what should we defend against?                        

Thursday- I am preparing for a short trip. I am looking up material about the city and its environs: things to do, places to eat. I wish I were that assiduous in preparing my spirutal maps. Planning for a trip has joy and expectation connected to it, but spiritual planning feels like a dutiful behavior to me. If you could snap your fingers and move your spirutal life ot a new plane, what would it then look like? Come back to reality, what are some ways to reach that place? Could you at least take a few steps in that direction?

Friday-I’m listening to a radio station as I write this, WTTS. They play songs A through Z for a while. Some psalms use a similar format. It gives a sense of completeness, of having a chance to say your speech. A-Z also has a sense of closure. When one reaches the final letter, is it not time to move on? As a spiritual exercise, consider writing out an A-Z prayer on some virtue or vice, some facet of your relationship with God, some hope or frustration?.

Saturday-We had a talk at Rotary recently from Pere Marquette’s naturalist on bobcats, eagles, and other wildlife in our area. We are fortunate to have such a great facility in our area. When does wildlife make you appreciate creation and when does it threaten something you hold dear? How do you balance respect for creation and economic developments?

OT Notes Ex.34:29-35-transfiguration

1) Moses is a figure in the transfiguration account of course. In tradition, his lack of a burial site indicated an assumption into heaven.
2) one could work with the image of  being in the presence of god transferred a radiance to Moses. We speak of people being radiant for a variety of reasons.
3)Notice how Paul turns or twists the veil image in his rendition of it in the 2 Cor 3,4 reading.
4) The quite rare word translated as shine could be related to the word for horn in Hebrew, so that is why some pictures of Moses have him with horns, as Jerome read it that way. At this point, make up your own jokes.
5) Is there a better description of intimacy with god than speaking with a friend, face to face? What affects our intimacy with God? How does the Incarnation affect it?
6) Would not Ps. 34 make sense as a reading  (Janzen, p. 262)
7) Could we play with the veil in the temple and the veil of Moses?
8) When do you feel a spiritual veil between you and the presence of God/ when is God's will veiled? When are we veiled form ourselves? When is the veil more of a protective mask for our well-being?
9) In similar way, when do we see the light of God in our communities?
100 One could work with Moses the representative, the mediator as well. It could make a good topic to consider bridges and go-betweens in our lives.