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No Place Like Home

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

2 Corinthians 5:6-11, 14-16

“We’re at home in the body,” says Paul the Apostle…at home in this vessel that bruises and jostles and ages and wrinkles and sneezes and bleeds, at home in this meat case of incessant needs, at home in this temple of hungers and appetites yearning for ecstasy, longing for paradise, wishing escape from our aches and our pains, our own wounded psyches, our time-addled brains. From the tips of your toes to the crown of your dome, be it ever so…broken… there’s no place like home.

There’s no place that needs such upkeep and maintaining. One day you’re feasting, the next you’re abstaining. One day it’s easy to carry your weight, the next day you wonder “Who packed all this freight?” One day you’re an athlete racking up points, the next you’re a senior with bionic joints. One day you’re a tower of strength, in your prime. The next day lumbago is twisting your spine. The years pile on and give you a licking, but with diet and meds the ticker keeps ticking. So we take baby aspirin and pray for catharsis because, after all, home’s where the heart is.

Home’s where the heart is…so, although we are slowing, we’re still pretty confident about where we’re going. We walk by faith, not merely by sight–especially when nature calls three times a night. But despite all our physical hurdles and hobbles, despite how our little world teeters and wobbles, despite all our blindness and deafness and woe we still, pretty much, know which way to go. Though our feet may meander, our attention may roam, softly and tenderly Christ calls us home.

Christ calls us home. And yes, we are judged. We stand here before him all battered and smudged, we feel every scar—especially those we’ve inflicted—every lie or dark deed–we stand here convicted. But we stand here with Christ who died once and for all so that our death is wrapped up in his in one ball of death-killing love and mercy and grace that lifts us right out of that self-centered place where we wallow in fear and ego and worry and gross self-importance and anger and hurry. We find mercy and grace, forgiveness, shalom—our souls wrapped in love until Christ is our home.

Christ is our home. So we see with new eyes—a new point of view—and to our surprise, because Christ is more than a mere human being, we see that there’s really no mere anything. Or mere anyone–we are, all of us, deeper, more complex, more cherished, and no life is cheaper than yours or than mine or than anyone else’s. We find our true selves when we learn to be selfless, when we fall into Christ and let love conform us, let the Spirit inspire, reshape and transform us, till in this slow stew of transfiguration we see that in Christ there is new creation.

In Christ, new creation. All things are reborn—the ones you love most, the parties you scorn, the planet itself, the stars in the skies—all things are made new and we see with new eyes. Old habits, old angers, old grudges, old fears, addictions, obsessions, your old unshed tears, old guilts that trouble your sleep in the night, opinions and bias that narrow your sight—it all fades away to allow a fresh start in Christ, your new home, in Christ, your new heart. The old fades away as the new takes its place and life becomes grace upon grace upon grace.

Grace upon grace, even through the long waiting that drags on our days as we’re anticipating that final renewal, the post-mortem waking, when you’ll shine like a jewel at the final remaking of all things that are and all things that will be and all things that were. And all you. And all me. The blossom that hides in the seed is concealed and what we will be has not yet been revealed. And though we’re impatient to make our escape, like a nymph in a chrysalis we’re still taking shape. But home’s where the heart is and our hearts are glowing, so we speak with confidence about where we’re going. We walk by faith, not merely by sight. Love urges us on and Christ is our light. Our feet may meander, our attention may roam but softly and tenderly, Christ guides us home.

Catch the Wind

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

But some of the believers who belonged to the sect of the Pharisees stood up and said, “It is necessary for them to be circumcised and ordered to keep the law of Moses.” Acts 15:5

Sometimes it takes the Church a while to get in sync with what the Spirit is doing. That’s nothing new. You don’t have to read too deeply into the Book of Acts to see that this has been the story of the Church from the very beginning. The Holy Spirit keeps surprising the members and leaders of the nascent Church by inviting, inspiring and embracing persons they would never have thought to invite into their movement. The apostles keep trying to do the right thing as they see it, but the Spirit often has other plans.

Take the appointment of Matthias, for instance. In the first chapter of Acts the disciples decide that they need to replace Judas. Apparently they’re just uncomfortable with a core leadership of eleven. Twelve is a better number—much better mojo than eleven. So they find two men who meet the job qualifications, Justus and Matthias. They roll the dice and Matthias wins the job. And then he promptly disappears from the pages of the New Testament. The Spirit, it seems, had other ideas about who the new 12th Apostle should be. We’ll come back to that.

It takes the Church a while to work things out, to figure out who they are, to figure out that the Spirit is radically inclusive in ways that push their buttons and stretch their boundaries. It takes them a while, for instance, to accept that the Holy Spirit is embracing both Hebrews and Hellenists, two Jewish groups who were pretty good at finding reasons to dislike each other, into Jesus’ family of faith. You can find hints that it’s not all peaches and cream between these two groups in chapters 6, 9 and 11.

Imagine how startled they all are when Philip baptizes a Samaritan sorcerer named Simon (chapter 8). Is new life in Christ available for Samaritans? How can it be possible that a magician is acceptable? Doesn’t Deuteronomy 18 clearly say that we’re to have nothing to do with magicians? Doesn’t Leviticus 20 say that they should be put to death? But Philip just goes and baptizes him because the Spirit moved Simon Magus to believe in Jesus!

Oh, and then there’s the Ethiopian eunuch. Talk about a guy who’s cut off! This is a guy who had to stand outside the temple to pray (Leviticus 21, Deuteronomy 23). But the Holy Spirit hand delivers Philip to the side of his chariot so he can lead the Ethiopian through a Bible study in Isaiah and explain that Jesus is the fulfillment of the prophesy he’s reading. And once again, thanks to a handy pool at the side of the road, Philip goes ahead and baptizes him—makes him part of the Church! He’s not allowed in the temple, but Philip brings him immediately into the company of Jesus whether the company likes it or not.

This is the repeating thread of the Book of Acts. The boundaries are stretched. The door is pressed open a little wider every time. The Spirit pushes aside their preconceptions of just who can be part of the movement, just who can belong in the Church of Jesus. And apparently the invitation is open to people you would least suspect or ever imagine.

Let’s go back to Matthias. The Spirit certainly put Matthias to good use. Tradition says he preached in Judea, Cappadocia, Aethiopia and, eventually Georgia (the one next to Russia, not the one next to Alabama). But useful, honorable and productive as he was, God had someone else in mind to be the designated hitter and it turned out to be someone that the other 11 would never have thought of in a million years.

If you had told the apostles on that chapter one day as they rolled the dice for Matthias that Jesus was going to make a guy who was viciously persecuting the church, a guy who would stand approvingly as the official witness as one of their own was stoned to death—if you had told them that a guy they feared more than anyone would end up being tagged by the Spirit to become the most enthusiastic and productive of all the apostles, they would have thought you were possessed. And not in a good Holy Spirit kind of way. But resurrected Jesus, himself, appeared to Saul of Tarsus and set him on a path that would convert him from Persecutor Saul into the Apostle Paul. Jesus invited the Church’s worst enemy to become one of its greatest leaders. You’d better believe it took the Church a while to get used to having him around and to accept that he really was one of them. See Acts 9 for details.

And then came the most difficult transition of all. In chapter 10, Peter has a vision where God shows him every kind of animal and invites him to “kill and eat.” Peter protests that he has always kept kosher and, gosh, thank you, but “I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.” “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” says God, and repeats the lesson a couple of times just to be sure Peter gets it. Then the Spirit sends Peter to the house of Cornelius, a Roman Centurion. An Italian. A gentile.

I don’t think we can adequately grasp in our day and age just what a huge leap this was and just how difficult it was for the Church, which still understood itself as a Jewish movement, indeed, saw itself as the fulfillment of all that it meant to be Jewish—how difficult it was for them to accept that Gentiles were being invited to join the fold. We can get a hint, of course. In chapter 11, Peter is called to task and has to defend his decision to baptize Cornelius and all his household. In chapter 15 the apostles all assemble in Jerusalem in the first Council of the Church to decide if gentile believers have to be circumcised and keep Jewish dietary laws. And even after the Council makes its decision the issue isn’t entirely put to bed—it continues to rear its head in Galatians, Ephesians and Romans. And that’s part of the problem. Instead of seeing them as persons whom Jesus loves and the Spirit has called, some believers, especially the Pharisees, continue to see them as an issue. But the Spirit blows where it wills (John 3), and the door gets opened ever wider.

This is the history of the Church: the Spirit opens the door ever wider. It takes time, sometimes, for the Church to catch up. It takes time for people to realize that women and men can sit together in worship. It takes time for people to accept that worship doesn’t have to be conducted in the language the grandparents brought from the old country. It takes some getting used to the idea that Germans and Swedes and Danes and Norwegians can all be part of the same denomination or even the same congregation. It takes time to agree that women don’t have to wear hats. Or gloves. It takes time to accept that persons of all races and ethnic backgrounds can sing together in the same choir and sit together in the same pews. It takes time to agree that divorce is no reason to exclude someone from Christ’s table. It takes time to realize that 1950 has come and gone and that’s not a bad thing–good riddance to it. It takes time to realize that these other people who puzzle us or make us wary are also called by Christ and moved by the Spirit to participate fully in our family of faith. It takes time to stop thinking of them as an issue and start to see them as persons. And yet the story of our faith from the Book of Acts to the present day is a story of God opening the door ever wider no matter how often we try to close it.

In my own congregation we are taking steps toward becoming a Reconciling in Christ congregation. That means that we would make a positive statement of invitation to our LGBTQ neighbors and actively invite them to join us at the Little Church With A Big Heart. I wonder, though, if we aren’t being too careful in our process, in our efforts to give our members a chance to ask questions and state opinions and voice their anxieties. As I read the Book of Acts I note that God did not call a congregational meeting or present a series of articles on Evangelizing the Stranger before sending Philip to Simon Magus and the Ethiopian eunuch. Jesus didn’t take the church through a Bible Study on Conversion before yanking Saul off the Damascus Road and drop-kicking him into leadership in the movement he once tried to destroy. The Spirit did not prepare a series of instructive sermons on inclusiveness before sending him to the Gentile Roman Commander with the words “You must not call profane what I have made clean” still ringing in his ears.

We must not call profane what God has made clean. I must not think of anyone as an “outsider” if God is inviting everyone inside. And most of all, I need to remember that in this strange and wonderful organism called the Body of Christ there is room even for me. A gentile.

For God So Loved…

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be destroyed but may have everlasting life. For God did not send his son into the world to judge the world, but so that the world could be saved through him. –John 3:16-17, translation by Richmond Lattimore

You get used to hearing a thing a certain way and it’s hard to hear it any other way. You get used to seeing things a certain way and it’s hard to see them any other way. It’s not just attitude or stubbornness that does this, it’s at least partly the way our brains work. The human brain, says psychologist James Alcock, is a belief engine. It automatically creates neural pathways to reinforce the patterns, ideas and meanings that we already know and it automatically reacts with wariness to anything that doesn’t quite fit the familiar paradigm.

Take that Bible verse above, for instance. John 3:16 is the most memorized verse in all the Christian scriptures. But I think most of us learned to see it and hear it a certain way when we were small. First, if your experience is like mine, you learned it in Sunday School and you learned it in isolation from what comes before it and after it. You memorized it and treasured it, but it pretty much stood alone in your mind, isolated from the story of Nicodemus, set apart from the very important message that Jesus didn’t come to judge but to save. I was a full grown adult before Pr. Darcy Jensen called my attention to that very important verse 17, and frankly, I was a bit gob smacked! Jesus did not come to judge (or condemn, depending on your translation) but to save!

And to save what? Well, the world, of course. Except not exactly the whole world, because most of us, I think, thought of “the world” as “the people,” the “everyone” the “whosoever” from verse 16. So what we really heard was “God so loved the people that he gave his only son…” And that’s okay as far as it goes except that the word for “world” in the original Greek text is kosmos. As in cosmos. As in all creation. God loves all creation. Jesus came to save all creation!

And there’s that verb to save again. Most of us learned, I think, that this meant Jesus would rescue us from a very painful and nasty afterlife that was the default destination for everyone except his special pals. And yes, to save can mean to rescue. But it can also mean to heal, to make whole, to restore, to preserve.

The point of all this is that sometimes new information does break through the old patterns so that we can see and hear old, familiar things in new ways and our world is enlarged. Sometimes that new information can be life-changing.

In The Bromeliad Trilogy by Terry Pratchett, Masklin, a gnome, tries to come to grips with all the strange ways that new information has been turning their comfortable little gnome world upside down. He does a capable job of leading their community through a nearly catastrophic series of changes, but the power of new information doesn’t really hit home with him until his girlfriend, Grimma, discovers an encyclopedia. New information changes her world, and by extension, his. He laments to a friend,

“I told her we were going to get married, and all she could talk about was frogs. She said there’s these hills where it’s hot and rains all the time, and in the rainforests there are these very tall trees and right in the top branches of the trees there are these like great big flowers called…bromeliads, I think, and water gets into the flowers and makes little pools and there’s a type of frog that lays eggs in the pools and tadpoles hatch and grow into new frogs and these little frogs live their whole lives in the flowers right at the top of the trees and don’t even know about the ground, and once you know the world is full of things like that, your life is never the same.”

Once you know, your life is never the same. “Knowing things changes you. You can’t help it.” says Masklin in a later chapter. You can’t help it. And maybe that’s another reason we resist new information because once we see something in a new and different way, we can’t unsee it. But the transformative power of our faith lies, at least in part, in our ability to see the world and each other with fresh eyes. We are to continually be transformed by the renewing our minds.

For centuries our theology has, for the most part, been anthropocentric, centered on humanity. On us. But we don’t have to change too much in the way we read or hear our sacred texts to develop a theology of ecology. For God so loved the cosmos… This is how much God loved all of creation…

God, in Christ, is certainly calling us to do whatever we can to rescue the people of this world from the various and sundry miseries that can make life a living hell. But if we read it just a little differently, with new information, we might see that we, in Christ, are really being called to an even bigger job, to the healing and restoration of the whole world. All of it… including those tiny frogs who live in their tiny pools in the bromeliads in the tops of the Amazon trees.

Betrayed- A Maundy Thursday Meditation

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

“It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” ― William Blake

Betrayed. It’s such a gut-wrenching word, isn’t it? Betrayed. Just to say it, just to read it can open up that aching hollow in the pit of your stomach, can make the room tilt, can dim the light and warmth of the brightest day. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t felt it at one time or another.

Betrayed. The word can conjure up faces you haven’t thought of in years, or bring to mind places and events you thought were long ago laid to rest. It can test your claims of forgiveness. Betrayal cannot happen unless first there is trust. It is, by definition, a breach of trust.

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” –1 Corinthians 11:23-24

We hear these words every week in the Words of Institution. I was taught in Confirmation, and the lesson was repeated in seminary, that the most important words here are the words for you. That’s what Martin Luther said: the most important words we hear as we receive the sacrament are the words for you. I’m certainly not going to argue with that. I believe that every time we receive the sacrament we are having a powerful encounter with Christ. I think that’s happening on both a personal level and on a community level. The you is both singular and plural, although in the Greek text it is decidedly plural, all y’all.

Lately, however, the word in the Words that gives me pause is the word betrayed. On the night he was betrayed. I find it remarkable that, knowing everything that was about to happen, knowing that a friend who had followed him, listened to his teaching, watched him perform miracles, a friend who had travelled with him, camped with him and broken bread with him was leaving the room to betray him, to arrange for his death—knowing all this, Jesus still took the time and energy to give his followers, to give us, a gift.

I can’t help but think that this betrayal was very much on his mind when he picked up that piece of Passover bread and transformed its meaning with the words, “This is my body.” This is my body that is even now being betrayed. This is my body that will suffer in ways you won’t want to remember. So when you see that suffering and your mind reels, bring your staggering thoughts back to this bread. Think of how it takes life to sustain life. Think of how the wheat gives its all, its stalk cut off at the ground, its long stem, once supple and green, desiccated into sun-bleached straw, its nutritious seeds ground to powder, all to sustain your life. Think of how it is transformed into a loaf, a thing that bears no resemblance to what it was except by its flavor. Think of how in that new form it can serve many whereas when it was a single seed it was not even enough to meet the needs of one. Think of how in passing through the oven its ordeal of baking fills the room with one of the most restful, restorative fragrances known to humankind. Think of how there is redemption and new life in its pain.

Pain is the French word for bread. It is a strange quirk of our languages and there is no clear etymological connection, but I think of it almost every time I serve communion. Pain is bread. Bread is pain. It’s pronounced differently than our English word pain—more like pan—but even knowing that there is no clear linguistic relationship between French pain and English pain, my mind and heart refuse to accept that it is mere coincidence or accident that pain means bread.

The bread that heals us is pain. It is the pain of betrayal. It is the pain of humiliation. It is the pain of physical ordeal. For you. For me. For us. It is a pain to end all pain, eventually. A pain to make us cling to each other and make us vow that we will do whatever we can to save anyone, everyone, else from ever having to endure such pain again.

The Light Side of Lent

Steve Beckham 5 Comments

“Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light. There is nothing deceitful in God, nothing two-faced, nothing fickle.” -James 1.17 (The Message)

Lent came early for me this year, its deep, contemplative shadow absorbing some of the shine of Christmas, Epiphany and Transfiguration, not dimming those shining feasts, exactly, but certainly making them stand out in starker contrast so that I could examine more of their details, looking past the sheer brightness of the revealed Christ to see the very human Jesus who is often overshadowed by all that incandescent divinity, obscured under the heaviness of all that light. You have to look through some pretty dark lenses and filters if you’re going to see what’s happening on the surface of the sun.

What happened was this: on the 5th day of Christmas I learned that in a deep and dark precinct of my body, a place where, literally, the sun don’t shine, a gang of cells had become rebellious, mutating and multiplying according to their own whim instead of according to their ordained function. In other words, cancer. If it had its own way, this gang of cells would take over everything, never realizing that in doing so they would destroy themselves by contaminating and collapsing the little universe in which they live and move and have their being, namely me.

Ah, but even in the valley of the shadow there are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light; even the cross has to stand in the light to throw a shadow. I am blessed to live in a time when there is a potent tool to suppress the cellular rebellion inside me. And get this… that tool is—are you ready?—light! Light is quite literally saving my life. In the 2nd week of Epiphany I began my own little Lent. Every day for 40 days (really, 40 days!) I go to a clinic and lie down on a table under a linear accelerator which bombards me with a stream of photons. Photons. Particles of light! It works like this: the rebellious cells can’t stand the photons, the light. They wither and die. But the healthy cells adapt. “And this is the judgment,” says John 3:19, “that the light has come into the world but some love darkness because they are up to no good.”

Oh, the metaphors! Oh, the analogies! One could riff on all the cancerous business of contemporary culture or personal failings for all 40 days of Lent and still barely scratch the surface. But let’s not. Yes, there are devils and beasts in the dark hollows of our personal wildernesses, but there are also angels. See Mark 1:13 if you don’t believe me.

So here is Lent–forty days to shine a little light on what ails you. Forty days to shine some light into the darkness of your duffle and see if anything slithers away. Forty days to lay out your laundry in the sunshine and maybe dispose of some of those old attitudes and ideas that never did fit quite right on a child of God. Here is Lent—a good gift of a season full of shadows, but shadows that testify to the presence and power of the Light.

Note:  My 40 sessions of radiation therapy will be complete on Tuesday, March 17, the Feast of St. Patrick. 

Make Believe

Steve Beckham 6 Comments

It’s only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea, but it wouldn’t be make believe if you believed in me.—Paper Moon, 1933

Make believe. Those two words have been sticking in my head ever since I read this excerpt last week from Wishful Thinking by Frederick Buechner:

“You make believe that the tasteless wafer and 
cheap port are his flesh and blood. You make believe that by
 swallowing them you are swallowing his life into your life and 
that there is nothing in earth or heaven more important for 
you to do than this.
 It is a game you play because he said to play it. ” Do this 
in remembrance of me.” Do this. Play that it makes a difference. Play that it makes sense. 
If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that 
you are a child.” Continue reading “Make Believe” →

The Unintentional Tyranny of the KJV

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

The other day we were having some back and forth on Facebook about Bible translation issues in response to an article I re-posted on my wall from http://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/articles-and-resources/deliberate-mistranslation-in-the-new-international-version-niv/ about some of the agenda-driven translation choices in the NIV. One problem not mentioned in the article, though, “afflicts” nearly all translation teams and is, I suspect, mandated by Bible publishers. That problem, and it has enormous implications, is the perceived obligation to not stray too far from the King James Version, especially in the most familiar passages. This is not because the KJV is a particularly good translation. In many, many ways, it is not, and for a fuller understanding of why, I strongly recommend the book God’s Secretaries by Adam Nicolson. But for all its faults as a translation, the KJV has been, for generations, The Bible; for some denominations, it is still the only translation allowed.

As a pastor who usually preaches the lectionary texts, I quite frequently find it necessary or useful to single out a particular word or phrase in the text and talk about translation choices—choices which may have significant impact on the theology and application that arises from the passage. In this week’s gospel, there’s a wonderful case in point from Matthew 11:29-30.

“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” That’s the NRSV translation and it hews closely to the KJV though the language is updated. “Meek” becomes “gentle” and “ye” becomes “you,” and so on, but it still says what the KJV says.

Now, putting aside the fact that if you’re preaching or teaching this text you should probably spend a moment talking about what a yoke is unless you’re in a rural community where horses and mules are still used, the real translation issue here is that the Greek word zygon, which has been translated as “yoke” ever since it appeared that way in the KJV, has another meaning. It can also mean a balancing scale, the kind used in the marketplace to weigh something.

So here’s an alternate translation from the Greek. “Come alongside me all who are weary and burdened. Take up and use my scale and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my scale is kind and my burden is insignificant.”

Translating it this way makes the passage less about “pulling our weight” one way or another or letting Jesus help us bear the great load of life that weighs on us all, and more about the freedom and peace we find when we set aside our need to be constantly judging and evaluating both others and ourselves. It can also be heard as an invitation to lay down the burden of the criticisms and judgments others have leveled at us and, instead, let Jesus do the evaluating. This fits, too, with the earlier part of the text where Jesus takes the crowd to task for their cynical and critical attitude and their failure to simply accept him for who he is, as he is.

So you can see how the choice of how to translate even one word may make a difference in how a passage is understood and interpreted. The theology that arises from thinking we are called to put ourselves in Jesus’ harness and pull whatever load he would have us bear is not bad theology, but it’s quite different from the theology of finding rest for your soul by putting down the burden of criticism and judgmental thinking.

Another example of a passage where a significant difference in theological understanding depends on translation choices is one that Biblical literalists like to quote a lot: 2 Timothy 3:16-17. The NRSV renders it this way: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” Once again, this echoes the KJV: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for…”

From a translating standpoint, there are two primary problems with this passage. The first is the choice to translate pasa graphei as “All Scripture.” In particular, the choice to translate graphei as “Scripture” (with a capital S) is a choice that was driven by a pre-decided theology. The word graphei, in its most common use, simply means “writings.” “Scripture” is a very weighted word; it implies that the writings in question are in some way holy or sacred. To the translating team addressing this passage in the early 17th century, this seemed entirely appropriate. In their minds there was no question that the work they were translating was, in fact, Holy Scripture, so it is natural that they would assume the original writer intended something similar, especially since in verse 15 he had reminded the recipient, Timothy, “from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” But even referring to “sacred writings” in one verse doesn’t necessarily justify the leap to “All Scripture” in the next.

What we don’t have here is any concrete idea of what, exactly, the writer regarded as “sacred writings,” though we can make some good guesses. We do know that the early church made significant use of many books of the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible), particularly Genesis and Psalms. We know that the prophetic books, particularly Isaiah and Jeremiah were often used and quoted. One thing we have to bear in mind, however, is that when this letter to Timothy was written, nobody had decided which books could officially be regarded as “Scripture.” It would more than 250 years before serious discussions of the canon of scripture began in earnest. The Church, itself, would not be well-enough organized to find substantial commonality of doctrine for such discussions to be productive until after the Council of Nicea in 325 CE. And while the Rabbis who began meeting and teaching at Jamnia some time around 90 CE did have long and interesting discussions about which books “defiled the hands,” their way of saying they were to be considered holy, they came to no conclusions about an official canonical list for the Jewish Bible, although they universally agreed that Torah was to be considered supreme among all writings.

So back to the translation issue at hand: “All Scripture is inspired by God.” Bearing in mind that nobody had yet decided what was and what was not Scripture when this was written, is there another way to translate it? Let’s look at a literal word-for-word translation of the original Greek. Where there is more than one translation choice for a word, a second option is offered in parentheses. “All writings God-breathed and beneficial for teaching, for refuting error, for correction (or restoration), for instruction (or discipline) in righteousness…” Did you notice that “is” isn’t there? That’s the second important translation issue with this passage, and where you decided to put that little word “is,” which isn’t in the original but has to be inserted somewhere to make a sentence that makes sense in English, can make a pretty significant difference in how the verse is read and understood.

Here’s how the great Greek scholar Richmond Lattimore translated this passage: “Every writing that is divinely inspired is also useful for teaching, for argument, for correction, for education in righteousness…” Every writing that is divinely inspired. Every God-breathed writing. That’s a long way from “All Scripture is divinely inspired.” One translation presumes that the reader and the community of faith will discern which writings are and which are not “God-breathed.” The other implies that the canon of Scripture is clearly defined, known to all and, since it is God-breathed, not to trifled with.

Interestingly, that canon, itself was redefined in 1647 at the Westminster Convention of Reformed Churches, nearly 4 decades after the King James Translation was completed and published. They eliminated the books commonly known as The Apocrypha, reducing the total number of books to 66. They did this, of course, without the consent or participation of the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches or even, for that matter, the Lutherans. So, apparently, “All Scripture” can be redefined if a large enough group of the same theological persuasion agrees to do so.

It’s interesting to me that the theological descendants of those who prefer that King James or King James-ish translation, the theological descendants of the ones who were quick to discard a whole collection of books that didn’t fit their particular qualifications, are the ones who tend to be more often literalist in their reading of the Scriptures and lean more toward Fundamentalism in their theology. It makes sense, of course, if you believe that the question of divine inspiration is settled and put to bed. But if you translate that same passage another way, if you read it to mean that one of our jobs as people of faith is to discern if, when and how a writing is inspired, it leads to an entirely different understanding of how we encounter, understand and apply the Word of God in our communities and our lives.

Since its publication in 1611, the Authorized Version Commissioned by His Majesty King James has imposed a quiet and subtle tyranny over all subsequent translations. In doing so, it has also powerfully shaped the theologies of English language readers, Americans in particular. I think it could be argued that not all of that theological shaping has been for the best.

The Penalty For Neglect

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Thoughts Along the Way…

For the past 2 years our congregation has been enjoying a Sunday morning Adult Ed class called Occupy the Gospels. It has been an enlightening and stimulating study and discussion that has taken all of us who participated into a deeper level of understanding of why each gospel is so different from the others and just what each of the gospels is all about. We’ve done a close reading of each gospel examining such questions as who was it originally written for, what kinds of stresses and pressures were they dealing with in that community, why does Jesus say things one way in this gospel but differently in another gospel, and so on.

If you’re going to call yourself a Christian, a follower of Jesus, an apprentice of Jesus, it’s important to be deeply familiar with what Jesus said and did. In his tract How Christians Should Regard Moses, Martin Luther suggested that we are not really properly equipped to understand the rest of the Bible unless we first come to a clear understanding of the gospels.

One advantage of doing a close reading together in a group is that very often others will spot things you haven’t seen before or ask questions that hadn’t occurred to you. I honestly couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve been through the gospels, but in our class together I was frequently seeing new things or seeing them from a different perspective than I had before. And sometimes that new little thing I saw would sit with me for weeks and make me rethink a lot of other things about my faith and my understanding of my faith.

Here’s a case in point. The 25th chapter of Matthew has always been important to me. I’ve even sometimes called myself a “Matthew 25” Christian. This chapter is the only place in the gospels where Jesus, himself, describes the final judgment, where the “sheep” are separated from the “goats,” and the criteria are not at all what a lot of people expect. He doesn’t say a word about what you believe or don’t believe. There is no mention of whether or not you accepted him as your personal Lord and Savior or invited him into your heart or any of those other popular ideas that some people think are the doorway to being “saved.” Nope. Nothing like that at all. No statement of creed. No tally of church attendance. Not a bit of it. Instead, the final exam is all about one thing and one thing only: how well did you take care of people who were in need?

34 Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’

A few years ago I realized that the “sheep” in this text, the people who did these good things and are being rewarded and inheriting the kingdom, are quite surprised to find that they are, in fact, the Grand Prize Winners! They didn’t know that by taking care of those in need they were also taking care of Jesus, himself. They just did it because it was the right thing to do.

Rereading this text in our class a few weeks ago, though, I was suddenly hit between the eyes by yet another little epiphany. Words I had read maybe hundreds of times before suddenly hit me in a way I just had not thought of before. And this time it was the flip side of the coin. This time it was the “goats,” who got my attention– you know, the ones who did not feed the hungry or visit the sick or give a drink to the thirsty, the ones who ignored those in need, or worse, went out of their way to do nothing for them.

41 Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 42 for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink…

These are the words that hit me like a ton of bricks: “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” I confess, I’m not real big on the idea of Hell and eternal punishment. I like to think that God’s grace trumps everything in the end. On the other hand, the punishment motif crops up several times in the Gospel of Matthew, so in this gospel, at least, it is kind of unavoidable. But seeing that the “goats” get punished wasn’t the thing that arrested me. It was that they were being consigned to a punishment prepared for the devil and his angels. In other words, the failure to take care of those in need is not merely a “failure” or sin of oversight. It is something far worse. It is evil. If the punishment is the measure of its severity as a sin, then the failure to care for those in need is demonic.

I think the ramifications of this are huge. Jesus, as I read it here, is saying that any actions on our part that deprive those in need of food, water, clothing, shelter or medical care, actions that deprive the imprisoned of hope and comfort, actions that alienate the stranger– such actions are evil, even demonic; the punishment is the measure of the crime.

At our little congregation, the little church with a big heart, we have much to be proud of in the ways we have fulfilled the positive side of this equation. We have been wonderfully generous in feeding, clothing and providing for those in need. Our benevolence is extraordinary, and I am so proud, as their pastor, of this congregation’s generosity in spirit and in practice. I know and trust that we will keep up the good work that leads us into God’s presence.

But think about those “goats.” As you read the headlines or watch the news, as you watch what our elected officials are voting for or against, what they are funding or not funding, remembering that they do all this in our name as our representatives, think about those “goats.” Think about the final exam as Jesus describes it. Think about how Jesus sees it. Are we on the road to inherit the Kingdom? Or are we stumbling toward that place prepared for the devil and his angels?

Pro Gloria Dei

Pastor Steve

A Quiet Place

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Thoughts Along the Way…

I stood there on a beautiful green hillside, standing just at the edge of the shade made by a canopy erected for the occasion, my guitar slung over my shoulder, my fingers on the strings poised to play. But no music came to my fingers. I had led the procession up the hill from the hearse, carrying my service book, walking ahead of the pall bearers who carried that beautiful walnut casket, a work of art with its satin finish, carrying within it the mortal remains of an even more beautiful and complex work of art, God’s own handiwork, God’s baptized child, our friend and companion on the journey, John.

The casket was settled gently on the stand above the grave. The pall bearers removed their white gloves and took their places amid the others gathered for the words and rites that would commend our John’s life into God’s hands and commit his body to the earth. As Sandy, John’s widow, had requested, I was going to play something on the guitar, some music to speak to our souls before the words to speak to our hearts. So there I stood with my guitar, ready to play, people looking at me, some expectantly, some with peace, some with encouragement, some with a plea or yearning for something I could only guess at, and all I could think about for a moment in that moment was the noise.

Huge earth movers were shaping new hillsides for new graves a few hillsides away, their giant diesel engines growling across the landscape. Just beyond them a crew in a helicopter was doing something undoubtedly important to the power lines held aloft on their giant towers that always look to me like the Martian monsters from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. C.S. Lewis once described the Kingdom of Hell as The Kingdom of Noise. I think that’s a pretty apt description. This was supposed to be a quiet, peaceful moment in a quiet, peaceful place where we could all let a bit of gentle music and words of promise carry us to the edges of our own deep wells of thought and feeling. But how could I begin to cut through all that noise? What is an acoustic guitar against the growl of earth movers and the whopping of a helicopter?

I must have looked as if I was waiting for a signal, and maybe I was. Sandy looked at me, smiled and nodded, and I realized in that moment that if this was not going to be the quiet place in the world that I was hoping for, that I thought it should be, that I had expected, then I was going to have to find a quiet place in me. The music would have to come from a quiet place in me and I would have to trust that somehow the quiet would be powerful enough to cut through the noise.

I closed my eyes and listened. Blest Be the Tie That Binds was flowing from my fingers, and when I looked up, I could tell that others could hear it, too. The melody then rewove itself into Just As I Am and as I played, unconscious of my playing, I let those notes full of grace speak to my own heart. Without a pause my fingers moved into Simple Gifts, the old Shaker tune that promises us that “When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend we will not be ashamed, to turn, to turn ‘twill be our delight, till by turning, turning, we come round right.”

Somehow, the quiet cut through the noise. Somehow the melodies of unity, grace and simplicity pierced the wall of mechanized cacophony that had seemed so overwhelming. Somehow people heard it all the way to the edges of the crowd. “Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord. And in all truth, the Spirit was my amplifier in that moment.

I won’t pretend to tell you that the music wafting from my guitar carried everyone to a place where they were prepared to truly hear the power and truth of all those words of hope and promise we speak as we lay our loved ones to rest. But it carried me to a quiet place where I could speak those words with faith, confidence, and something akin to joy.

So very, very often the world seems to be doing its very best to bury our better, deeper thoughts and feelings in a coffin of noise. So very, very often the thing we need most, long for most is simply a quiet place to think and feel and, depending on the situation, speak aloud to ourselves where it is quiet enough to hear our own voices. Sometimes we desperately need to get away to a quiet place. But since the world won’t often let us do that, we need to find that quiet place inside us. There is strength there. There is beauty there. There is power and grace and love there. And music.

Pro Gloria Dei,

Pastor Steve

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Anniversary of a Dream

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

It was on this date in 1963 that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before a crowd of thousands and in a singular moment of grace planted the seeds of a profound change in our nation and our culture. The seeds he planted in that speech have grown over the years; we see the fruit of that change everywhere in our country.

While he had in other places and other contexts described the evils of segregation and violence against persons of color, on this occasion he did not use the moment simply to catalogue these injustices. Instead, he shared a vision of what this nation could and should be. He did not say, “I stand here before you to denounce an evil.” Instead, he submitted his voice to the spirit of prophecy and announced, “I have a dream.”

That day, within living memory for many of us, we heard what I believe was truly a word from God proclaimed by a prophetic voice, and in that prophetic moment we were given a vision toward which we could move. The work is by no means done. The vision is by no means completely realized, but we are a better nation, a better people, less divided by the accidents of race and color than we once were. We still have a long way to go, but thanks to the vision, to the dream announced to us that day, we often see the children of former slaves and the children of former slave owners together at the table of good will, and for a new generation it is no longer even a thing of wonder, but a commonplace occurrence not worthy of comment. Thank God.

I was thinking about all this in the context of this political season which has been particularly rancorous. The tools of critical thinking and analysis have languished as candidates are presented in caricature and complex issues are condensed into soundbites. Anger and animosity have been openly encouraged by those who seek or broker power. Negativity and blaming have fanned the flames of discontent. Insinuation, innuendo and outright falsehood have been deployed freely and truth has suffered even more than usual as lines have been drawn which have too often bruised or severed the bonds of friendship and even family. Adamantine opinion has short-circuited courtesy. All have sinned and fallen short of what could be a glorious national conversation.

On this anniversary of Dr. King’s speech as we recall this pivotal moment in our history, it is good for us to remember the tremendous power of lifting up a positive vision. It is always, in the long run, far more powerful than simply denouncing the evil we think we see.

I want to believe that we can still work our way through our differences by holding up our common vision and reminding each other of our better intentions. We have the language of those better moments alive in our heritage. We do not need to reinvent it, only to reclaim it.

I like to think that even in our disagreement about how, exactly, things should work, we do really still believe that all are created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights which include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I like to think that somewhere beneath all the rhetoric we do all still believe that we, the people, established and ordained this nation’s governmental structure and codified it in our constitution in order to, among other things, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. I like to think that we give more than lip service to the idea of liberty and justice for all. I want to believe that, when all is said and done, we do still understand that ours is a government of the people by the people and for the people— that within and underneath all the talk about “the government” we are describing not only “the people” as an anonymous collective but real individual persons, fellow citizens who are doing their best to serve as they have been elected, called or employed and who are subject to the same laws and expectations. I want to believe that we understand that the institutions that we established through the processes of our government were not created to be our nemesis but are, rather, tools of our own making to accomplish our mutual goals. I want to believe that we all understand that the individual rights we have guaranteed to each other can only be fully enjoyed in the context of mutual responsibility and support.

We are, under God, still one nation. We are still fulfilling the dreams and hopes of visionaries who came before us. We are not, each of us, in it for ourselves or by ourselves; we are in it together for each other. We did not stand up every morning in school and assert our individual rights, though we understood them to be guaranteed by our mutual code of law. We did not stand up every day in school and announce that this already is a nation of liberty and justice for all; we stood up and pledged that we would strive to be such a nation together. We pledged allegiance to a hope and a vision. We pledged allegiance to a dream, a future reality that will always be still in the making.