partsofspeaking

It might be that the parable of the sower is a picture of what he teaches them from Isaiah.   Some will not hear in Israel.   Some will follow and be receptive for a while but not truly internalize the whole of the gospel, and some will be seduced by the cares of the world and persecution.   But many will stay with him, and grow.   The first church was mostly Jewish; we forget hat, but the leaders of Judaism were against it.   Eventually the Gentiles outnumbered them, and then over they decades some anti-semitic elements came in.   I think it was mostly Constantine and the growth of Catholicism in terms of a state church.   One of the reasons we don’t celebrate Easter on Passover (as we should) is that Constantine didn’t want the Christian holy day to be conflated with the Jewish one.   (I’m sure there are books on this.) The passage in Isaiah and its use here is a problem passage to me, in our modern sense of the ideal pure...

Having recently finished leading a (small) book group with colleagues on Mindset by Carol Dweck, I have a few thoughts--well, more than a few, but I'll just share the most useful, in my thinking. First, I would recommend the work of Angela Duckworth and David Yeager.  This video on YouTube is a good start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUrkU4yjZu4  This is one of many you could find (Angela has done Ted Talks and is the "grit" lady) but I think this one combines them in a coherent way.  I heard David Yeager speak at AASCU last year and he has a lot to say to serious college teachers.  By serious college teachers I mean those who really want to attain student learning outcomes and are willing to set aside ego and biases to achieve that goal. My major take away from Mindset : the myth of easy. Learning is supposed to be fun, right?  And everyone can be whatever they want to be, right?  And everyone should have great self-esteem on the b...

--> My first response to this lesson (Jesus in the Temple) was that it was kind of odd, so I had to think about why I thought it was odd.   This doesn’t seem to be a passage of the Bible that really bears on our lives, more like an interesting but disconnected event in Jesus’ life when he was a young adolescent.   Luke had a reason for including it, at the Holy Spirit’s leading.   By the way, Luke as a physician was probably a slave.   I imagine someone bought his freedom at some point, or he bought his own.   Roman slavery had nothing to do with race, only with captivity or poverty.   Only American slavery is about race.   It is the only biblical story (there are mythical stories that the Catholics tell, but they have no basis really) that tells us anything about him from toddler age to full adulthood.   Luke, we are often reminded, wrote for the Greeks, was a physician, included a lot of information about women, and wrote mor...

Tomorrow I am teaching on the birth of Christ.  Here is the lesson. It seems out of place in the calendar but so it goes. This is one of those theological words that doesn’t appear in the Bible but is used to cover a large, difficult to understand concept.   “Carn” means flesh; The Eternal Son of God became man with flesh and blood in a specific time and place and was named Jesus, the Christ.   He was/is Lord (not to be confused with LORD in Old Testament).   This introduces the word trinity, another word that is almost impossible for us to grasp and we make human attempts to understand this, which is a mystery.   A mystery is a Bible word for something not revealed until a specific time, but there is more to it than that. “The biblical idea of mystery, then, reminds Christians that God holds the course of human events in his hands and has so shaped them that they work for the salvation of his people. It also demonstrates the gracio...

Chapter divisions are really meaningless, so we have to overlook them most of the time, especially here.   Twelve is a very long and intense chapter.   We start with controversies over nothing made into something and end with an incident with Jesus’ family where they seem to think he’s crazy.   It may be they just don’t know what to do with him.   His mother should have known better, but they were, at the core, afraid for his life.   His unbelieving siblings probably feared for their own, since in those days the family was often punished with the wrong-doer.   At first I thought that this story, which is recorded three times in the gospels, did not have a reference to their thinking he is out of his mind, but I was wrong—it’s in Mark 3.   There it says “his own people,” so it assumed that is the reason they are there, asking for him.   Jesus does not reject his family here really, only shows that blood ties have their place...

Reading this book because it was recommended by a higher up at the college who wanted to lead a book group on it, and the book group is this week.   I am slow to recommend books like this, but I found it helpful.   It took me a while to get into it, and it’s pretty anecdotal and of course, like all these books presents its ideas as the salvation of the organizational world.   Essentially, it posits five levels for organizations. Stage 1 – Members say, “Life sucks.” Stage 2 – Members say, “My life sucks.” Stage 3 – Some members say, “My life is great.”   Here we have people performing well but only for themselves. Stage 4 – Members say, “We are great,” which is an us-them mentality but is preferable to Stage 3, where everyone is about themselves and their own success.   At this stage the leaders have had epiphanies that show them the organization is bigger than individual members, etc.   Sort of a Jack Mezirow transformative le...

--> A difficult passage, because (1) this is not the pat, nice Jesus we like, (2) it is very black and white, and we moderns like the phrase “It depends,” connoting contingency, gray areas, unnecessary complexity to give us wiggle room, (3) we see ourselves in the condemnation of foolish talk, (4) we see our culture in those who have massive amounts of revelation and still rejects, and (5) the parable of the demons coming back after exorcism is odd and creepy.   But this is coming after the unbelievable accusation that Jesus was demon possessed or even worse. I don’t think the story of the unclean spirit is so much a parable as a hypothetical story.   Or even a generically true story, because it is in present tense.   If a demon spirit is exorcised (commentators imply this rather than that the demon leaves by choice, which they apparently don’t do), he will not find a place in the desert.   The Jews of that time believed the desert was a place of demons...

--> About two years ago I was asked to be on a panel about religion .   I had prepared a spiel about the global state of Christianity, but the moderator had one question for me, “How do you explain Westboro Baptist?” I am still floored by this, and eventually, toward the end of the talk, was able to make the point that there are 2 billion people on the planet who call themselves Christians and there are 29 people in Westboro Baptist, so it’s not really a comparison.   Needless to say, I don’t plan to be on a panel like that again. The problem, of course, is that there are dozens of kinds of Baptists and it doesn’t take an act of Congress to put the name Baptist on a shingle.   Also, people don’t know that the pastor of Westboro Baptist was a civil rights attorney and defended African Americans against Jim Crow laws.   He was also allegedly a pretty nasty fellow at times.   Where would America be without Baptists?   I ask this seriously...