God is in the Details

Our pastor’s message theme for this year is The Bible in a Year. In keeping with that, he challenged us to read the Bible in a year. I have read it through a number of times in different translations but my wife and I decided it was a good idea to go along with this. Then she discovered a website, one of many actually, Biblica, where you could listen to it being read aloud, and we have generally been doing that at our breakfast times. We also have a tape-recorded version we can listen to.

There is something to be said for listening to the word, rather than reading it silently. Indeed, references to approaching The Word in The Bible generally refer to hearing it and that was the way much of it existed before it ever did get written down. We also know now from science that information received through the ears is processed differently than information received through the eyes. There is a different impact to something being heard, the way were originally created to receive information. Having said that, we should not underestimate the place of writing in ancient times. Moses is generally regarded as the first person to start to put things down in writing, and we know he was brought up in the courts of Egypt, so he may well have learned to write. Certainly, there are a number of references to writing things down in the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Bible, sometimes also called The Books of Moses.

Some of this material is probably the least read of all the Bible content. When you get past mid-Exodus, past the giving of the 10 Commandments, you start to encounter what seems to be endless detail and even repetition. Particularly for us as Christians, knowing that this is all generally referred to as The Law, given to the Jews, which we understand from the New Testament do not need to follow to the letter anymore, this material is often passed over.

You may be familiar with the saying, “the devil is in the details.” My understanding of this is that it often refers to 2 areas where we get caught, i.e., ignoring something which then results in a rather unfortunate outcome. Sometimes this is when we neglect to execute or carry out “the details”; at other times it is when we fail to do something like read “the small print.”

Well, if you listen to these generally un-read books of the Bible, certain themes begin to arise from the details. I believe there is much we can learn about God from these details and the resultant themes.

In the first place, I think it reinforces our understanding of God as perfect and just as our Creator. If we believe these qualities about God, we would not expect him to not care about details. We would not expect him to not to leave things to chance. Yet, that is what people who believe in evolution do, but that is another topic. Here we have God basically doing 2 things: the first is giving the people the law, which he goes into great detail to spell out to make sure everything is understood. The 2nd is giving instructions on how to make some of the accoutrements that go with worship, such as the "tent of meeting" and all that goes in it. Along with that, are all the instructions about worship, which includes a lot of detail about the number of kinds of gifts and sacrifices.

There is also a sense here that God wants his people to give their best and to make their best. Given the circumstances, ostensibly roaming through the desert having just escaped from Egypt, there is a lot of gold, silver, brass, spices, fine linen/cloth and leather to be gathered and used. Nowadays, with Jesus' teachings about simplicity ringing in our Anabaptist ears, we sometimes question this, comparing it to the exorbitant resources that were put into building cathedrals in Europe in days gone by Christianity before our spiritual forefathers got into the Reformation. Perhaps the point here is this: in God's perfect and ideal world, which he originally created, there would be nothing but the best. However, as we know too well, we do not live in that world. Indeed, many of us become too preoccupied with collecting and building up our approximation of the best or the ideal, to the neglect of what God also considers important, looking after one another, particularly the needy. No doubt Jesus had to keep speaking against riches because of how they do sidetrack us from our tasks of ourselves trying to keep our focus on God and bring others to the same place.

Another aspect of God, that is somewhat unique to Judeo-Christian religions, is the concept of God loving us and wanting a relationship with us. Indeed, that is how we understand God creating us in the first place. To put it simply, he had so much love, he needed a lot of people to share it with. Sometimes it doesn't seem like this is coming through in many of these chapters where people seem to be dealt with harshly and with all this emphasis on following so much detail. However, I think there is still the underlying idea that God cares about everything and wants us to be part of the Kingdom where everything is good.

Part of this that struck me is how God tells Moses in great detail who is to oversee making all of the things for which he has given Moses the instructions, who are the craftsman that he has gifted. When it comes to appointing leaders of the tribes in the census in Numbers, God knows the names of all of those he wants to be the heads of the tribes and their clans. Now, I know full well, having myself studied for 3 years at a theological institute and doing a lot of learning since, that there are many who study the Old Testament who dismiss much of what we read at face value as content that was written much later by people who had the records of those who performed these tasks. However, the more the Bible has been studied and archaeology and other disciplines have also added their understanding of the distant past, the more the literal content of the Bible stands up to examination, so I will take some of this as it is read. The take-home message here is that the Creator God of the universe at the same time knows and cares for each one of us individually by name. Of course, there are many other stories in the Bible where people are called by God by their names.

I will also briefly address this issue of those who want to refer to what some see as God being violent in these accounts. Now we know from the biblical record, that there was a previous time, in fact a couple of times, that God was very upset in his holy and just righteousness at what his creatures had chosen to do in terms of evil. In the story of Noah, he destroyed all but that family because of the wickedness at that time. Not much later, when people's pride was again getting the better of them, he scattered them abroad from their efforts to build what we refer to as The Tower of Babel.

Indeed, it is recorded that when God spoke to the patriarch Jacob, telling him it was all right to go to Egypt during the famine where his son Joseph was in charge, he was told that his people would be brought back to the land promised to his grandfather Abraham, because God was not yet "done with the Amorites." This suggests that these people were possibly already then becoming quite wicked in God's eyes. We know from the Bible that God was very upset with the Canaanite tribes' offering of infants and children in sacrificial fire to their gods. He was also upset with their distortion of the gift of sex by how they incorporated it in worship-related prostitution.

We are not God. We do not know when it is the right time to bring about a final punishment on an individual or group for their wickedness. However, again, if we believe that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, he would know when people are past the point of no return, as had happened before. I believe that was the case with those many tribes that at that time inhabited the Land of Canaan. They were just too wicked to be allowed to continue. Therefore, to some extent, God used the return of the Children of Israel to punish them with his commands of driving them out of the land and keeping so very separate from them. At the same time, we read of numerous times through Israel's history of how God carry out these acts himself and did not require his people to be violent. I think that goes along with how we understand Jesus teaching us in the New Testament. We are told that vengeance belongs to God, he will repeat. We are not to take things into our own hands. Again, this is something you may understand with hindsight, but I don't think it justifies us in our current attempts to say that war or capital punishment is right at times. In keeping with the latter I always keep in mind that God did not even kill Cain, the first murderer. He just banished him.

God was trying very hard to keep his people from falling prey to the wiles of the tribes around them, and we know how many times they failed as we read through the books of the Old Testament leading up to The Exile. No wonder he had to give such strict laws about their purity and sometimes exacts such strict judgments against them for failing him and not recognizing his awesome holiness and righteousness. To be sure, Jesus, in his relationships with individuals, and his teaching, really drove home the point that God wants to be in a relationship with us. However, I think sometimes nowadays we have overdone that friend aspect to the point where we sometimes forget about the Holiness, the Justice and the Righteousness of our mighty God. God is all of these things, and it is all for our good. We may not ever understand it all; our calling is to faith.

The Big Comma

This morning the biblical passage for our denominational devotional book, Rejoice, referenced the beginning of John chapter 17, verses 1-5. My custom is to read the passage before I read the written devotional material. When I did so this morning, it struck me that Jesus stated in verse 4 that he had glorified his heavenly Father on earth by finishing the work that the Father had given him to do.

I was somewhat disappointed then when I turn to the actual writing of the devotional and found that the writer jumped right to the interpretation of verse 4 as being a reference to Jesus' death. I really do not think we have to come to or perhaps even can come to that conclusion. Let me explain.

Jesus was ostensibly praying this at the end of his Last Supper with his, by then 11, followers. To be sure, his death was imminent, and he is asking his Father to glorify his Son [in his death], but he is already saying that he had glorified the Father by "finishing the work that you gave me to do." It seems to me he is talking about work that was completed before he died.

It, therefore seems evident that the work that he was referring to was the preaching, teaching and healing that he had done over the previous years. This made me think of the remark made in a plenary session of our Mennonite Church British Columbia Annual Conference in 2013 by Anabaptist writer David Augsburger, professor of pastoral care and counselling in the School of Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary in California in reference to what is generally known as the Apostle's Creed. As many of us know, it begins as follows:

I believe in God,

the Father almighty,

Creator of heaven and earth,

and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, died and was buried;

The Apostle's Creed is an item that is generally more known by the so-called mainline churches, in which it is often recited, as opposed to other more post-Reformation Protestant churches. One of the criticisms that these latter churches had of the mainline denominations, which led to the Reformation, that they did not put enough emphasis on what Jesus taught and also showed by his life's example how we ought to live. For over a millennia it had been by and large seen as sufficient to be baptized at birth, to attend mass and donate to the church. When the reformers, particularly our Anabaptist spiritual forebears, got their hands on the Bible and began to read it for themselves, their eyes were opened to how much was missing in what the church was teaching about Jesus.

Indeed, if all that was expected was to believe what the apostle's Creed states, it includes no mention of the importance of Jesus's whole life and practice. As you can see, it goes right from "born of the Virgin Mary," to "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried." It is that comma, after the word Mary, that was referred to as "What a comma!" It covers the whole life of Jesus: all that he taught about how we are to live as his disciples and followers. As Augsburger stated, “The comma is where it’s at! It’s that comma that you and I live by as disciples. It’s that comma that contains all the healing. And oh what a comma!” Let's give more credit to that, and pay more attention to what it hides for too many.

CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 2014

After 8 years as a member of Peace Mennonite Church her ein Richmond, BC, Canada, I was called on to give the Christmas Morning Meditation in our pastor's absence at the time. I thought I would share what I was given with a wider audience:

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun

And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear ones
The old and the young

And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For the rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong

And so happy Christmas

For black and for white

For yellow and red ones

Let's stop all the fight

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

Anyone know who wrote that?

Yes, John Lennon, one of the Beatles. The one who said once he thought he was more popular than Jesus. Well, John died some time ago but Jesus is still alive.

So, this is Christmas. Some of us might be saying that with a somewhat resigned tone of voice by now, perhaps even wearily. We have been bombarded by commercial propaganda since - when? - Halloween? We have been hearing Christmas music everywhere for a long time too. No wonder we may be feeling tired. Many of us have attended Christmas parties, Christmas concerts and the annual family gatherings, not to mention all the time and work involved in preparation for Christmas – shopping for gifts, putting up lights, finding and decorating trees, baking, cooking, sending invitations and greetings. Small wonder we might be tired, if not near exhaustion.

So, this is Christmas? This celebration that comes around every year on December 25?  Most of us probably know Christmas did not really begin with the birth of Christ. It wasn't until four hundred years later that The Church established this December 25^th “Christ Mass” as the commemoration of the birth of Jesus. It has probably not even been 100 years since Christmas has taken on the form, in its entirety, as we know it now, sacred and secular.

So, why do we celebrate Christmas? This is probably easy for us to answer and you might even be thinking, Why are you asking it? We know that it is a celebration of the coming of Christ to this earth as a child. It is a celebration of the Incarnation - God coming to earth in the flesh as fully human and God at the same time. To be sure, this is a concept some of us still struggle with, perhaps reflecting on it with renewed interest at this time of year.

Yes, there is still too much about this Christmas celebration now that is secular. Sometimes we talk despairingly about the commercialization of Christmas. We hear slogans in protest like, "Put Christ back into Christmas!" We know there can be no Christmas without Christ, but for far too many around the world, that is the case.

We may even be afraid that there is an orchestrated effort to take Christ out of Christmas. Many schools no longer have Christmas concerts, which used to be a highlight of the school year when many of us were young. We  learned our simple lines when we were younger; more elaborate parts when we were older. We practiced the songs that we sang and played in choirs and otherwise. We may have even gotten new clothes for the season.

Public institutions now refer to this holiday as "a winter break", or "the holiday season." That just shows how confused and forgetful, even ignorant some have become. Holiday originally meant holy day.

Other anti-Christmas campaigners want to refer to Xmas. If we look back back to when Greek was more commonly known, we Christians have the last laugh about that. Nowadays, X has many meanings, usually referring to something extreme or censored, such as X-rated movies and X-rated songs. But before all that, before X symbolized the unknown in mathematics, X was an abbreviation for Xristos, the Greek word for Messiah. I still don't advocate that Xmas is a suitable word for us to use, but once we understand that history, there is nothing really wrong with it. The problem is though, that if we forget the older meaning of X, if we just say Xmas, in an effort to abbreviate things, the efforts of the anti-Christs might not have been in vain.

However, the world is not all off-track when it comes to Christmas, which is about celebrating the birth of a baby who came to earth to fully experience, and show us how to experience, the loving relationships our loving God created us for. In the study of human development in the last 30 years or so, scientists have learned from their observations of babies and toddlers, that what is required for our normal and optimal development, the healthy growth of our brain, our ability to function as healthy individuals, even our existence, is a good relationship with a caring and loving figure. Surprise! Isn't that what God was revealing to us all along? Isn't that what Christmas is finally all about? God created us to live in relationship with Him, one another and our world. He created us to live in community. This was revealed from the Beginning. But after our ancestors wrecked God’s original plans, as described in the book of Genesis, God tried to show us how to live by giving us The Law. We know from Jesus' teachings and the writings of Paul that didn't work. So, God decided the only way to show us how to live was to come down and do it in person. A law can reach our mind, but only a loving relationship can reach our heart. Indeed, God had promised in the prophets that he would bring about a time when His Law would be written on our hearts.

There is another thing that we can learn from the science of human development that relates to Christmas. It takes a lot of repetition to create the right kind of brain pathways to make us into healthy and well-adapted individuals. We need a lot of routine and rhythm in our lives to give us stability and security.  Isn't that like celebrating Christmas year after year?

We do not have it in Scripture that God commanded us to celebrate Christmas. However, I believe the Holy Spirit gave The Church the idea of celebrating Christmas. I don't think this celebration would have taken hold as it has and lasted this long if God was not accepting of it. Who knows better than God who created us, including these brains of ours, that doing something like this regularly might just be good for us?

Now we know that Jesus has left this earth for a period of time to fulfill God's mysterious purposes. But that does not mean that it again becomes difficult for us to have a relationship with God. He sent the Holy Spirit to dwell in us fully, brain and heart, if we believe in him and what he did. The Holy Spirit maintains that loving relationship. The Holy Spirit writes on our hearts.

This brings us to another aspect of Christmas. Just as when we celebrate communion, we must remember that we are not only looking back to Jesus' first coming. We are not only in Advent for 4 weeks before Christmas to prepare to celebrate Christ’s first coming. Advent, like communion, is also a time to look forward to Jesus' 2nd coming. Christians believe that will be the time when all will celebrate in the great Wedding Feast of Christ and His Bride, the Church. Indeed, both Jewish and Christian teachings talk about The Great Feast of the Future, when the Messiah will return to Earth and establish His reign.

So, in spite of the secular, materialism, the commercialization, who should be more joyous about Christmas than we Christians? There are some who say that they believe in God but who do not celebrate Christmas because they think God never ordained it because it’s not in the Bible. However, I think they have it wrong. We know God loves feasts. The Old Testament laws include feasts that God commanded his people to keep and celebrate. Pastor Tim has emphasized in so many of his messages how Jesus regularly attended feasts when he was on earth. The first recorded miracle is of Jesus making better wine for a wedding feast. In fact, many of his parables include stories about wonderful feasts. Until Christ’s return though, we have to make do with feasts, like Christmas, or our Community Meal, that, wonderful as they may be, are but a shadow of the Great Feast that awaits.

Let us, as some of us will have read in the church’s monthly devotional, Rejoice, last week, prepare together to see Jesus, not get so caught up in our other preparations, like the innkeeper, that we have no room, time or energy to receive Christ at Christmas.

We do have to be prepared, we must stop and think, if we want to say with hope, joy, peace & love that Christmas has come. How many of us, to be truthful, have found ourselves saying with excitement and enthusiasm that Christmas has come! How many of us dance with joy that Christmas is here? We were reminded of that the Sunday before last when we lit the Advent Candle of Joy and Pastor Tim told us about how he had been inspired by the joy of a child. Indeed, then that same child danced in front of us while the choir sang. Can we still be inspired and excited by the child that was born at Bethlehem? That's the question I leave you with today. 

Missing the Word

Missing the Word

As I suspect is true of too many of my fellow Christian' lives, just as it is in mine, there are times when we do not read the Bible as regularly, as frequently or as much as we really should. I realized as soon as I wrote that title though that it could also lead to a misunderstanding and not really convey what I am discussing here. I am not just referring to reading words on a page in the book; I am talking about missing fellowship with God, our Heavenly Father, that occurs when we read the Bible, The Word. That is the ultimate point of the Bible, communion with God. In reading it, we open ourselves to further communication through the Holy Spirit, as we are enlightened about what we read by the very same Person that we believe inspired the writing to begin with (John 14:26; 15:26).

My understanding of how we as Christians view the Bible is that it is an inspired record that God has given us to show us how he is at work in his creation, particularly on earth and in the lives of humans. We do not regard it in the same way as I understand the Orthodox teaching of the Muslim is about the Koran, namely that every word is sacred in Arabic as it is written and therefore can never be altered.  They believe this because the belief is that the entire document was given in this form to the original Prophet Muhammad over a period of time in the early 7th century CE. That is why you will find orthodox Muslim scholars even discounting the study of the Koran in different languages. Some of them therefore then also have difficulty with we Christians who have the Bible that has come down through so many languages, translations and copies. They don't believe that we can have a believable record anymore.

The first Bible delivered to me as my very own copy of this The Word of God was a King James Version, which was the only form known to most English-speaking Christians at the time (I am referring to the early 1950s). I believe it was a 7th birthday gift. I read that through, although not immediately of course. While attending Canadian Mennonite Bible College in the mid-60s, I purchased the version used for the most part there, the Revised Standard Version, and read that in its entirety. A few years later, when the New English Bible came out, I read all of it. I have read the Bible from cover-to-cover several more times since then. Now I have begun to read a “Green” edition of the New Revised Standard Version. This is a special version that highlights everything in the Scriptures that has to do, according to its editors, with creation and the environment. I had just before this, for the first time ever, purchased a study Bible, in the form of the Harper Collins Study Bible, which is another New Revised Standard Version translation. I had not really felt much of a need for this type of Bible previously because even my very first Bible had cross-references, a concordance and other such study helps that served me well over the years.

So, I have read through The Word a number of times. I have studied it from when I was an elementary age Sunday School student until the present time. I have taught it to Sunday school classes, led small groups in its study and preached sermons based on it. When I was about 12-years-of age, I remember wanting to read it diligently to discover all the rules I could to live the proper life of a Christian.

However, I must confess that it was not until I was almost middle-aged that I reached the point where the desire to read the Bible came from somewhere inside of me, not because of that external compulsion that this was something a Christian should do. To me, this could only have happened because of having reached a certain degree of maturity as a Christian, having come to the point in my relationship with God were I really wanted to keep in touch with Him through His Word. It is the indwelling Holy Spirit prompting me to keep up my communion with God.

So, this is where I am when I said to the current small group of our congregation of which I am currently the leader, I have missed the fact that we have not been meeting this fall, as it has had a negative impact on my reading and studying the word, and therefore my being in communion with God. Now I truly sometimes say with the psalmist David, "As the heart pants after the water brooks, so my soul pants after you, O God." (Psalm 42:1) He actually expresses it a little more graphically yet in Psalm 119:131: “I opened my mouth and panted: for I long for your commandments." (Commandments is just one of many words David uses, especially in Psalm 119, to refer to the Word of God.) Therefore, I am going to begin, as it were, to catch up on the studies that we would have done this fall, had we been meeting.