A Life Well Lived

I went to a funeral today. At least that's what they used to call it. Maybe it is not appropriate to call it that anymore because there was no casket; the body had been interned 2 hours previously. So these events have become called Memorial Services. Or Celebrations of Life.

Well, today's event was indeed a joyous celebration. However, the deceased would probably have been somewhat uncomfortable at all the attention he got, but who knows? It was certainly deserved. To borrow another common expression, his was indeed "a life well lived."

The event celebrated the life of our Great Uncle Bill, formally known as William E Thiessen. As even one of his 3 sons noted, no one knew what E stood for. One speaker who had known him in his younger days said he had adopted it because he thought made him look more distinguished! Perhaps what he really wanted to do was distinguish himself from other William Thiessens. I know my maternal grandfather added the letter M between his first and last name for that purpose, to distinguish himself from other Frank Ennses. In days gone by people were not given the multi-handled names they have nowadays.

But this is the same uncle of whom we saw pictures playing a guitar and tuba taken in his Bible school days, but which he had confessed to a friend were only taken to impress his wife-to-be! He never knew how to play either instrument.

Bill was an individual born to a mother who died months later of the Spanish flu in 1919. Some members of his family revealed today that this was something that had bothered him all his life of 96 years, never knowing his mother. Indeed, nowadays mental health professionals might wonder what kind of attachment problems he had developed and how suitable he would be in relationships. They might look at his career as a pastor and his family relationships from children down to great-grandchildren and think that the affirmation he seemed to give to everyone he met was a sign of neediness based on that past, looking for love and affirmation.

We know better. It was the sign of a man totally given in the service of a Master he loved dearly. The Master was none other than Jesus Christ. We are enjoined in Scripture to imitate Christ. Indeed, Uncle Bill, as everyone knew him, did just that. One can only imagine that the way he made everyone who knew him feel must only be a taste of the way Jesus made those around him feel when he walked this earth.

Bill understood that he was who he was because of those who had gone on before, the great "cloud of witnesses" referred to in Hebrews chapter 12. He appreciated that legacy and did his best to pass it on. Indeed, as his descendants were reminded today, what they enjoyed is because of who he was. Even the Old Testament tells us that God “punishes the sins of the fathers to the 3rd and 4th generation,” but for “those who are righteous and faithful to him, he blesses them for thousands of generations.”

It saddens me to see how many of our generation have turned their backs on this wonderful legacy that goes back for centuries if not millennia. Who do we think we are that we know better than all those who came before and no longer need to fear (and here I'm using the positive biblical definition of this term, not the vernacular' being afraid') God?

The geography of our large country having the impact that it does on our mobile and extended families nowadays, even though my father had essentially grown up with Uncle Bill as a brother (they are only 2 years apart in age), I did not really get to know and appreciate the man for who he was until we moved to BC and a 45-minute drive away nearly 10 years ago now. The only time I really recall meeting him before was when our family had stayed at his place over the weekend and attended the church with him that he pastored in Linden, Alberta, when we were on our way to visit her grandparents in BC and attend one of our uncles' weddings. I really have no other memories of that event.

But when we met him here in BC, when he was already in his late 80s, we experienced what so many shared today. This man, who carried his Bible with him almost till he died, and always told everyone that he was praying for them, had a most special way of giving you his attention in such a warm enthusiastic way that you could not help but be attracted to him. Again, I say, what a reflection of his Master. Even my wife, coming from a different culture as she does, was truly taken by him. Often when we would make a trip to the Fraser Valley, it was prefaced by a call to him to see if he wanted to join us for lunch or dinner or come with us to some event we were attending. Indeed, our uncles and aunts always included him in our gatherings, particularly when he was pretty much the only one left of his generation and already a widower. Knowing how many people he knew and how little he really knew us, and for how short a time, I would usually remind him whom I was when I called. You could just hear the recognition and see the smile on his face, as he would brightly inquire about how we were. Indeed, as it was said today, he was one of those saints whom when you went to visit, even when he was in hospital for the last time, would end up cheering you up and praying for you, when you had thought you had gone to do the same for him.

Uncle Bill, you have gone to your reward. May we be be faithful to carry on imitating your Master as wonderfully as you did.

Thinking Biblically about Real Estate

As noted in my previous posting by date, our congregation is currently traversing the Bible in a year and we are presently still in the first 5 books of the Old Testament. I touched on a number of the themes in these passages in the previous posting and here I want to write about land, real estate and even about rights as it pertains to this topic. Contrary to what is preached by those purveyors of the so-called "prosperity gospel" that is all-too prevalent in our continent, especially south of the border, I don't think there is anything here to promote capitalism and acquisition of wealth. Come to think of it, our current government in Ottawa seems to be quite pre-occupied with that as well.

One could write a lot on that topic itself, although it is somewhat of a digression from what I am speaking about here. Let me just say that my understanding of the blessings that God promises to those believe in him has nothing to do with property or wealth. It has everything to do with properties of the mind, heart and soul, the fruits of the spirit: character, that is all. The abundant life promised us is a life overflowing with peace and joy, not possessions and status.

I was just thinking about writing this when I discovered that our pastor is going to be speaking about this next Sunday, February 8, 2015. It will be interesting to see what he has to say. In our congregation we are currently utilizing a practice where our small groups are encouraged to study the pastor's Sunday message and associated passages either before and/or after the message is delivered. Therefore, I also see one question in the preparation phase that addresses an issue that I believe must be part of this discussion and that is, who owns the land?

In our North American and Canadian context, this issue of land ownership is especially pertinent. This is because we as a nation, speaking for Canada at least, are embroiled in difficult discussions with the indigenous inhabitants of this land because we have quite different views of land ownership. Our government, based on democratic principles as honed in the British system over the centuries, believes in private property in conjunction with certain property rights.

Our indigenous peoples have never believed in land ownership. They believe that the land is for everyone to share and is in effect owned by The Creator, which is their title for the Supreme Being we refer to in English as God. A couple of paragraphs back I noted that our pastor referred to a passage that suggests ultimate land ownership is God's (Exodus 15:13, 17). More on this soon.

There are at least 4 different passages/stories that I want to refer to in developing my thoughts on this topic.

The first that we come across in reading these books is the whole concept of the Year of Jubilee. This is spelled out in Leviticus chapter 25:8-34, with a few more details with respect to specific situations added in verses 47-55. The general idea is that, because the land belongs to God, which is clearly stated in verse 23, which adds that the Children of Israel are “but aliens and tenants," the land is to be given a rest again, as it is completing the 7th of the 7-year sabbatical cycles (see below). Not only that, it is been to be returned to whoever may have bought it during that 49 year period of time. God's reasoning for this is that it is not land that is being sold, but "the number of harvests that are being sold to you" (Verse 16). Again, he reassures the people that if they obey this, they will get such good crops in the 6th year that the can live on them for the following 3 years!

However, although houses in villages in the countryside are included in this, houses in walled cities are not. If they have not been redeemed within a year of their sale, they will "pass in perpetuity to the purchaser, throughout the generations; it shall not be released in the Jubilee." So, I'm not quite sure what that would say to our current urban real estate markets.

Another thing that was supposed to happen in the year of Jubilee is that slaves were to be released if they so wished. The details of what to do if they were released or not are what is referred to in the latter verses of the chapter. In any case, all of this certainly goes against acquisition of large tracts of land and the amassing of wealth that could be related to that. However, it seems to apply more to the agrarian setting than urban, so, again, how do we understand this for our towns and cities?

The 2nd section of significance that I want to refer to here is how the division of land is spelled out for when the people enter the Promised Land. It is allotted according to the population of the tribe, and that was the way it was to stay. I am not sure what the ramifications of that would have been if one tribe significantly outgrew a smaller neighboring tribe in number (Interestingly, this is spoken to somewhat in Joshua 17:14-18 when the tribe of Ephraim, son of Joseph, complains that the land given them is too small). However, again, I believe this speaks to a general principle of fairness and justice. This is discussed in Leviticus 26:52-56. Here it is stated that "to a large tribe you are to give a large inheritance, and to a small tribe you shall give a small inheritance; every tribe should be given its inheritance according to its enrollment." The land was to be apportioned by lot.  In chapter 32 particular reference is made to the tribes of Reuben, Dan and Manasseh who wanted to take good ranch land east of the Jordan River because they were tribes with cattle, and in their passage through this land on the way to the Jordan, which they would eventually cross, they found it to their liking. The actual details of how the land was apportioned to the 12 tribes is not spelled out until Joshua chapters 13-19, after the Children of Israel had crossed the Jordan River into the promised land.

As I referred to in my previous blog installment's title, God does not forget the details. In Deuteronomy 19:14, he warns that landowners should not move boundary markers to enlarge their property.

A further development of this theme that goes against acquisition of wealth does not even require people to wait 50 years. According to Deuteronomy 15, any debt was to be forgiven every 7th year, at least when it pertained to members of the community, i.e. the People of Israel. This rule is accompanied by the reassuring promise in verse four that "there will be no one in need among you because the Lord is sure to bless you in the land that the Lord God is giving you as a possession to occupy, if only you will obey the Lord your God by diligently observing this entire commandment that I command you today." In the same passage, God warns the people that they should not begin to think along the lines of how close they were to the 7th year and make judgments about debt on that basis, i.e. not lending something that was going to be repaid perhaps a year later. As it says in verse 9-10: " your neighbor might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt. Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so, for on this account the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and all that you undertake."

Indeed, not only where they to forgive debts in the 7th year, they were to set their slaves free, again, at least if they were Hebrew. Indeed, not only were they to set them free, they were to "provide liberally" "the bounty with which the Lord your God has blessed you, remembering that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you; for this reason I leave this commandment upon you today" (Versus 12-18) Again, God promises to bless them if they do so. They were not to leave their freed slaves without anything to live on before they could re-establish themselves.

Thirdly, there is the interesting story of the daughters of Zelophehad, which begins in Numbers 27. A man died leaving 5 daughters but no sons. In those days, it was established that property was passed down through the sons. These sisters were brave enough to come to Moses and the other leaders of the people and say that it was not fair that they would not get their father's land as an inheritance when there were no sons in the family. Moses brought this matter to the Lord and was told that, "the daughters of Zelophehad are right." As a result, God instituted the method of passing on inheritance in this situation in considerable detail in verses 8-11 of this chapter. I am not going to spend much more time on property inheritance, but if these rules were still followed, it might save a lot of grief in families with respect to execution of wills and passing on of inheritance.

This story takes another twist in Numbers 36 when the heads of the clan to whom these daughters belong come to Moses with the concerned that these daughters may marry and then males who may not be of their tribe will end up with their property, particularly in the year of the Jubilee. The solution given for this at the time is that these daughters must marry within the tribe so that the land stays within the clan or tribe. I think this also underscores what I believe to be the principle that God was trying to teach us through the whole Jubilee process. God had given the tribes each a certain amount of land according to their size, and this was essentially not to change. Again, it goes against anybody increasing their portion of land, even a tribe. I could see that as having ramifications for nations trying to increase their size as well.

In any case, I wonder what it would do to our economic system and our method of handling property if we paid more attention to some of these rules. I think it could be quite literally liberating, as the Year Of Jubilee was to be.

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.