BiND:  Day 39 (II) – 40

 

The book of psalms is something of an enigma in biblical literature.  It doesn’t really tell a story, at least not in a traditional narrative sense.  It’s not really the “word of God,” at least not in the traditional sense.  It’s a collection of prayers, poems, and songs.  Imagine reading the hymnal, beginning at page 1 and going through to the end (600-odd songs later!).  Reading the psalms is a little like that. 

 

It’s no accident that many of the hymns you would read if you were reading through the hymnal come straight from the psalter.  Augustine famously said “the one who sings prays twice” so it’s easy to imagine singing our prayers, and to imagine our singing as prayer.

 

Many of the psalms were likely first written as private prayers of individuals for themselves and their community.  Many more were likely used liturgically—perhaps as songs, perhaps as calls-and-responses, perhaps as what we would call prayers of the people.  There are several different types of psalms in the book—there are prayers of praise, prayers of thanksgiving, songs of trust/confidence/hope, petitions and laments, wisdom poetry, and liturgies for processions or blessings.  Each of these types have examples of both individual and community prayers in the book.  Sometimes the superscription (the part before the first verse) tells us a little about the psalm, it’s context, or how it was to be used.  Sometimes it says “with stringed instruments” or something like “according to the Deer of the Dawn.”  If you look in our hymnal, right under the title you’ll find some words in all capital letters and usually a set of numbers and/or letters (for example, hymn 422 says Beach Spring, 8.7.8.7D).  These are the tune name and meter—ways of telling us how to use the poetry we find there.  As the teacher of Ecclesiastes says (we’ll read this in about a week…), “there is nothing new under the sun!”

 

Some of the psalms are acrostic poems—they take the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and begin each verse with a successive letter.  Many of the psalms employ various strategies of Hebrew poetry—like repeating a concept in the next line with a  new metaphor, writing mainly in couplets, etc. 

 

Today we read Book I—the psalter is divided basically into 5 books, though the divisions are not always obvious in their meaning—which clearly begins with a purpose, and that purpose is to show that following the covenant brings blessing.  Most of the psalms in this book use God’s name (YHWH in Hebrew letters), generally translated as Lord.  Most of the psalms in this section also follow a basic pattern—there is some sort of adoration of God, an affirmation of trust in God’s righteousness and justice, often right alongside pleas for help or deliverance.  There’s a lot of reference to covenant-keeping, and most of the help needed seems to be military/political in nature rather than personal (though there are exceptions, of course!).  In this section we also have some favorites, naturally—Psalm 22, with its plaintive “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and then psalm 23 with its wonderful images of trust. 

 

What stood out for you today in reading the psalms?  Any favorites?  Any questions that came up for you as you peeked into the prayer life of a nation?

BiND:  Day 36 (part 2)-39 (part 1)

 

Ah, the story of Job.  It just doesn’t get any more fun than this, does it?  God and the adversary (ha-satan—literally The Adversary or The Accuser.  Not a proper name, but a noun indicating function/title!) set up a little bet about God’s faithful servant Job.  God thinks that Job is faithful because he just is and because Job gets God.  The accuser/adversary thinks Job is faithful only because of the material rewards, and if those benefits are removed then Job will wither and be like everyone else.  In lots of ways, God has faith in Job as much as Job has faith in God.  Then all kinds of horrible things happen to Job—as Richard says, “Job had it all, and in a single day he lost it all.”  But Job perseveres in faithfulness, though he does question and rail and vent his anger and beg God to look at someone else for a while, or just kill him already.  Then God comes along and says “can you make the sunrise?  Were you here when I made mountains and oceans?  have you see the sea monster?  Can anyone else control him except I, who made him?  What about ostriches—aren’t they great?”  Umm, yeah.  That’s an answer.  At least, to Job it is.  Job is humbled and he returns to exalting and glorifying God, no longer presuming that he (a mere mortal) should have any answers at all.  And then his stuff and family is returned tenfold.

 

Well, if ever there was a story that raised questions about God, about humans, and about how we relate together, this is it.  Not to mention the traditional theodicy (problem of evil) issue:  why do bad things happen to good people?  If God is loving and powerful, how come bad stuff happens?

 

We should note that the poetry in the big middle section (chapters 3-42) is the older portion of Job, and none of the disturbing stuff about God and the adversary making a bet is in that.  The prose at the beginning and end were added later as an attempt to make sense of life’s suffering.  Since Job’s friends clearly can’t be right—Job doesn’t deserve what’s happening to him (and, by extension, none of us deserve the things that happen to us, at least not things like the ones described in Job); and since Job clearly can’t be right—God can’t just let things like that happen to people (it doesn’t work with the covenant theology we’ve been talking so much about lately!), then there must be another answer.  And the answer the ancient people came up with is hugely unsatisfying and causes us loads of new problems.

 

As we discussed in class tonight, though, ultimately Job’s friends and Job do get it wrong.  And also a little right.  God doesn’t punish us by striking down our families or our bodies or our psyches, as Job’s friends suggest.  And if we just examine ourselves more closely and repent more and pray more and act more faithfully, the suffering won’t magically end because God is somehow satisfied.  But also, as Paul says, “there is no one who is righteous, not even one.”  Human beings are all broken, all sinful.  Yes, we are also all made in the image of God, which is what Job clings to and continues to claim over and over again, but ultimately, compared to God, well…we don’t really compare.  So when God finally speaks out of the whirlwind and gives us all a whirlwind tour of God’s amazing creation and amazing deeds, well, all we can do is be in awe, all we can do is be humble.  There is a bigger picture than just us.  We are part of the picture, yes, but not the whole picture.  And, most importantly, we are not God.  So while we don’t understand, and while we rail at God for injustice, we also have to recognize that God is God and we aren’t.  Yes, rail against injustice, and also yes, recognize that whether we want to be or not, we’re part of it.  And recognize that, as the Westminster Catechism says in question 1:  “What is the chief end of humankind?”  “Humanity’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.” 

 

There’s lots to think about about Job—join in in the comments!

orthodox icon of Job, “the much suffering.”

BiND:  Day 36 (Esther only)

 

The story of Esther is really interesting.  Written in the mid-400’s BC, it’s an example of written, not oral, literature.  There’s no evidence that this story was an oral tradition before being written down, and the end of the book even says that Jews are to read the entire story from the scroll at Purim every year (which modern Jews still do).  In some ways, it’s an ancient novella.  It reads like historical fiction—there’s no evidence for Esther, for instance, and the hyperbole is pretty amazing (the king can’t change his own laws?  They slaughtered 75,000 people in one day somewhere outside the main city?  etc)—and it clearly is used to set up the festival of Purim and it’s fairly obviously designed for liturgical use.  It’s a pretty good story, too!  It’s fast moving and uses a lot of suspense as well as intriguing pairs to move the story along.  (FYI:  The version we have in “protestant” Bibles is the Hebrew Masoretic text.  There are also two Greek versions which expand on and moralize about the story.  You can find these additions in the apocrypha in most study Bibles.)

 

What’s interesting about Esther and the fact that it’s in the Bible is that there are no references to God, no prayer, no allusions to other parts of the Bible, no religious activities, and not even any evidence of keeping the law!  We have a straight up “secular” story.  So what can we learn from the story?

 

The most common thing I’ve seen, at least for youth groups, is to capitalize on “for just such a time as this”—we’ve been given so many privileges and advantages due to our station in the world, perhaps we’re also being called to use those privileges for such a time as this.  I’ve also seen the story used as a justification for resisting oppression, for using womanly wiles, and for slaughtering enemies.  I like to think of it as an example of someone changing the system from the inside—appearing to be playing by the rules but actually subverting them. 

 

What do you think about the story?  What does it tell us about God and how we are to be as God’s people?

BiND:  Day 34 and 35

 

Well, we’ve gotten ourselves into exile, which may or may not be a great time.  It’s hard, of course, to live outside the land, without the Temple, away from what our ancestors worked so hard for.  We’ll see in the psalms some of how people felt as they were led away to live in a foreign land, and we’ll see more in the prophets about how we got into exile and what to do now that we’re in it.  But in the meantime, the people had to figure out how they could still be God’s chosen people without the land or the Temple, and how they could still worship God.  This is when we get into the first real development of Judaism, and Ezra-Nehemiah is where we first see the people being referred to as “Jews” rather than “Hebrews” or “Israelites.”  No longer are they primarily politically defined by their ancestor, now they are politically defined by their religion, which is of course tied up in their ethnicity. 

 

Ezra-Nehemiah is a book about what happens when the people come home.  The book (which we now have as two books) was likely written between 458 and 432 BC—from the time Ezra went to Jerusalem through the second governorship of Nehemiah.  First we should remember that it’s historically unlikely that all the Israelites were taken into exile—probably it was mainly political and religious leaders, wealthy people, and a percentage of the peasants/regular people.  Of course there are Samaritans, who didn’t go into exile but stayed and intermarried with the new settlers brought in by the Babylonians, and therefore became mixed and ritually impure and would later be despised by all “good Jews.”  But still, when we see the numbers who come back with Ezra/Nehemiah, it’s by no means everyone.  In 50 years you can bet the population continued to expand, but some people apparently decided not to come back.  Which ultimately led Nehemiah (who was a Jew but also in the Persian government, and so became governor in Jerusalem) to resettle some of the rural population in the city to make sure there were enough people there to rebuild and defend.

 

So—after exile, some of the Jews (as they’re now called) are sent back by the Persian emperor to rebuild the Temple and then the city.  Jerusalem was part of the Persian empire, not a separate or independent nation/kingdom/city-state.  It’s pretty clear that the people are in Jerusalem at the pleasure and by the order of the emperor.  But when the construction gets going, with the Temple and the city walls being the first things put up (houses came later), the neighbors start to get suspicious that revolution might be coming.  Since Jerusalem was part of the empire, this is a big deal and these neighbors write off to accuse the Jews of treason.  For a while it seems to work, but ultimately the Jews prevail. 

 

These are not just any Jews—these are Jews serious about the covenant.  Did you notice how many times they mentioned “the law of Moses”? These two books (which used to be just one book, made up primarily of what scholars call the “Ezra Memoir” along with some official documents and some history documented elsewhere as well) were clearly written by the hardliners, the fundamentalists.  Ezra goes so far as to kick out foreign wives and “half-breed” children.  These are literalists.  Which makes it all the more interesting that animal sacrifice in the newly rebuilt Temple doesn’t play more of a role.  There’s lots of liturgical information, but not a lot of sacrifice mentioned.  It was almost certainly happening (otherwise why have the Temple?) but the other aspects of keeping covenant (no buying or selling food on the Sabbath, among other rules) have much more central place.  It’s interesting to watch what’s happening to the community as they try to recover their sense of place along with the covenant that they’ve been trying to keep outside the land.

photo is of the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, taken by TCP.

I had a little chat with Anna Z today–between the 1-1/2 hour drumming workshop (a Sherri Dees dream!) and “intentional free time” during which Anna was planning to spend time being artistic.  They are certainly keeping her busy down there!  She says that the group is very close and “really emotional–we cry all the time.”  They are really getting into some spiritual and theological issues, as well as having some great servant experiences.  Tonight they are going to a Taize service.  Anna was also really excited about the outdoor labyrinth!  She talked a lot too about the different experiences of call that people are having, and how they are working out their callings as individuals and as a group.  It all sounds fascinating!  It sounds like she’s having a great time.  She kept saying “I don’t know where to start to tell you about all of this!”

Anna thanks you for your prayers–and I hope we will continue praying for her and her Project Burning Bush colleagues as they discern how God is calling them and as they experience lots of new things.  The program ends Saturday morning and Anna will be home Saturday night (insha’allah!), just in time for the mission trip that leaves Sunday afternoon!  Thanks to all of you for being a great support and a great community for Anna.

BiND:  Day 33

 

Today, more kings.  Two memorably good ones:  Hezekiah and Josiah, both of whom were humbled by discovery of the law and who instituted serious reform—restoring the Temple, destroying high places, organizing Temple worship, celebrating the Passover, etc.  But even their goodness and righteousness (and even their repentance when they became too proud to serve God) weren’t enough to avert disaster.  It appears that, though serving God is important, consistency is also key.  It’s not enough for the people to serve God for 40 years and then spend another generation or two serving other gods—they need to serve God consistently, they need to be the covenant community all the time (not just on Sunday morning).  It’s a hard life, but rewarding if they can stick to it.

 

I noticed a few things as I went ahead and finished Chronicles today (the reading assignment today ends only a chapter and a half before the book does, so I figured I might as well…).  First, today was the first time I noticed the phrase “which are the work of human hands” when talking about other gods.  I remember lots of times where it says that the king set up altars for “the whole host of heaven” but today it says that the people of Assyria “spoke of the God of Jerusalem as if he were like the gods of the peoples of the earth, which are the work of human hands.”  This is not just another tribal God we’re dealing with, this is the real deal—that seems to be what the Chronicler (or possibly a later editor) is saying here.  Interesting, especially in light of our discussion in class last night!

 

I also noticed that in the end of Chronicles the writer picks up something that was said in Deuteronomy, about the land not being given the Sabbath it deserves every 7 years, but during the time of exile the land would get rest.  And it happened—the land lay “desolate” (or at least, not used by Israelites) and made up for its missed Sabbaths.  God’s promise to the land has been fulfilled too.

 

Last but not least:  you may have noticed throughout Chronicles that when a king dies, it often says he was buried “in the city of David.”  We generally think of the city of David being Bethlehem, since that’s what it says in our Christmas story.  But in this case the “city of David” is the oldest part of Jerusalem.  You can still see the ruins being excavated just outside the current old city walls.  How’s that for a little tidbit?

photo is of a wall archaeologists think may have been an early palace in the city of David.  More info from BiblePlaces.com–search for “city of David.”

Jayne says:

I just got off the phone with Anna and she is bubblying over with excitement. She has taken some classes and workshop. Today (or maybe yesterday - she was talking very fast) was an improv/drama workshop she really loved. Saturday David Lamotte (sp?) will be there to give his Changing the World 101 workshop and a concert. Yesterday they went ot a community market and planned and prepared a meal with food purchased from the Market. They also took a tour of a slave trade route. Next week she will be sitting in on a Hebrew class (she is especially excited about it.)
The group is from all over the US and in general a year older. There are 16 of them plus teachers. They are building lasting relationships. Anna’s comment - everyone is so different but so nice. Lot’s of philisophical discussions like what if my blue is your green but we both call it blue…
There are also daily reflection times where she thinks about where she saw and heard God during the day’s activities.
Thanks again Teri for telling us about Project Burning Bush. Thanks for everyone’s prayers and support. I truly can’t think of anything better for Anna.

After tonight’s Bible in 90 Days class, I realized I think a lot more things than we can discuss in an hour… about what the Bible is, what it means to be a Christian, and how we relate then to people who believe and live out their beliefs differently than we do.

We spent a lot of time talking about whether, if we believe in the God we see in the Bible then can we still respect people who believe differently?  And I suggested that it’s possible, and indeed that as monotheists we claim, that there is in fact only one God, but different ways of understanding/being in relationship with God.  Some choose the way we do, some choose the Hindu way or the Muslim way or the Buddhist way or the atheist way or the just-go-through-life-however way.  But if we claim there’s only one God, then…well, there’s only one God. The challenge of being a Christian is to be in relationship with God as we see God revealed first in Christ and second in the rest of Scripture, and third in the world and our experience.

The problem, of course, is that it seems so arrogant, the “traditional” way of saying “I believe in the real God and you don’t because your scripture is different.”  As finite human beings, it is not possible for us to understand God or even really to contemplate all the hugeness of God’s mystery.  We have to go on faith that there are things about God we don’t get, but we serve God anyway.  We keep climbing though the mountaintop is shrouded in clouds 99.99% of the time.  

But here’s what I know to be true, for me.  (notice that was a small-t true, not True…because that falls back into “things that are bigger than my brain.”)  I know that the God I know in Christ, the God revealed in the stories of God’s relationship with people throughout time, is True, keeps promises, is faithful even when I’m not, and is worthy of being in relationship with.  Like Dan, I have seen (both in my life and in the lives of others) the difference in the way life is lived when a person is in relationship with God.  I also believe that the stories we have of people’s relationships with God, and God’s relationships with people, are beautiful and wonderful (even when they’re horrible) and that they show us something of who God is and who we are created to be.  They give us little glimpses of the kingdom (or of what the kingdom is NOT, sometimes!) and they call us to help build the kingdom of God on earth, not to just sit back and wait until we die to get beyond the cloudcap.  We read these stories again and again because they form us again and again–they aren’t stagnant, they are living both on the page and in our lives.  WE are the covenant community, and we read these stories to see how it’s been done before and to imagine how God might be calling us to do it in the future.  Does that mean other people and their stories and understandings of God are wrong?  I don’t think so–partially because the Bible is pretty clear that humility is a good thing, that knowing our limitations of understanding is a good thing, that not judging is a good thing.  What it does mean is that we have stories of our faith ancestors, we have relationships with the covenant community both past and present, and we have a relationship with a faithful, promise-keeping, love-and-justice-together-equal-grace God who calls us to be a faithful covenant community now, to offer the world glimpses of what God wants the world to be like.  What’s not beautiful about that?

BiND:  Day 32

 

Well, there’s always room for a little more review, isn’t there?  Today as I was reading I realized that I hadn’t yet written anything about the Queen of Sheba.  So here goes…

 

It’s not entirely clear where “Sheba” is—most scholars say it’s where modern Yemen is, but some suggest it’s more like east Africa somewhere (they base these discussions on what the Queen seems to have brought and why she would be an important trading partner or why she would need Solomon to be a friend since he might be on her trade routes).  In any case, her people would be called “Sabeans” (not Shebans!).  She was obviously quite a woman—head of state, traveling in her own retinue, taking it upon herself to pay a visit to another monarch, and bringing lots and lots of cash with her.  But even with all that, when she saw all Solomon had (both in material goods and in the wisdom God had granted), “there was no more spirit left in her.”  That’s right, in mere moments Solomon killed the spirit of a powerful and wealthy woman.  But she keeps on with the tour, the negotiations, and possibly with some other…ahem…activities (there are just enough euphemistic terms in here to make that a possibility…).  And then she goes home, and that’s the last we hear of her or her country.  Doesn’t it seem at all odd that the head-of-state visit that should be described in most detail would be by a woman from a country that’s never heard from again?  There doesn’t seem to be any good explanation for this, other than to speculate that this is an opportunity for the writers to show how vast Solomon’s holdings and wisdom are.  So great, in fact, that they literally take the queen’s breath (ruach means breath or spirit) away. 

 

You may have noticed that in today’s kingly review, we focused entirely on kings of Judah (the southern kingdom, and viewed by the Chronicler as the only legitimate kingdom) and the kings of Israel are only mentioned as bad examples, bad people, or full-on corruptors.  You may also have noticed a pattern:  the kings start off good, but then when their priest or their prophet dies, so too does the king’s righteousness.  Each king begins well but falls off the bandwagon in the last few years of his reign and begins worshiping idols.  It’s almost as if to make the point that we can’t do it alone—we have to have help, encouragement, friends who will keep us accountable in our life of faith.  It’s never more obvious than when one’s entire life and work is being boiled down to a few paragraphs!

photo is of the reconstructed remains of Solomon’s Stables, near the Temple.  Taken by Akiva, from Flickr.

 

BiND:  Day 31

 

More review today…I just want to highlight a couple of things in this recap of David and Solomon’s reign(s) (which the Chronicler wants to blend together in one big happy-days montage).

1. Judging from the number of people involved, worshiping God is a full time job for most of the nation.  I wonder what our lives would look like if we considered worship our full time job and had to figure out how to do other things in a spirit of worship?
2. In a time when we as a congregation are contemplating a building project, it’s interesting to read 1 Chronicles 29, about how everyone gave big offerings (of their own freewill, no less!) and, once again, just like in the Tabernacle story back in Exodus, there is more than enough to complete the project of building for God’s glory.  Today we would say we are building for God’s mission, but that doesn’t change the offering situation!  And then David’s prayer of gratitude and praise is amazing. I think I might start using it.
3. At the end of David’s prayer of gratitude in 1 Chr. 29, he turns to the people and says “Bless the Lord your God.”  This is the most common use of the imperative form of the word “bless” in the Hebrew Bible.  We in English tend to turn it around, ordering God to bless us, our endeavors, our nations, etc.  But in the Bible the people are the ones who are ordered to bless God.  It’s a little different mindset. How might it change the way we view God, ourselves, our endeavors, and our nations if we turned it around?
4. I love Solomon’s prayer in 2 Chr. 6 (a recap of his prayer in Kings) because he is so certain that people will sin (he even says, like Paul, “there is no one who does not sin.”) but he is even more certain that God’s love and forgiveness are bigger than the sins of people.  It’s there and all we have to do is notice!  What a great theological statement Solomon makes—very Reformed.  “There is no one who does not sin” but “there is no God like you, in heaven or on earth, keeping covenant in steadfast love.”  This is, in essence, our theological tradition.  Though we interpret things slightly differently than he goes on to do (we believe that God’s love and forgiveness are given to us before we can even ask for it, whereas Solomon says “give it to them when they ask”—but as I said in the excursus on exile below, we have a slightly different (and less physical-literal) worldview so we know what it’s like to feel unforgiven because we haven’t asked for forgiveness, though we may be forgiven in actuality).
5. In 2 Chr. 7, that’s a lot of sheep.  (it’s probably hyperbole, a way to say:  it was a lot, and this was a really super important occasion!!!!  But still.  120,000?  wow.)

photo is of an arch reconstructed like one from Solomon’s Temple, on the site of the Temple.  by DDanzig, from Flickr.