wild Bible stories

Today the snow is falling again and I was without any running water when I got up this morning. Interesting stuff. Messes with ones plans for the day. So I am doing a quick blog while I await the return of water for my shower for one cannot venture out into the stores and banks and post offices smelling like yesterday.

Yesterday I was trotting around on my friend, Dave's, blog (http://www.nakedpastor.com/) and saw his latest video conversation with Shane from http://www.fakerepublic.com/. Excellent stuff. Go there right now and watch the fakenaked show part 2. It is about money and marketing and integrity and they toss in a few innapropriate remarks just for good fun. Anyway, that got me onto Shane's website where I came across this fine quote in one of his posts. I asked if I could include it here and he graciously agreed.

i shudder every time i hear the life-giving message of jesus preached as constricting, fear-inducing, death - the dysangel! i despair when the wild word of god is tamed and tethered to a proof-text in support of prejudice. every time i hear the too-familiar sermons reiterate the same-old slant on complex, tangled, intricate, infinitely new passages, i cringe. i know this is the reason so few spend any time exploring the scriptures for themselves any more - they believe all the gold has been mined from these depths and all that remains is a hollow, black, cavernous carcass. the two-edged sword has been dulled by timid, safe, entirely predictable and unshocking interpretation. tragically, aslan has had his claws pared (to paraphrase the inimitable dorothy l. sayers). - from http://www.fakerepublic.com/

I had just been reading Isaiah 10 where strong and untamed words of destruction are rife, the kind that peace-loving modern tolerants hate, and was struck by the perspective one small phrase brought to the whole wrathful chapter. Here's the gist of the scenario: Israel has gone in a really bad direction and done some very bad things. God sends Assyria to attack them to show them that evil is not alright and you can't get away with injustice. They suffer. It is bad. People die. Then God says he will turn his wrath on Assyria who is now arrogant in its victory over Israel. Sounds like violence upon violence, but listen to the love and careful thought for a people's well-being behind all this slaughter:

And on that Day also, what's left of Israel, the ragtag survivors of Jacob, will no longer be fascinated by abusive, battering Assyria. They'll lean on God, The Holy - yes, truly. The ragtag renmant - what's left of Jacob - will come back to the Strong God. Your people Israel were once like the sand on the seashore, but only a scatterd few will return. Destruction is ordered, brimming over with righteousness. For the Master, God-of-the-Angel-Armies, will finish here what he started all over the globe. Therefore the Master, God-of-the-Angel-Armies, says: "My dear, dear people who live in Zion, don't be terrorized by the Assyrians when they beat you with clubs and threaten you with rods like the Egyptians once did. In just a short time my anger against you will be spent and I'll turn my destroying anger on them. - From Isaiah 10, The Message.

Our fascination with violence and destruction and unrighteousness is only too evident to God (and to anyone who watches any television or movies). He takes that unholy idolatry and smacks us over the head with it to wake us up out of our deception, and then he obliterates the instrument of violence itself so that we will no longer give it power. How brilliant is that! I love this God! And this complex, tangled, intricate, infinitely new, never timid, nor safe, nor entirely predictable and sometimes shockingly wonderful way he has about him.

These are the woods beside my house in the blizzard on Sunday.

The water has come back on, thank you technicians of the town of St-Lazare. Blessed shower!

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go...

Esther's protest

I have been hesitant to write anything here pertaining to the student protests in Montreal, partly because I didn't believe I had any solutions to offer and partly because I just wanted to stay out of the controversial mess it has become. Besides, I have studying to do. But this weekend, something changed. I read the book of Esther. First, some background: the unrest started early in the year when a group of students decided to protest the tuition hikes proposed by the Quebec government ($325 a year for the next 5 years). Seeing that tuition rates have been frozen for almost ten years, it seemed reasonable to the government to increase them to reflect rising costs. This did not sit well with some students, and they organised an ongoing protest in which students were encouraged to boycott classes and refuse to hand in assignments. It has now grown into a movement which has staged several organise...

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

The mad dash for the end of term has begun. I have finished all my required readings and have jumped into research reading. One of my papers is on the madness of theology (the correlation seems more obvious to some of us than to others). Truly inspiring stuff, I am finding. Let me share a few quotes here: There is a certain madness in Christianity – in a desert God who is jealous and passionate, in a saviour who speaks in apocalyptic terms, in a life of sacrificial love, in the scandal of particularity. In principle, a confessional theology should bear the mark of this madness, but the mark or wound must constantly be renewed. - Walter Lowe, "Postmodern Theology" in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , 2007. “In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the ‘Kingdom of God’ are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the ‘world,’ resulting in what I call a ‘sacred anarchy.’ C...

outWORD by Matte Downey

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