tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34212627756810990392024-02-08T10:59:43.016-05:00Pastor Aaron's CornerRevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-85454492450256093832018-06-23T14:00:00.000-04:002018-06-23T17:29:13.241-04:00Wedding Sermon for June 23, 2018This one is a little out of the ordinary. It's for a wedding, and the readings for it were chosen (mostly) from outside the Christian canon. But no worries; God's grace is so great that anything can proclaim it.<br />
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Readings:<br />
<a href="http://snippetandink.com/ceremony-reading-art-good-marriage-wilferd-arlan-paterson/" target="_blank">The Art of a Good Marriage,</a> by Wilferd Arlan Peterson<br />
<a href="https://www.weddingbee.com/blog/secular-ceremony-readings-2/" target="_blank">Four Elements of True Love</a>, by Thich Naht Hanh (In the link, it's #4)<br />
<a href="http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=396646542" target="_blank">Genesis 12:1-5a</a><br />
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God came to Abram, we are told, and gave him some instructions. “I want you to take everything you have, and move to a new land.” Abram seems to have had a gift of being able to talk to God in a way that most of us can’t. He probably answered by saying, “And which land is this, then? How do I get there? Can I get directions? Maybe put it into Google Maps?” And God’s answer? “You’ll know it when you get there.” And so they set out, traveling across the fertile crescent, north and west and south again around the desert land in the middle east, to settle finally in a beautiful land called Canaan. A grand and powerful story.<br />
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In our American culture, we have this funny idea that love is something cinematic. It has to be big, sweeping, with romance happening in unexpected ways, the hoped-for relationship intruded upon by some problem the couple discovers as they’re falling in love, or some other person who still has feelings for one of the players. And yet there is this inescapable pull between the lovers, and they cannot ignore it. All obstacles are surmounted, and one night they meet up on the top of the Empire State Building, or in Paris, or by the side of a moonlit lake, and we all know how the story ends.<br />
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And Cristina and Stephen, your story is like that, in its own way. I mean, seriously, who else is able to talk about going to school together in Rhode Island, and then moving, separately, across the country to California, and falling in love there? And then moving back here, living in your parent’s basement (how romantic), buying a house together… It’s a story for the big screen (or at least a Hallmark Television Movie), starring Colin Firth and Emma Thomson.<br />
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Except, as I’ve gotten to know you a bit, it sounds like you don’t really feel that your relationship is cinematic. It’s just normal. It is what it is. So you renovated a house, and you have jobs, and you get up in the morning together, and you do your thing. It’s just normal life. There’s nothing all that surprising about it. Normal life, just, you know, together.<br />
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I suspect that’s why you chose the first reading, that beautiful poem by Wilferd Arlan Peterson, that begins by saying, “Las pequeñas cosas son las grandes cosas.” The small things are the big things. You know as well as any couple I’ve known that it’s not really the cinematic parts that make a great marriage. It’s just, you know, holding hands and remembering to say “I love you” regularly. It’s remembering that your spouse doesn’t have to be perfect, but only has to be loved. It’s cultivating a spirit of joy in the simple things you do for each other, instead of just service and sacrifice. It is being patient, and flexible, and kind, even when you don’t really feel like it. It’s not about going to Paris together, though that can be fun if you do. It’s about paying a mortgage together, and cleaning the kitchen together, and eating breakfast together.<br />
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I can hardly imagine what it was like, Abram sitting down at the kitchen table with his wife Sarai the next morning, having absolutely no idea how to tell her. “So, Sarai, my princess. I… So I… um… could I have a little more milk on my cereal? *cough* Heh-heh. Um, so, I have something to tell you. Right. Well, see, last night, I had this dream, and in it, God said to me… God said, well, {quickly} he wants us to take everything that we have and move to a new land six hundred miles away. *cough* So, what do you think?” I remember learning in Sunday school that it was practically a miracle that Abram had enough faith to do this crazy thing. But I think the real miracle is that Sarai had enough faith in her husband. The truly miraculous thing about Sarai and Abram is that they sat down together and talked about why this was a terrible idea together and then decided that it was still the right thing to do, together, and so they packed up and went. They just lived together.<br />
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And how do we live together? By acting in kindness, relieving suffering, cultivating joy, and refusing to discriminate. These are the things that the Buddha teaches are the components of true love. They are simple. But listen to what he says about the results of these simple works and attitudes: “First, we learn to love one person with all our understanding and insight; then we expand that love to embrace another person, and another, until our love is truly boundless.” The love we have for one another does not stay with ourselves. It expands and expands. And Abram and Sarai’s story says the same. God’s promise to them isn’t just something for themselves. God says, “In you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”<br />
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Stephen and Cristina, I asked you a question a few months ago, when I first met with you over Skype. I asked you what difference you thought this wedding would make. After all, you’ve been together for years now. And you just bought a house together. It doesn’t get a whole lot more committed than that. So what’s the point of this today? And what you told me, I think, is right. Your wedding today isn’t really about you. It’s about them. All the people who have gathered here with you to witness and celebrate who you are together, people from every stage in your journey together, every chapter of the story of becoming who you are. It’s about taking your private love and going public with it. It’s about officially inviting all of them to see what’s going on here.<br />
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When you pay the mortgage and clean the kitchen and eat breakfast together, you are living out the love that you have for each other, and that I believe God has planted in you for one another. You are showing the world what love looks like. Which means that you are teaching the world how to love. And even more than that, you are a sign for the world that IT is loved. In the way you love each other, whether you know it or not, you are telling everyone else about how God loves them.<br />
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And that is the most important, most holy thing you could do. Celebrate the joy you have in your love. Because in this broken world, captive to fear and anger, the only thing that can fix it all is love.<br />
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We don’t acknowledge it very often. But it isn’t the big, powerful, dramatic events of the religious traditions that have really changed the world. Jesus was born to a poor unwed teenage mother. The Buddha’s claim to fame was sitting under a tree and thinking for a while. Mohammed was just a guy who loved his community. The Hindu goddess Sita simply remained faithful to her husband. And Abram and Sarai sat down and talked it out. And what is the result of that breakfast conversation? Today, 15 million Jews, 2.1 billion Christians, 1.3 billion Muslims, and the followers of a handful of smaller religions find inspiration in these two peoples’ faithfulness to each other and to God.<br />
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May you simply be kind to each other, lighten each other’s load, and find joy in each other. May you do it in all the small ways of life, never forgetting, even when you are each other’s greatest frustration, that you are also each other’s greatest love. And may many, many people come to know love through you, just as they have through that ancient couple’s love one morning at breakfast.RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-38434360508013167322018-06-18T12:48:00.003-04:002018-06-18T12:50:05.178-04:00Sermon for June 17, 2018Sermon on Season After Pentecost, Lectionary 11(B) - <a href="http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=396339988">Mark 4:26-34</a><br />
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The story of Don Quixote seems, on the surface, to be simply a fantasy meant to delight, a story about a man who has lost his mind and come to believe that he is a knight, windmills are giants, and his peasant neighbor is a squire. But it contains a profound truth, one that I know well, since I had the privilege of playing that peasant neighbor, Sancho Panza, in the musical version of the story, my freshman year of college.<br />
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Spoiler alert: At the end of the play, Don Quixote dies. As his friends look on, each of them reacts differently. Sancho is a simple man with simple ideas in his head, and for him, the death of his master means the end of his adventure and a return to his old, miserable life. But Aldonza, the prostitute whom Quixote had taken for a noblewoman, is wiser. She sees the beauty in her mad knight’s foolish belief that even the least of people in this world hold a spark of not just human dignity, but true greatness. I can remember the two of us standing off to stage right, as the character playing the priest intoned Psalm 130 over Quixote’s deathbed. She looked at me with pained eyes and implored. “Believe, Sancho. Believe.”<br />
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And there, at the climax of the story, the moment of most profound emotion, I burst into laughter. I should be clear: Laughter was not in the script. It was entirely inappropriate. But I could not hold it back. Night after night of rehearsals, we would get to that line and out it would come. It was uncontrollable, a compulsion. At one rehearsal early on, something small struck me funny, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. After two months of this, our director really became quite angry. “If you can’t fix this soon, I’m going to have to find someone else.” Eventually, the problem solved itself, and the show, as they say, went on.<br />
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It was a hard time in my life. It was freshman year of college, and so I was living on my own for the first time, and not doing a great job of taking care of myself. The courses, and the amount of homework that went with them, were impossible to keep up with. And with a lead part in the theater department, instead of doing that homework at night and practicing good self-care, I spent three hours in rehearsals, six days a week. I had difficult relationships to deal with, too. And on top of it all, I was fighting with an emerging chronic mental illness that was slowly destroying me from the inside—and of course, had no idea what it was. It makes sense that all that stress and pain was manifesting at a moment that, in the play, was intentionally designed to produce powerful emotion.<br />
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What makes less sense is that it manifested itself in laughter. And different kinds of laughter from one night to the next. Sometimes I would be doubled over in hysterics. Sometimes it would just be a single guffaw. Sometimes it would be a high-pitched, nervous thing, but other times it would be a real belly laugh. I wanted badly to stop it. I tried everything. But it came anyway, and I was powerless. Amidst everything else that was going on, my body desperately needed joy. And so it got it, by force.<br />
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And that is what the kingdom of God is like. It is like a seed that is planted—or actually, Jesus says, not even planted, but simply scattered on the ground. Jesus has in mind a first-century context, with first-century agricultural technology. Today we have machines, large farming equipment, that actually—I researched this, it’s incredible—inserts a thin metal shaft, like a needle, into the earth at just the right depth, and then jets the seed through it on a puff of air calculated to just the right pressure, planting for optimal production. It sounds insanely over-complicated to me, but it’s a lot more effective than going out into the fields and just tossing handfuls of seeds onto the ground like Jesus is talking about. And then, nobody does anything to it—no plowing, no tilling, no watering, no tying it to frames to ensure it grows straight, no pesticides, not even putting up fences to keep out the rabbits. But it grows anyway. First the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. It takes care of itself, it grows whether you want it to or not, there is really nothing you can do to stop it. But suddenly the harvest is full and ripe, and the grain is collected and milled and baked, and thousands eat loaves of bread and are filled to fullness with baskets leftover.<br />
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I have heard this preached beautifully with the image of a weed growing up between the cracks in a sidewalk. Go ahead, spray it with weed killer, and in a month it will be back, like it or not. It’s a good image, but it’s not good enough. Which is why Jesus follows it up with this story of the mustard seed. And to be clear about it, this isn’t Jesus talking about faith like a mustard seed being able to do great things; that’s a different teaching of his. Here, Jesus is talking about the whole Kingdom of God, and what that really looks like; not just the seed of faith inside us, but the kingdom bursting forth around us. A tiny seed grows into a large bush, large enough for birds from the corners of the earth to nest in its branches.<br />
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Friday night I was walking down the street in New York City with some friends, and we came to an area where the sidewalk had been heavily paved with asphalt from the curb all the way to the building. Whoever paved it did a sloppy job, and the paving reached a foot up the wall. There, at the corner of the wall, was a weed. It had actually shoved its way up through the asphalt, pushing it away from the surface, and growing out beyond it. The stem of this plant, under the asphalt, was about four inches around, and the whole thing had grown as tall as me. I suspect it was there because it had grown so strong that nobody could cut it down—at least, not without damaging the building.<br />
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This, Jesus tells us, is what the Kingdom of God is like. Like the smallest seed, it is sneaky, and slips in where you don’t expect. Like an untended seed that grows anyway, it is unstoppable. Like the seed ready for harvest, it produces incredible things that change people’s lives. Like the surprise of the biggest bush, it grows into the Kingdom of the World in ways that are so large they are unexpected, drawing people from the corners of the world to its Good News. Like the weed on the street, it is so strong that it can not be torn down, and its roots will slowly tear away at the building it grows on until all is reduced to rubble. And like unstoppable laughter, it counters the stress and pain and despair of the world by bursting into joy.<br />
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If I knew this congregation better, I would know the best way to introduce a section of my sermon here about how we, people who dwell in God’s Kingdom, can counter the pain of the Kingdom of this World; pain like tearing children away from their parents and incarcerating them in concentration camps built out of abandoned shopping centers and then using God’s Holy Word to justify these atrocities. But although I think as God’s people we must counter this with gospel, and I obviously can’t stop myself from speaking about this evil, I just don’t know you well enough, and I so I can’t dwell on it any more than I already have.<br />
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Instead, I’ll leave you with a different idea: The idea that you live in both of these kingdoms. You were born into the Kingdom of the World. But Christ has made you a citizen of the Kingdom of God by his gift. Nothing you have done has made this true, it just IS true by God’s gift. By the grace of Christ, you have a foot in both.<br />
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I live in New York City now, though I get to leave at the beginning of August, which makes me very happy. It is a stressful place to live, so many people in such a small place. It’s odd; some days, I am disgusted by the way people treat each other, the meanness, the cruelty, even in day to day interactions. Other days, I am delighted by the little acts of love people do for one another, the beauty and dignity and greatness they see in each other. An example: One day, a schizophrenic man started up a conversation with a restaurant patron through the open window, and a server angrily shouted him away. The next day, a different schizophrenic man—mental illness always seems more visible in a large city—walked into a coffee shop and started screaming. A server walked up to him, had a quiet and pleasant conversation, treated him like he mattered, gave him a drink, and sent him happily on his way. Two days in a row, this is what I saw. But oddly, no day is filled with both. Friday this week was joyful, all day. Saturday was angry. And if everyone is kind one day, and everyone is angry the next, I suspect it’s not everyone else who is changing. It’s just me, and the way I’m seeing things. Some days I live in the Kingdom of this World. Some days, I live in the Kingdom of God.<br />
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Which will you live in today? And if you end up living in the Kingdom of this World, will you respond as if you <i>only</i> live there too? Or will you help to sow the seeds of the Kingdom of God, a growth that cannot be stopped, a growth that will happen whether you sow those seeds or not, a growth promised by a God who is ultimately, always victorious over every evil, and whose joy God has invited you to be a part of?<br />
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RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-41834745745938151832018-06-09T17:52:00.002-04:002018-06-09T17:55:19.399-04:00Sermon for June 10, 2018Season of Pentecost, Proper 5(B) - <a href="https://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9Chttp://bible.oremus.org/?ql=395581070%E2%80%9D">Genesis 3:8-15</a>, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9Chttp://bible.oremus.org/?ql=395581118%E2%80%9D">Mark 3:20-35</a><br />
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Every day we gather at 1:45 for prayer. And despite being an ordained pastor with eight years of experience and two Master’s degrees in religion, I have no idea what is going on.<br />
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Let me explain. I’m working to become a professor, someday teaching Old Testament. I earned a Master of Theology degree at Princeton in May, and am spending my summer at Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan to get the Jewish perspective on our shared scriptures. I wasn’t sure, at first, about being a gentile, living and studying in a Jewish community, but I’ve been accepted with open arms. The classes are interesting, and the professors aren’t afraid to explain what’s going on when the Christian in the room doesn’t get it. I’ve been invited to see movies with new friends and to share in Sabbath dinner. I am always welcome at even the most Jewish of events going on. I am as much a part of the community as everyone else.<br />
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Except, see, <i>Minchah</i> is Jewish midday prayer. We all gather together in the campus synagogue, and the prayer leader starts to chant the liturgy. In Hebrew. As fast as humanly possible. Honestly, it seems like there’s some special prize I don’t know about for the one who gets through prayer the fastest. There is so much going on in these prayers that I don’t understand. For Christians, when it’s time to say something together in worship, we say it together; there, everyone goes at their own pace in a cacophony of voices. At the beginning of prayer, everyone prays silently, and then we seem to go back to the beginning and start again aloud. Some days we sing to the God of Abraham, and other days to the God of Abraham and Sarah. There’s a section that seems to be read by random people from the congregation; yet everyone knows who is supposed to read each day, except of course for me.
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But it strikes me that prayer is the time when people should be able to come together most, and instead, I find it to be the time when I feel our division most greatly. In fact, there are a few other non-Jews in our classes, and while they attended prayer the first few days, now they’ve just stopped coming.
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If this feels like a jarring experience to me, how much more jarring must it have been for God that day soon after creation when he was walking through his garden, and strangely, his human beings were nowhere to be found. Usually they ran up to God with excitement, devoted in love to the One who created them, (who, admittedly, was devoted in love to them too). But today, they seemed to be nowhere.
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So God called out to them, and heard a faint sound coming from behind a group of bushes. “I’m hiding.” Rule number one of hiding is to not give away your hiding spot by saying, “I’m hiding,” but I guess the human hadn’t really done this before. “I’m naked. I don’t want you to see me.” And of course, God knew what had happened.
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When this story of creation begins back in Genesis 2:4, everything is connected. The water flows up from underneath the earth; water and earth are connected. The ground is gathered together to create the human; human and earth are connected. The human is filled with the breath of God and comes alive; God and human are connected. Animals are created to companion the human; human and animal are connected. The second person is created to partner with the first; people are connected to each other.
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But then the serpent whispers to them, “You will be more like God.” And that sounds like a good thing. But the biggest difference between us and God is that we cannot exist without God, but while God loves us, God can exist without us. To become more like God is to rely on ourselves rather than on God. And that is not what we were made for. Whether you take the fruit of the tree as an actual piece of fruit, or simply a metaphor, the point of it is that we turn away from God and toward ourselves. And this is the best definition of sin that I know.
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Self-reliance means ignorance of all those connections we noticed before. And that is exactly the result of the people’s actions; all our interdependence is torn apart. We only hear the beginning of the results in today’s reading, but it tells us that the people are torn apart from the animals, and serpent and woman are at enmity with each other. What follows after the reading ends is a description of the division between people, the loss of equity between man and woman, the breaking of our real love for one another. And the most surprising to me when I first learned it: The human who works the ground will find it difficult to cultivate, because the ground is actually cursed because of the human. The relationships between all of creation are destroyed, and the world is torn apart.
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And don’t we know it. The world we live in is becoming increasingly polarized. People in our individualistic culture are oriented toward the care of no one but themselves. Hate groups are gaining strength and a louder voice in our nation—Hate! God created us for love, and we drive each other toward hate! Racism, and classism, and sexism, and ageism, and heterosexism, and cisgenderism, and ableism, and nativism, do you hear this ridiculous list of things that we use to divide us? They are all gaining in legitimacy in our world. And they are all contrary to our basic nature as beloved children of God.
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I am convinced that this is what Jesus means when he talks about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. In a speech where he explains that a house divided against itself cannot stand, it is not only the house of Satan, some sense of external evil, that he is talking about. He is also talking about the house of humanity. We divide ourselves against one another. And in doing so, we deny the presence of the Holy Spirit in, with, and under the parts of humanity that we see as fundamentally removed from us. And the house of humanity, when divided, cannot stand. We cannot live like this. We are not really living, when we are like this. We may perpetuate existence, but no one will be able to truly live.
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And then, look what Jesus does: His mother and sisters and brothers, are calling for him, and he begins a new teaching. “Who is my family?” It isn’t that he turns away from his actual human family. But he looks at the people listening and says, “You are my family. Anyone who does the will of God is my family. Anyone who does the will of God belongs to me.” Jesus opens a path to reconnection, to bringing ourselves back into relationship with him and with the rest of creation, to restoration and wholeness. Jesus tells us that doing the will of God will fix this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.
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Which sounds like he’s saying that we’d better do God’s will. And honestly, that would be a good thing. But then Jesus goes a step further. He does God’s will on our behalf. Jesus, who has the power to create universes and stop the heavens in their tracks, allows himself to be arrested, and given a sham of a trial, and sentenced, and tortured, and executed. Jesus freely chooses to do God’s will, and by doing so, restores the connection for us. It’s not just that Jesus opens a path for us; he drags us kicking and screaming down that path, bringing us back to a created wholeness, sometimes seemingly against our will. This is the will of God, then: That we be one.
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When I was in seminary ten years ago, a few friends and I decided to do Evening Prayer every day during Lent. We gathered at sundown in the seminary’s prayer chapel, a room hardly ever used (as people preferred the large chapel), with stark decoration, which also made it a perfect space for the school to set aside for our Muslim students to perform their prayers. One evening, as we were praying, Dr. Aasi, professor of Islam, came in to do his prayers. We offered to leave and find another place, because this space should be his if he wanted it. He told us that wouldn’t be necessary. As we carried on, he laid out a prayer rug nearby and began to kneel and prostrate himself, according to his tradition. And then, when he’d finished, he joined us in reciting our last psalm before we went on our way.
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And in light of that experience, I’ve decided that every day, at 1:45, I will go to the campus synagogue and quietly pray the medieval Christian daily office for mid-day, reading psalms and prayers and hymns honoring the God I have come to know, surrounded by Jews reading psalms and prayers and hymns honoring the God they have come to know. We will pray differently, which is right, because we ARE different. That is true; all those differences that divide us are real. They are legitimate differences. It’s just that they shouldn’t divide us. They should enrich us, and draw us deeper into love for one another and for the Holy Spirit we each carry, the Image of God for which we were made. According to my faith, Jesus Christ has brought us together. And so they will pray their way, and I will pray mine, but we will pray together, and because of God’s mercy and God’s love, we will be connected and united as one.RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-6772044485363613692018-06-03T01:12:00.002-04:002018-06-03T01:13:46.501-04:00Sermon for June 3, 2018<div style="text-align: justify;">
I guess you could say that I am a country boy. In rural Pennsylvania where I grew up, I could look out my bedroom window and see corn and soybeans growing. Cars would go by, but it was mostly pretty quiet. This summer, however, I’m living in Manhattan, on the upper west side, just off Broadway. My bedroom window overlooks traffic at all hours of the day, and I find myself struggling to fall asleep at night because of the noise. The city is an angry place, and my cornfield sort of ways have not quite adapted yet to a world where everyone is in a big hurry to get to whatever miserable place they are headed next. I am evidently the only one around who knows the words “excuse me.” I have heard more racial slurs in a week than in the rest of my life. And I do not find myself wondering why everyone is in such an awful mood all the time. Instead, I find myself wondering how long it’s going to take before I wind up that way.<br />
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The reason I’m living in New York is so that I can take some summer courses at Jewish Theological Seminary, which is part of the Columbia University campus. I am working toward becoming a professor in the field of Old Testament, and I wanted to learn something about the Jewish perspective on our shared scriptures. It’s funny, having spent eight years now as a religious professional, and earning two Master’s degrees in religion, and then coming here and feeling like I don’t have any idea what is going on. But then, it’s a totally different tradition then ours, so it’s no surprise that there is a lot for me to learn.
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But some of the most interesting learning so far has taken place outside the classroom. Living in community with a bunch of Jewish people—conservative Jews, who take it a little more seriously than some to observe God’s Law—I find myself in what sometimes seems like an alien world, and wondering how my new friends manage to handle all their rules every day, outside in the real world.
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The biggest area of my confusion is around food. Rules about keeping kosher are not something I have ever had to observe before. But while my own personal eating habits are nobody’s business, the spaces in which I eat need to be kept ritually pure. Food brought to the seminary building must be kosher, but just to be sure, no outside food can be brought into the cafeteria, a kosher space. Everything that the cafeteria sells is labeled: Some with “Meat” and others with “Dairy.” Of course, nothing can be both. The same rules have to be kept in my own kitchen, since the space is certified kosher, and I share it with a roommate. Dishes in the cabinet on the left are for dairy. Dishes in the cabinet on the right are for meat. Food that has any chance of mixing, or meat that is slaughtered in ways outside the kosher rules, needs to be kept away. Being a gentile, I can have a cheeseburger at Shake Shack down the street, but I can’t bring any leftovers home. I few days ago, I went grocery shopping, and after standing in the store for about thirty minutes, picking up one thing after another, reading the ingredients, wondering what they meant—I left empty-handed, having no idea what was okay.
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And so it is proof positive that God has a sense of humor, in that today’s Gospel reading deals with rules about the Sabbath. Jesus and his disciples have two encounters with the religious authorities of his time about the injunction against doing work on the Sabbath. In the first, they are walking through a field, and picking grain, presumably because they’re hungry. The second time, they are in the synagogue for Sabbath worship, but there is a man with a withered hand, and Jesus decides to heal him. According to the Pharisees’ interpretation of the Law, these things qualify as “work,” and are therefore not allowed on the Sabbath, but Jesus does them anyway, and they are shocked. These two stories lie relatively early in Mark’s version of the Gospel, and they serve to explain why the Pharisees were so eager to get rid of Jesus and his followers.
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So many times throughout Christian history, we have interpreted these sorts of stories about Jesus to show that the rules of Judaism are misguided, and the freedom we have in Christ should take its place. But we need to be very careful of this kind of thinking, because it doesn’t match either what Christianity says or what it does. In the first place, while we say we get rid of all those “silly laws” that Jews have to follow, we just replace them with a new set of laws of our own. Don’t we? I mean, our sense of what is morally right and wrong is just as complicated as theirs, and the only difference is that we don’t have it written down and codified in the same way. We insist on welcoming the stranger, but only if they act like us in worship. We allow congregations to send extra voting members to our assemblies if their first language isn’t English, but when is the last time someone got up at assembly and preached in Spanish or Chinese? We don’t observe the Sabbath from Friday to Saturday night, but we do expect everyone to show up here on Sunday morning, and not usually because we want to, but because we think we should. This is what God expects of us, we reason. And it becomes as much of a law as the other. I remember, in my old congregation, a woman complaining because the acolytes wore sneakers, and another insisting that the candles be lit in the right order. And the things congregations fight about! As if God cares about what color the carpet is!
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I wonder. If Jesus and his disciples came into our churches, and sat in the back with their feet up on the pews and munching on potato chips and freshly picked grain, or getting up and performing healings when the bulletin clearly says he should be sitting down right now and listening to the sermon, would we politely ask him to leave? Or would be be less than polite?
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It’s important to notice, too, that Jesus never says, “The Sabbath is wrong and you should get rid of it.” Jesus is Jewish. And he’s a good Jew, too. He does observe the Sabbath. Except when he doesn’t. Which is to say, this story isn’t about the Sabbath, or any of those other rules. It’s really about the reason. What Jesus does say is this: “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.”
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We spend so much time thinking that the rules we follow, whatever they may be, are the way that we honor God. But we forget that they were not just rules, but gifts, things God gave us for our own well-being. They are not how we honor God; they are how God honors us. Which means that if we follow them for their own sake, we’ve got it wrong. And if we follow them and they crush us, we’ve still got it wrong. God’s instructions to us should lift us up, and bring us life, and fill us with joy. If they don’t, we should stop following them, because they’re not fulfilling their purpose. They’re not for God’s sake. They’re for ours.
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One of my classmates invited me over for Sabbath dinner. I had no idea what to expect, but I went. Despite her insistence that there was less food than usual, there was far too much for us to eat. Meatballs and chickpeas in a savory broth, and roasted peppers, and homemade challah bread and hummus, and more. Though a meat dinner, we discovered late in the meal that one of the dairy forks had accidentally made its way onto the table. They laughed as they went through a list of reasons to justify the accident. The rules are not so strict as I was led to believe.
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But what I’ll remember most is the prayers before the meal. We lit candles and sang and danced. I watched as the husband spun around with their two-year old in his arms, and the joyful faces as we shared some real time set aside to remember God and the wonderful things God does for us. And I thought, “Oh, this is what the Sabbath is for.” Just as every time I reach into the cupboard and have to decide which plate to use this summer, I am compelled to think of God, whom I love, who loves me.
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This is what Jesus wants us to know. It is not that we must follow the rules God has laid out. It’s that God is constantly a part of our lives, loving us and drawing us deeper into joy. Follow rules, don’t follow rules, whatever. If you pick grain, do it with delight and wonder in God’s gift of nourishment and growth. If you heal, do it to bring joy to God’s people and glorify the One who makes us whole. And if you keep the Sabbath, do it as a reminder that God loves us, and is with us, not one but all seven days a week. Whatever rules you choose to keep, whatever rules you choose to break, do them with joy and love in the Lord. Because God’s love is with you in every moment of your life. When you pray. When you cook. When you iron your clothes. When you navigate your way through traffic. When you are scowled at by a security guard on the corner of 121st and Broadway. The sabbath was made for you. The world was made for you. Jesus came for you. Jesus walks beside you, and loves you, so that you may live in joy.
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RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-26851417925680179242018-03-24T22:13:00.002-04:002018-03-24T22:13:21.149-04:00Sermon for Palm Sunday 2018Jesus was alone.<br />
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If you read through the whole Gospel of Mark in one sitting, you may notice that there is a major turning point in chapter 8, a place where the story of Jesus turns on a dime and heads in a completely different direction. The first part of the book is full of miracles and good works. Jesus heals all kinds of people—a boy with demons, Peter’s mother, the daughter of a foreign woman, and man who is blind. And this starts to draw a crowd. People flock to hear him, he is surrounded at every turn, and when he tries to sneak away for a few minutes rest, they chase him down and bring him back. He walks on water. He feeds thousands of people with just a little bit of food—twice. And his twelve closest friends are there to see it all. And they are amazed, but mostly, they don’t get it.<br />
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And then one day, as Jesus is teaching, everything just slides into place. Well, for Peter, at least. Jesus and his disciples are walking along the road to Caesarea Phillipi, and out of nowhere, he asks them, “Who do people say that I am?” And after some suggestions from the other disciples, Peter blurts it out: “You are the messiah.” And it’s obvious that he is right.<br />
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And that’s when everything starts to go wrong. Because Jesus says to them, “Good. You’ve got it. Now, let me tell you what a messiah is.” And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. Which is, frankly, an absurd and awful thing to say. Everybody knows that the messiah is a great king who will rise up and defeat the Roman Empire and free the Jewish people from their oppressors and return Israel to the glories of the days of Solomon. Suffering? Rejected? Killed? No!<br />
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And as the story goes on, it seems that now whatever the disciples do is add odds with Jesus’ plans. Jesus has given them the power to heal, so they try to heal a young boy. But they can’t do it, and Jesus says their faith is too small. The disciples complain that there are other people performing great works in Jesus name. “Jesus, stop them!” And Jesus says, obviously, that those who are not against us are for us. Children gather around Jesus and the disciples shout them away. And Jesus calls them back, and says that we must all be like children in order to enter into heaven. And it’s clear: Jesus’ teaching is getting harder, it’s getting a darker tone. And the crowds that follow him everywhere are getting... smaller.<br />
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For just a moment, as he enters into Jerusalem, the crowds gather around him, shouting “Hosanna” and waving branches. But it doesn’t last long. It seems that people are powerfully drawn to Jesus. But when they find out who he really is, they run for their lives. He stands up to the religious and political leaders, and his disciples abandon him in droves, until finally, only those twelve are left.<br />
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So they gather for dinner that last time, and Jesus offers his hardest teaching yet. Something about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and the apostles can’t understand, or maybe are too horrified, too disgusted by the idea, and they refuse to understand. And then after dinner, he goes off to pray, and only Peter, James, and John come with him. He asks them to stay awake with him, but they fall asleep. And then when Roman soldiers show up, even THEY run away. Chapter 14, verse 50, says it simply. “All of them deserted him and fled.”<br />
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Peter, God bless him, Peter at least tries. He keeps his distance, but follows where they take him, and waits outside in the courtyard overnight to hear what happens to him. He meant it when he told Jesus at dinner that even if everyone else deserted him, he would stay. And so he did. But that doesn’t mean he’s not terrified for his life. And so his last fleeting effort to stay fails when his fear compels him to pretend he doesn’t know Jesus. And so even this last faithful friend leaves. And Jesus is alone.<br />
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They would follow him to the ends of the earth, but they would not follow him to the cross. Condemned to death, he hangs there utterly alone. People pass and mock him, but they do not stay. People taunt that perhaps Elijah will come and rescue him, but Elijah does not come. And finally, he cries out, “My God, my God, why have even YOU abandoned me?” And then he gave up his breath.<br />
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We are alone, all of us. It is part of the human condition. Oh, we have lots of people in our lives, and hopefully, our relationships with one another are full of love. But you know as well as I do that we can never truly, fully understand each other. Even the closest lovers, who have everything in common, still argue, still offend, still trip over misunderstandings. Our existence ends at the ends of our flesh, and no matter how much we might want to, we cannot share that which is inside us with anyone else. The most socially connected of us has had moments where we have been alone in a crowd. To be human, in a way, is to be alone.<br />
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And so Jesus also had to be alone. He had to be fully human, he through whom all things came into being. To be fully human, he had to know the joy of the Hosannas. He had to know the sorrow of the Garden. He had to know the torture and violence of our common life. He had to know death, and he had to face it alone. Because that was the way he mended the rift that we carve out between us and God, ever since we first made it so that we were alone.<br />
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It is a gospel that can only be gestured to today, a Good News message that needs to wait for next week. But Jesus who knew how alone the limits of our flesh can be, offers himself for us, his body and blood to eat and drink, to enter and mix with our own bodies, to insist that we have God with us always, in even the most fleshly way. It is the simplest thing to understand, and at the same time, the greatest wonder and mystery of faith. We should be horrified and disgusted by the idea and run away, and yet we find ourselves to be powerfully drawn to it. This meal we gather around is just a sign to show us what God is doing, and yet it is also no mere symbol, but the very active thing that gathers us, and the way that God does everything to us. In Jesus is death. In Jesus is life. And in Jesus, we never have to be alone again.<br />
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RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-67671232841014630522017-01-16T18:37:00.002-05:002017-01-16T18:37:48.304-05:00"With:" Mountain or Molehill?It's been a while. Let's pick up where we left off, with verse 20. As usual, we're going to quibble over the translation of specific Hebrew words. :)<br />
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<i>20. And I will make a covenant with them in that day,<br /> With the animals of the field,<br /> And with the birds of the skies,<br /> And with the creeping things of the ground,<br />And I will destroy bow, and sword, and battle from the earth.<br /> And I will make them lie down in safety.</i></blockquote>
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<a name='more'></a>The first problem we have is with the words "with them." It is not clear at all who "them" is. Pronouns need a reference. But the most recent "they" it could be are the "Ba'als" in verse 19. It should be pretty obvious that God is not making a covenant with the false idols of Canaan.<br />
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The second choice is the way I've translated it--to indicate that "with them" means "with the animals of the field" and so on. This is possible, and it makes for very nice sentence structure in English. The problem here is that the word "with" isn't the same. The word "with" in the first phrase is, in Hebrew, simply <i>"Le-,"</i> a word "particle" that can mean to or for, or a variety of similar things--translation isn't an exact science. "With" is completely appropriate here.<br />
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But if this were referring to the animals and birds and creeping things about to be named, we'd expect the same <i>"Le-."</i> That's not what we get. Instead, the more formal word meaning "with" is here: <i>"'im."</i> Now, the meaning is the same, and the interpretation could still stand. But it is odd that there's not a match. If the author (presumably Hosea) had this in mind, it's more likely that he would have used the same word--unconsciously if for no other reason. Feel how weird this phrase feels:<br />
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I am going to talk to them.<br />
I'll talk with Mary, and with Bill, and with Jason.</blockquote>
It's comprehensible, of course. But it would feel more "correct" if the first like were "talk with them," OR if the "with" in the next line were the word "to." All that is to say simply that the language here is awkward. It makes sense the way it is. But it makes <i>more</i> sense if God, proclaiming that he will make a covenant with "them" means with someone else.<br />
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The only "them" left is the nation of Israel--odd because he's just been talking about Israel metaphorically, as a singular woman (Gomer). Hans Walter Wolff pegs Israel here, saying that God is going to be an intermediary, forming a covenant between Israel and the animals of nature. He finds some precedent for it, too, in the ancient Near East.<br />
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Wolff follows this train of thought, assuming that there must be some enmity between Israel and the animals. He reaches back to verse 14a:<br />
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<i>14. And I will make her vines desolate,<br /> And her figs...</i></blockquote>
saying that the destruction wrought upon the crops was probably carried out by wild animals, and so God here restores a proper relationship between them and Israel.<br />
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It's a nice idea, but I am unconvinced. The simpler explanation, it seems to me, is that the covenant is indeed of God with animal life directly. I don't know quite enough yet about Hosea to weigh the validity of this theology with the rest of the prophet's words, but there was indeed in Israel the theological idea of perfect balance, cosmic order, everything in its place. That order broke down--particularly through human action--and part of the religious obligation of Israel was to return things to the right order.<br />
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In this case, Israel has failed in that duty, making things worse through her worship of false idols. When God restores his relationship with Israel, "removing the name of the ba'als from her mouth," as in verse 19, God also thereby restores right relationship among the rest of nature.<br />
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In the rest of the verse, we also see the restoration of human relationships with other humans--the destruction of "the bow and the sword" the implements of war. God receives Israel back into his favor, and all those broken relationships in our world also fall back into place.<br />
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This should remind us that our actions have far-reaching consequences that extend beyond ourselves. The plants and animals, and other nations, suffer because of our selfishness and foolishness. And consequently, when God restores our relationship with him in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all those other broken relationships are restored as well.<br />
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Questions for Thought:<br />
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1) When we consider human sin, does it really have such far-reaching power? How might we restore our relationships with the nations and our world?<br />
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2) Does it really matter how we resolve such a tiny little grammatical issue?<br />
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3) Go back (maybe just to the translation page) and read what we've done so far. What's the message you're getting from Hosea? How does this verse fit into the larger picture.<br />
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Oh, and Mark: I responded to your comment from last time. You may want to peek at it. :)<br />
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Grace and Peace,<br />
Pastor AaronRevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-73951195249836684872016-11-07T15:28:00.000-05:002016-11-07T15:28:29.013-05:00Imperatives and JussivesOn our last reading, Mark pointed out something interesting in verse 18. (Well, a few things, actually.) He noted that "you will call me 'my man'" could be either a command or a description of the future. English uses "you will <i>verb</i>" generally as a future tense, and usually forms a command by simply offering the commanded verb--in this case, "call me 'my man'" without "you will." However, to intensify the command, those future-tense words can go back in there: "You WILL call me 'my man.'"<br />
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The Hebrew pattern is equally confusing:<br />
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<i>tiqre'iy</i> - This is the form we have here in verse 18. As we've noted before, words' meanings are made up of a three-consonant stem. In this case, q-r-y is the stem for "to call."<br />
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The 2nd person feminine future form of the verb, called the "imperfect," is made by adding a <i>ti-</i> on the front and a <i>-y</i> on the end. <i>tiqre'iy.</i> This is a match for verse 18.<br />
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The common command form of the verb, called the "imperative," in the 2nd person feminine, adds only <i>-y</i> on the end. <i>qir'iy.</i> Not a match for our verse. That would seem to settle it.<br />
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However, there's another form of the verb, called the "jussive." It works the opposite of the English, "you will," in that it offers a gentle command, or a strong wish. Maybe more like saying, "Please call me 'my husband.'" For normal verbs, the jussive looks exactly the same as the imperfect. <i>tiqre'iy.</i> We can only tell the difference by the surrounding context.<br />
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So which is it here? Imperfect or jussive? On the one hand, either could work here. God could as easily be commanding Israel to call him "my man" as he could be noting that, sometime in the future, Israel will call him "my man." In order to figure it out, we need to look at the verses around it. Throughout them all, God is telling us what will happen in the future. In most of them, God is saying "I will do this." In the surrounding verses, we don't have any other sayings about what "you" or even "she" will do. The comparison is, therefore, not exact. But it seems to me to be much more likely that God is using a future verb rather than a command.<br />
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That said, the point isn't exactly proven thereby. It could be a command in the jussive, albeit one given with gentleness. We can't be 100% sure.<br />
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This raises some issues in our reading of the Bible. First, we're forced to notice, yet again, that the Hebrew and English languages don't quite map to one another. Here, there were similar problems with the grammar of the passage. But the problems were still different enough to require some specific choices on the part of the translator. Is this a command or a future indicative verb? What's the difference if we choose one over the other? There are significant differences between the following few choices for verse 18, all of which are faithful, in some way, to the Hebrew original:<br />
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<i>And on that day, you will certainly call me "my man."<br />And on that day, it will be that you will call me "my man."<br />And on that day, call me "my man."<br />And on that day, please call me "my man."</i></blockquote>
One can't help but wonder how much is lost in the process of translation. It also brings to light the enormous responsibility of the translator's work. In our church, we use primarily the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, though ELCA Lutherans are secondarily "authorized" to use the New International Version in our worship and study if we so choose. The NRSV and NIV translators' choices have a direct impact on the way we read and understand our Bible, and the way we use it and hear its message in our worship. Is it any wonder, then, that we come to some different theological conclusions than our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers who use the New American Bible, or our evangelical brothers and sisters who cling to the King James? This is to say nothing of the huge differences that the church experienced in the Great Schism in 1054, between the eastern church which read its Bible in Greek, and the western church which read in Latin?<br />
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And what, exactly, should we do, then, if we want to be faithful to God and the message he proclaims through our scriptures? There is no way that the whole community of the faithful is going to come to learn ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and koine Greek just to make sense of our scriptures. Pastors in our tradition are required to learn Hebrew and Greek in order to complete their seminary education, and I suspect most of us promptly forget what we've learned when the language course comes to an end. My Hebrew is still pretty good, as I've worked hard to keep it fresh these past years, and even I still had to look up the difference between the imperative, jussive, and cohortative forms of the verb in order to write this lesson. If I didn't catch the discrepancy when I was translating, what are most of the faithful to do to make up for these problems?<br />
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Unlike most lessons, I'm going to give my answer to these questions. Don't let that stifle you, though. Use your creative, rational mind, and come up with some thoughts of your own, and post them in the comments!<br />
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I've not been great at keeping up with this, and even as I repeat my promise to attend more closely, I know I'm not likely to be able to do so. That is especially true this time around, as I'm headed off for some meetings and a long vacation. I'll be back in Massachusetts on December 7. If I have the opportunity to do so, I'll set up a post or two to appear automatically while I'm gone. If not, see you in December!RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-33964010220364199122016-10-03T15:40:00.000-04:002016-11-07T15:29:39.061-05:00My Husband<div style="text-align: justify;">
Scholars seem to disagree on whether verses 18-25 go with what comes before. Hans Walter Wolff, who I'm using for the detail-oriented view, says there's a break before verse 18, and that we begin a new (and much later) oracle today--but he quotes others who say it's a continuation. I'll let you be the judge:</div>
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<i>18. And on that day</i></div>
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<i><i> -- This is a saying of YHWH --</i></i></div>
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<i><i> you will call me "my man."</i></i></div>
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<i> And you will not call me "my Ba'al" anymore.</i></div>
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<i>19. And I will remove the name of the Ba'als from her mouth,</i></div>
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<i> And they will not be remembered by their names anymore.</i></div>
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A strict translation of verse 18 would really begin, "And it shall be on that day..." This is a common Hebrew expression that doesn't really belong in English, so accordingly most translations dispense with it. But if you're peeking at a King James version, you'll find it there. In any case, it's a way the prophets proclaim something that will happen in the future.</div>
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To understand what Hosea is saying here takes a bit of explanation. We have a few words in our society that we use for "husband." One is, obviously, "husband," and it is the most common one. But we also could say "spouse" or "significant other," or in this generation, "partner," or even "hubby" as a diminutive form indicating a closeness and casualness of the relationship. In particular situations we could also say "groom" or even "bridegroom." The meaning of each of these is slightly different, one from the other, some used for only certain situations but not others, some carrying connotations, some (either simply or pointedly) avoiding the gender of the person. But they all have the same denotation, "husband."</div>
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The same is true in Hebrew, though of course the connotations don't line up in the same way that they do in English. One word that can be used for husband is <i>'ish.</i> This is the simple, common noun for "man" or "male." It's paralleled by <i>'ishah,</i> which means "woman," but is used for "wife." You can see that this terminology sets the spouses on equal footing. Wolff says that it further shows a closeness in the relationship, though I'd like to see more evidence of that before I buy fully into it.</div>
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The other, and much more common, word for husband--at least in modern Hebrew, though I suspect this was true in the ancient world as well--is the Hebrew word for "master." I hope that ruffles your feathers a bit. The same word that a slave would use to address his master is used by a woman to address her husband. You can see the striking power imbalance in this usage. (Honestly, if you think about where the English words "husband" and "groom" come from, you'll find something similar there.) Here, the man would still call his wife simply, <i>'ishah,</i> "woman." Imagine a justice of the peace saying, "I now pronounce you Master and woman." Sit in that feeling of discomfort for a moment.</div>
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And so God says, "You won't call me 'My Master' anymore. 'My man' will do." Or to put it another way, God says, "I won't be lord over you anymore. I will be your equal partner." Well, mostly equal, in ancient Hebrew thought, anyway. God places Israel on a more equal footing with himself. This is a marriage characterized by love and partnership, rather than power and obedience.</div>
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Which should be no real surprise. After all, Israel clearly doesn't obey. And this is true whether we're thinking of the historical ancient Israel, back in the 8th century, or by the historical Israel at the turn of the first millenium, or the figurative Israel of the Church of Jesus Christ, or by us today. As Christians, we call Jesus our "Lord" or "Master," yet we can hardly say we do a thorough job of obeying him. Slaves of a master get punished for their disobedience. Equals of a partner work together to accomplish a goal.</div>
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How else should we understand the meaning of the incarnation of Jesus Christ? Jesus is God, come to dwell among us, giving up the fullness of his power in order to walk by our side. The Second Person of the Trinity becomes fully human so that we are set on equal footing. If we call him Lord, it is by our own choice that we do so, which choice we are able to make only because of the freedom he gives us and the partnership into which he invites us. Christ is Lord. But not because he lords it over us. Instead, it is because we choose to offer ourselves to him, he who offered himself first to us.</div>
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We're still one step short of understanding the translation. Here's the other piece: The word for "master" in Hebrew is <i>ba'al.</i> That's right; the word for "husband" is the same as the word for "master," which is also the same as the name of the primary foreign god, "Ba'al." It makes sense. We usually call our deity by a description, rather than a name. We almost never pronounce the name YHWH in the Christian churches, and absolutely never in Judaism. We simply call God, "God." There is only the one, and so the description is enough. The Muslims call him <i>Allah,</i> which is a contraction of the word "the," <i>al,</i> and the word "God," <i>ilah.</i> Allah is not a personal name; it's just exactly the same thing we call God: "The God."</div>
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So it makes sense that some of the nations around Israel would call their god, "Master." That's what the god was supposed to be. It's a descriptive term. In fact, it should not surprise us, as I noted a few weeks ago, that there were many "ba'als." There was the god, the master, of Carmel, Ba'al-Carmel. Then there was the god of Zebub, Ba'al-Zebub. Each place had its own. It was less of a name than it was a description.</div>
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And that description, then, could apply to the Israelites' God as well. Ba'al-Yisra'el, perhaps? Or maybe, since there's only the one, just "Ba'al" will do. As the neighboring peoples' ways of experiencing and worship God seeped into Israel, the name "Ba'al" was applied to the God of the Israelites as well. At the very least, Ba'al-Samaria is an attested name, and Samaria was the capital of the Israelites' northern kingdom.</div>
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For God to say that "you will no longer call me Ba'al" means a whole host of things. First, I won't be your master, but your partner. Second, it is a deliberate reference to the gods of other nations; you will turn away from them and turn toward me. And third, God says you won't call me "Ba'al" anymore; you're going to stop importing foreign ideas into your theology.</div>
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I thought this was going to be a short one, but it's just as long as ever, and we haven't even gotten to the next verse! We'll just have to save it for next time. Here's today's questions:</div>
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1) What happens to our relationships when we choose certain terminology over others to describe each other? For example, what is it like to call your spouse, "Wife," and how is that different than calling her, "Partner" or "Woman?"</div>
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2) I've always thought that the biggest false god in our world today is money--particularly in an ultra-capitalist society like ours. What names do we use to refer to our money, and how does that shape the way we think about it?</div>
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3) What names do we use for God? Make yourself a list, and then look them over. Which ones work best for you? What does that say about your understanding and view of God?</div>
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4) As we're plunging forward with this, what do you think? Is this verse (and those that come after) connected to what comes before? Or is it something different? Go back to the full translation (which you can find at the Translation link at the top of the page). Look at the subject matter of each verse in Chapter 2, starting with verse 4. Ignore the blank lines/new paragraphs I've left in the translation. Look also at the pronouns, and what happens with them. Who is God/Hosea speaking to in each verse? Does this change the way we should read this? What belongs together, and what doesn't?</div>
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See you next week!</div>
RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-39799599599052907222016-09-27T16:17:00.002-04:002016-09-27T16:17:33.183-04:00Good News!<div style="text-align: justify;">
It's good news today, which is a nice change of pace!</div>
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<i>16. Therefore, look: I myself will seduce her</i><br />
<i> And cause her to go into the wilderness</i><br />
<i> And I will speak to her heart.</i><br />
<i>17. And I will give her vineyards to her from there,</i><br />
<i> And the Valley of Achor for a door of hope</i><br />
<i>And she will answer [there] as in the days of her youth</i><br />
<i> As in the day she came up from the land of Egypt.</i></blockquote>
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So far, in this long oracle, we've had lots of accusations (She said, "I will go after my lovers;" As for me, she forgot me) and dire consequences (I will strip her naked; I will take away her grain...and her new wine) for unfaithful Israel. We've also had the word "therefore" twice in this prophetic speech, which is a little odd. Usually, we'd only have one, but Hosea doesn't seem to be able to draw things to a close. Instead, we now have a third "therefore." It is to prove the final one in this oracle, as well.</div>
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Back in verse 8, God responds to Israel's infidelity by "therefore" blocking her path to her lovers, the other deities Israel was worshiping at the time. That doesn't seem quite to do it, though. Israel goes in search of other gods, but cannot find them; yet this does not satisfy God's pain at being cheated on.</div>
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So, in verse 11, God "therefore" takes away all of Israel's good things--grain, oil, and wine--the very staples of life. This is the produce of the land of Israel, and some scholars seem to view this as a hint of Israel's exile in Babylon. I personally have a hunch that Hosea is a little too early in history to be predicting exile; if I remember correctly, some 200 years stands between Hosea and the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem. More likely, the prophet has drought and famine in mind. In any case, this has a sense of final judgment--but Hosea isn't satisfied to stop here, either.</div>
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So now, in verse 16, God "therefore" does something unexpected. Where we expect to hear more words of condemnation and ill consequences, we are told that "I myself will seduce her." The "myself" here is a particular emphasis of the subject, completely unnecessary grammatically. It seems to me that, while God has simply threatened bad news previously, God is now assuring that this final course of action is the one that will certainly be visited upon Israel.</div>
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And what a course of action it is! God who started divorce proceedings back in verse 4, at the beginning of this oracle, is now firmly set on winning his love back. Note: Not dragging her back; not preventing her from going elsewhere; not cutting off her other lovers; not leaving her with no other options. She is just as welcome as ever to go worship those other gods. But YHWH God will make her fall in love with him all over again.</div>
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There are some interesting features in God's description of how he plans to seduce her. "I will cause her to go into the wilderness" seems rather odd; to our ears, it suggests something bad, not something good. But it hearkens back to the Exodus from Egypt, when God delivered his people from slavery. The wilderness is a land of good news, where God provided abundantly for his people, sustaining them in their years of wandering. It is a place that leads, finally, to the land flowing with milk and honey. Or, in verse 17, to a land filled with vineyards--or as Amos will say, a land where the hills drip with sweet wine.</div>
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The Valley of Achor is obscure; some suggestions have been offered by various scholars, but none seem conclusive. Most likely, it lies just on the western side of the Jordan river, forming part of the borderland of the Judean nation. Calling it a "door of hope" is sort of like imagining the first drive down a highway that leads to a city to which one is moving; it is the gateway to the hope of a new stage in life.</div>
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This Valley of Achor also shows up in the book of Joshua, in chapter 7. After defeating the city of Jericho, the armies of Israel are told to take all the spoils of war and put them into the religious treasury. A certain man, Achan, can't help but keep some for himself. As a result, God doesn't help the Israelites on their next excursion, at the city of Ai, and they are soundly defeated. Joshua finds out what Achan has done, and he, the spoils he took, his family, his cattle, and his property are taken to the Valley of Achor. There they are stoned to death, burned, and buried. The Israelites are then able to defeat the city of Ai.</div>
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It's no wonder many faithful people get uncomfortable when they read Joshua. In any case, the Valley of Achor is clearly understood as a symbol of God's punishment for Israel's disobedience. And now, for disobedient and unfaithful Israel, God turns this symbol of punishment into a "door of hope."</div>
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One more note. God says he will "speak to her heart." It's a beautiful expression that shows up in a few other places, too. Shechem speaks to Dinah's heart in Genesis 34:3--another pretty horrible story, but the deep connection between the two is clear. So too, Ruth finds that Boaz "speaks to her heart" in Ruth 2:13. It is an expression showing the deep, passionate love of the speaker to the hearer.</div>
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And so, all hints of punishment are gone. God yearns and stuggles to reconnect himself to his wayward Israel, and seems to be willing to go to any means to do it. All the previous threats, all the truly deplorable behavior that was suggested earlier, turns to smoke. Ultimately, for Hosea, God is a God who loves his people, and that love is the impetus for any response he might have. He can't bring himself to bring upon his beloved the destruction he prophesied. Instead, there is only loving fidelity. When we are unfaithful, God is steadfast.</div>
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This begs a few questions, which I'll leave for you to ponder:</div>
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1) If the results are loving constancy, and a renewed effort to get his people to fall in love with him again, then why did God first have to pronounce the threats? Why did we need verses 8-15?</div>
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2) Calling upon the wilderness and upon "the day she came up from the land of Egypt" seems out of place. Hosea is writing several hundred years after the Exodus, and several hundred before the Babylonian Exile. Why go searching so far back for a symbol of God's love?</div>
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3) Joshua is a problematic book of the Bible. How do you reconcile the God of Joshua, who is intent on destroying the innocent Canaanites in the land, with the God of Hosea, who speaks directly to Israel's heart?</div>
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4) This is nice and all, that God reconciles us to himself. But what real bearing does that have on our lives?</div>
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RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-59878236689973975202016-09-13T10:57:00.003-04:002016-09-26T20:42:10.306-04:00Brokenhearted<div style="text-align: justify;">
Maybe I'm just in a poetic sort of mood, but there's something oddly beautiful about today's verses, despite their continued topic of divine punishment on Israel.</div>
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13. And I will cause all her joy to cease:</div>
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Her feasts, her new moons, and her sabbaths,</div>
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And all her festivals</div>
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14. And I will make her vines desolate,</div>
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And her figs, about which she said,</div>
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"These are my prostitute's wages,</div>
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Which my lovers gave me"</div>
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And I will make them a wilderness,</div>
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And the wild animals of the field will eat them.</div>
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15. And I will visit on her the days of the Ba'als</div>
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When she burned incense to them,</div>
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And she adorned [them] with her earrings and her jewels,</div>
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And she went after her lovers</div>
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And as for me, she forgot me.</div>
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--This is a saying of YHWH.</div>
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Hosea seems to weave in and out of allegorical language throughout this chapter. Sometimes, the words are metaphorical, describing a husband and his unfaithful wife as a symbol for God and Israel. At other times, the words are more literal, speaking clearly about God's relationship with his unfaithful people. Here we have, mostly, the latter. Gomer (Hosea's wife) does not have feasts, new moons, sabbaths, and festivals; Israel does. Gomer does not have vines and fig trees; Israel does.</div>
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The removal of feasts, new moons, sabbaths, and festivals in verse 13 is odd. Aren't these the ways that Israel shows its devotion to YHWH in the first place? Getting rid of them means less opportunity to return to the Lord, not more. Or does Hosea understand these as gifts from God, rather than gifts to God? What if we understood our worship that way? Sunday mornings are not the time we come together to direct ourselves to God; rather, they are the time we come together to explicitly receive what God is always offering to us. This fits well with Lutheran theology: Worship is not about what we must do, but all about what God is doing. God offers us new life in the waters of Baptism. God speaks Good News to us in the Words of scripture. God offers himself to us in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. And in a way, even those things we do in worship that seem like are about our volition--giving offering, for example--are really about what God has already given us.</div>
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In verse 13, God threatens to take all that away from his unfaithful people. There are a few hints about God's motivation in the language used here. The first is the surprising word that begins the verse. Although the causative form in English forces it to the end of the phrase, the first word in the Hebrew is actually "cease." <i>Chadal</i> would be an appropriate word choice here, but that's not the word Hosea uses. Instead, the verb he chooses is <i>shabbat,</i> meaning to rest, or to stop. It is the same word that, in noun form, is the holy day of rest, the Sabbath--which will be mentioned again later in the verse. While this is hardly enough to reinterpret the meaning of the verse in some "good news" sort of way, it does help fix God's intention. Yes, the regular celebration of the Sabbath will cease; that is the threat. But by saying, literally, "I will Sabbath it," suggests that perhaps it is no longer serving its purpose.</div>
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The other interesting language feature of this verse is in the way the list of festivals is formed. As in English, Hebrew could simply say, "Her feasts, new moons, sabbaths, and festivals." Instead, notice the difference: "Her feasts, <i>her</i> new moons, <i>her</i> sabbaths, and all <i>her</i> festivals." The scholar Hans Walter Wolff points this oddity out, and I can't say I'm fully convinced by it, but I do rather like the idea. These religious observances are no longer about God. They are all about Israel.</div>
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There are times in the past when Americans were accused of going to church just to be seen in their finest. These days, we might say the opposite. But if God's action in worship is to offer himself to us, perhaps we get in the habit of going to church simply because we think we should, or because we feel like it (and only when we feel like it), or because of what we get out of it. Do we even care if God is present there? Could we do away with it, and get our needs met elsewhere?</div>
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Whatever the case, it seems that Israel is celebrating its religious rituals out of habit. And this is shown because of its devotion to other gods instead. (Or, a good, God-fearing Israelite in this time might say, "also.")</div>
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A quick note about verse 14 first. The desolation of grapevines and fig trees goes along with the rest of the oracle so far. But it also gives us another poetic turn of phrase. The word for prostitute's wages, <i>'etnah</i> is very like the word for fig tree, <i>te'enah.</i> If you don't really see it, pay attention to the consonants, and note that ' is a consonant in Hebrew. </div>
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<i>'TNH.</i></div>
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<i>T'NH.</i></div>
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Clever, eh?</div>
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There's some question about the identity of the Ba'als in verse 15. On the one hand, Ba'al was the specific personal name of a specific deity in ancient Canaanite religion. Ba'al was a god who appeared in the form of a bull. He was king of the gods, and provided fertility to the earth in the form of his semen, which was what rain was understood to be. He was also involved in an ongoing, cyclical cycle where the god of death, Mot, would devour him (presumably in the late autumn), and then his wife, Anath, would destroy Mot and release Ba'al (in the spring). (Sometimes, I'm grateful for the somewhat simpler religion of modern Christianity. We have our weirdnesses, but the struggle between different deities, or, you know, fertility-sperm, is noticeably lacking.)</div>
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The identity of Ba'al with a bull helps make some sense of a number of interesting details throughout the Old Testament. For now, it's enough to notice that the form of the golden idol fashioned by Aaron and the Israelites while awaiting Moses' return from Mount Sinai was a calf. "It just came out of the fire like this," Aaron claimed. Some scholars also claim that the earrings tossed into the Exodus fire in the first place--which we also see here in verse 15--were part of the Ba'al fertility cult.</div>
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And yet, Hosea doesn't say Ba'al. He says Ba'als. The word ba'al in Hebrew means "master" or--sorry, ladies--"husband." It's possible that Hosea is simply referring to all the other gods, the deities that the Israelites called "master."</div>
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A third possibility is that different geographical areas may have each had their own version of the Ba'al cult, or else their own "master" deity. We certainly have recorded in scripture the names of different gods which are qualified by the name of a city: Ba'al-Berith, Ba'al of Smaria, Ba'al of Carmel, Ba'al-Zebub, Ba'al-Pe'or, and so on. In any case, it seems mostly impossible to reconstruct exactly what the Canaanite religious tradition became in eighth-century Israel.</div>
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What is most striking to me, is that last phrase. "And as for me, she forgot me." The "as for me" is completely unnecessary here, grammatically--or at the very least, it's in the wrong place. Like in English, Hebrew follows the form <i>Verb - Object.</i> In this verse, we get <i>Object - Verb</i> instead. It places extra emphasis on the "me," distinguishing it from what has come before, and weighing this final phrase down heavily. It's followed by the "saying of YHWH" which is common in most prophets as a way to indicate when the words belong to God himself, but which is very uncommon in Hosea (only four times in the whole book, and half of them are used atypically). You can almost hear God's sadness in this final line.</div>
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The oracle will continue, but shift gears, in the verses ahead. This is supposed to feel like an ending. Where God began the oracle as an angry, jilted lover back in verse 4, we might see him now finally heartbroken, in tears.</div>
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Questions for Thought:</div>
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1) We used specific features of the language a lot in today's reading. How does a peek into the Hebrew change the way you understand and experience scripture? Or to put it another way, what do we lose when we read the Bible only in English (or even more, in only one English version)? How might we make up for that lack if we don't know the original language?</div>
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2) What do you think about the purpose of worship? How much of it is God-oriented? How much of it is people-oriented? Why do we do it, and does it matter what we do in it?</div>
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3) What is it like to think of God as sad, broken-hearted? How is that different than thinking of God as angry, wrathful? How is the picture more complete when we consider both?</div>
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4) These are the ending verses of an oracle describing Israel's infidelity and resulting punishment. Is it still fair to call such a painful text "beautiful?" How?</div>
RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-20833394614654186072016-08-24T16:18:00.003-04:002016-08-24T16:18:49.137-04:00Vacillating<div style="text-align: justify;">
Last week, we talked about God as if he were a jilted lover who keeps providing for his beloved anyway. He walled off his beloved's paths so she could not get to her lovers, but kept offering her the new wine, and fresh oil, and grain that provided for her life. Such is God's grace-filled providence. And then we get this:</div>
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<i>11. Therefore I will return</i></div>
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<i> And I will take back my grain at its time,</i></div>
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<i> And my new wine at its appointed time,</i></div>
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<i>And I will snatch away my wool and my flax</i></div>
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<i> That cover her nakedness.</i> </div>
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Do you remember what we said a last week about the word "therefore" in the midst of a prophetic oracle? The prophet declares what is wrong, and then with the word "therefore," turns to the punishment that God promises to impose.</div>
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Back in verse 8, we noted that the "punishment" imposed there for Israel's (Gomer's) chasing after lovers is simply to cut off the path to those lovers, so that she has no other place to go than back to God (her husband). God has been faithful all along, and will continue to be faithful even now. Would that this oracle would come to an end there.</div>
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Instead, however, there is more punishment, now for not recognizing God as the true source of all that Israel has. What she has will be taken away from her. The grain and new wine (from verse 10) will be taken away. The wool and flax (from verse 7) will be taken away. And she will be left naked, exposed, as punishment for her transgressions.</div>
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Hosea seems to be taking us on an emotional roller coaster. Yes, I love you. No, I'll punish you when you chase after other lovers. Yes, I will provide for you, even if you don't know it's me. No, I'll take it away when you don't know it's me. There's some cognitive dissonance at play here. Perhaps God is turning out to be an emotionally manipulative spouse for Israel. He's bordering on abusive. And then, even that border falls.</div>
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<i>12. And now I will uncover her [shamelessness] in the eyes of her lovers. And not one shall deliver her from my hand.</i></div>
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Verse twelve seems somewhat innocuous, at least in the context of what comes before it. The word "shamelessness" is put in brackets here because it needs some discussion. Brown-Driver-Briggs (or "BDB"), the only Biblical Hebrew dictionary currently available in English, lists "nabluth" as "immodesty, shamelessness, lewdness," relating it to similar words in Hebrew: "nabal" meaning "foolish," and "nebalah" meaning "senseless" or "disgraceful."</div>
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The problem with this is twofold. First, BDB was published in 1907. It is now 109 years old. And in the last 109 years, we've learned a great deal about Hebrew. BDB has been a wonderful tool for the English speaking world as we've tried to make sense of the Hebrew Bible, but it's now quite out of date. Unfortunately, unless you're fluent in German, it's really your only option. Two semitic scholars from Harvard University, Jo Ann Hackett and John Huehnergard, are working on updating the dictionary, but you can imagine how big a task that will be.</div>
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The second problem is that this little Hebrew word, "nabluth," is found only once in the entire Hebrew Bible. Moreover, BDB, which usually excels in finding similar words in other languages that are related to Hebrew, lists no possible etymology here. One cannot help but wonder exactly where this definition comes from. Why did the authors of this dictionary think it means "shamelessness?" For a dead language, one needs to have some evidence, since we cannot go ask a native speaker. And BDB gives us no answers.</div>
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The major commentary on Hosea that I'm using to give some guidance to our study is one by Hans Walter Wolff; you'll recognize at least the last name because I keep saying it. It was published in German in 1965 and translated into English in 1974. Which is to say that it might be good for me to find something a little more modern sometime soon. In the meantime, Wolff's commentary remains a classic, and his thoughts are worth hearing. He translates our word "nabluth" as "genitals," citing a similarity between it and the Akkadian word for genitals, "baltu," getting the idea from a French scholar. It's not a big stretch of the imagination to accept this idea, and in the long run, it simply makes clear what feels "smoothed over" in the usual translations.</div>
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<i>12. And now I will uncover her genitals in the eyes of her lovers, and not one shall deliver her from my hand.</i></div>
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Except, of course, that this is one step too far. It's not the first time we've talked about this in Hosea, but the ancient world's legal system allowed a cuckold husband to dismiss his faithless wife, publicly stripping her to show that even the clothes which he provided her are now no longer hers. We'll leave the discussion of the severity, and even abusiveness, of this to our previous discussion on this point.</div>
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What I do want us to notice, today, is how extreme this is--and how greatly it seems to differ from what we just read a verse or two ago. Why the radical vacillation? We are not used to God our provider flaring up in anger like this. God is constant, steadfast, unchanging, transcendent. God ever the same, more stoic than the best Swede, in perfect coolness from time immemorial to time eternal. This emotional God is the deity of ancient Hebrew religion, the God who walks in the garden and throws brimstone on Gommorah and tells Moses he's going to destroy the Israelites and create a new people for himself. This is not the unchanging crystalline perfection of the God of rational Protestantism.</div>
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And the question that results from this disconnect is: Will the real God please stand up? Which do you think God is? What has been your experience of God? Is He more like the God of Hosea, or more like the God of Pauline theology?</div>
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Questions for thought:</div>
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1) Think about the following pairs of words. Which one is more like God? Why?</div>
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Transcendent (beyond all things), Immanent (in the midst of things)</div>
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Human-like, Completely Other</div>
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Unchangeable, Vacillating</div>
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Stoic, Emotional</div>
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Passive, Active</div>
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2) Which of the two ways of talking about God seems more correct?</div>
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Which seems more faithful to the Bible?</div>
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Which seems more faithful to the Christian tradition?</div>
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Which seems more faithful to your experience of God?</div>
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Which do you like more?</div>
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3) How do you feel after reading a protracted discussion on how the Hebrew dictionary works? What does it mean for our understanding of the scriptures if we don't even know the basic meaning of words in the Bible? If we can't trust the dictionary, what CAN we trust?</div>
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It's important to cite references. Here's where I got the information on how BDB is being updated:</div>
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Hackett, Jo Ann and John Huehnergard. "Chapter 11: On Revising and Updating BDB." <i>Foundations for Syriac Lexicography III: Colloquia of the International Syriac Language Project. </i>Ed. Janet Dyk and W. Th. van Peursen. PSL 4. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias. Pages 227–33.</div>
RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-1334885891328218782016-08-08T15:50:00.002-04:002016-08-08T15:50:21.155-04:00Ever FaithfulSorry for the silence on this end. Between some illness and some computer problems, this has gotten away from me. I'm going to try to be more regular going forward. (Though I will mention casually that it would be helpful to me to justify the time I spend working on this if I knew there were people actually reading it! :) )<br />
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We continue at Hosea 2:8. As we do, I'll note along with Jed's comment that, since we are reading (very) slowly, looking at individual verses and even words in detail, we're missing important parts of the message that we might get if we read the whole of Hosea, or at least read in the context of more of Hosea, rather than just two verses.<br />
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It's surprising to me that I need to say this--or better, to remind <i>myself</i> of this. In my work, teaching, preaching, etc., my constant refrain is that we <i>must</i> read scripture in its context. I get very frustrated and annoyed when people from anywhere in the spectrum of Christianity take single verses and remove them from their context in order to try and substantiate some theological idea. It doesn't work. It just doesn't. Whenever we do that, we get it wrong. Always. The other verses that surround any one verse shape its meaning. The stories that surround a single parable shape its meaning. We <i>must</i> consider the context of scripture. Period.<br />
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My hope is that we do this even in this Bible study, every time we complete a larger passage, a section, a book. For example, we came to the end of the account of the birth of Hosea and Gomer's children, and then we look at the whole of chapter 1 and saw what the thrust of the whole passage was together. But to be honest, I'm not sure that's sufficient. You can't make sense of Hosea 2:3 without first understanding chapter 1. Perhaps we need to find a way to better take stock of the whole of Hosea's message (and indeed that of all the Minor Prophets) as we go. Ideas would be welcome!<br />
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8. Therefore look: I will fence [her] way in with thorns<br />
And I will wall up her wall<br />
And she will not find her paths.<br />
9. And she will pursue her lovers,<br />
And she will not overtake them.<br />
And she will seek them, and will not find.<br />
And she will say, "I will go and return to my first husband,<br />
For it was better for me then than now."<br />
10. And she did not know that I myself gave her<br />
Grain, and new wine, and fresh oil;<br />
I gave much silver to her, and gold<br />
(Which they made of Baal)<br />
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Prophetic oracles in ancient Israel often follow a certain pattern. The prophet begins by declaring what has gone wrong, what kind of infidelity toward God that Israel has embodied, what the kings or people of Judah have done to break God's law. Then, with the word "therefore," the prophet turns and begins describing the punishment that will be enacted upon the object of the oracle, often giving the chance of repentance to his hearers, that they might avoid this punishment.<br />
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Is this really a pattern? It seems kind of a thin structure on which to build a real theological argument. And yet, we have this formula again and again in Micah, Amos, Isaiah--and over fifty times in both Ezekiel and Jeremiah! Yes, this is a clear pattern for prophetic speech, and these types of form patterns are most useful when they ar broken.<br />
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In verse seven, we are given details of Israel's unfaithfulness. We should expect, with the word "therefore" in verse eight, that we are going to hear the punishment that will be enacted. "Therefore I will divorce her," might be appropriate here. Or more of the "strip her naked and throw her into the streets" from verse five. Instead, we have something slightly different.<br />
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The metaphorical mother in this passage is chasing after her lovers. The jilted lover's response? To plant thorns which will grow into fences, and build walls made out of stone. This might sound like a kind of imprisonment at first glance, but that is not what is happening here at all. As she runs after her lovers, she will come across obstacles that will get in her way. She won't be able to find the path to get to them anymore. In verse nine, she will chase after them, but won't catch up to them. She will look for them everywhere, but not be able to find them.<br />
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In short, instead of rejecting the estranged wife, the husband here finds ways to prevent her from getting to her lovers. She loses their trail long enough that she finally decides to go back to her husband.<br />
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I've often wondered over the the number of marriages that are dissolved over infidelity. When a person seeks comfort or love, pleasure or purpose outside of their marriage, doesn't that mean the marriage needs work? Why are so many people unwilling to put that work into it? Why do they just turn away and give up? Wouldn't your love for the other person, no matter how hurt by the infidelity, send you running to a marriage counselor, instead of to divorce papers? I mean, there are good reasons to file for divorce. But is this really one of them?<br />
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And I've always decided that the only reason I don't quite understand is that I've never been in that situation myself. I have to admit, the sum total of real romantic relationships I've been in can be counted without resorting to Calculus. I'm still pretty idealistic about that sort of thing. And if I'm really honest, I've had plenty of friendships that got messy. Why would I expect different from romance?<br />
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Real human beings hurt each other. We are sometimes unfaithful, in the most complex of relationships, and in the simplest. We fail, we falter, and even when we're trying our best--which, let's face it, we aren't <i>always</i> trying our best--we still make mistakes. Those mistakes cause great hurt, and sometimes we are, in our humanity, too limited to repair that hurt.<br />
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It is no wonder, then, that we would expect punishment here after the "therefore." It is a surprise that instead, God responds to infidelity by drawing his beloved back to him. God is always faithful, even when we are not.<br />
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And she comes back for what reason? Simply, "It was better with him than it is now." Not exactly the rousing celebration of love and discipleship we tend to think of as Christians. Yes, it really is okay if the only reason we turn back to God is, "Well, I guess that's the best I can do."<br />
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Verse ten holds a further surprise. We read back in verse seven that she was chasing after her lovers because of the bread and oil and drink that they provided. Here in verse ten, God proclaims that all along, it's really been him. "She did not know," God says. It doesn't even say, "But now she knows." God has lovingly continued to provide for his beloved all along, even when she was chasing after idols. And the gifts God gives are even better than those she expected: Not just bread, but grain; not just drink, but new wine; not just oil, but fresh oil, the first pressing. And silver and gold on top of all that.<br />
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We have one last little phrase in verse ten. In reference to the gold, some later scribe has penciled in, "Which they made of Baal." This raises an interesting point that scholarship is arguing about these days--and that ties nicely into the place we began our discussion today. This little phrase is clearly an addition. Aside from the fact that it just doesn't fit, logically, into the prophecy at this point, it also doesn't fit grammatically. The verb is plural: "THEY made." But there is no they in this passage. If Hosea himself were writing this, he'd have said "SHE made." If there are some passages where the text-critical problem is questionable, this isn't one of them. There's no doubt: This phrase was added later into the finished chapter.<br />
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So what do we do with it? For a long time, scholars would simply have said "it doesn't belong here" and ignored it. Well, they'd have actually said something more like, "appears to be foreign to the context...probably a gloss...should be regarded as the mechanical appropriation of a marginal notation rather than as an example of Hosea's literary style." That's right out of Hans Walter Wolff's commentary on the passage (page 37). Throw it away if it doesn't fit. It doesn't have any bearing on the prophet's message, since it doesn't even belong to him.<br />
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Other interpreters would be quick to insist that this is "Holy Writ" and the "Word of God." We can't ignore it. It is God's own word itself. It must of course be central to the passage, just like every other word and phrase throughout the passage. Critical tools like this are anathema. They shake the very foundations of our-- Okay, so obviously, I'm hamming it up a bit. But you get my meaning.<br />
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Today's scholars are beginning to find a middle way. They pay attention to concerns raised by our critical methods. Yet they use those concerns as inputs into the interpretation of the whole passage. We cannot reject a phrase simply because it doesn't fit. We cannot insist on its equity to what surrounds it, because obviously, it doesn't fit. Instead, we see clearly that it's been added later. And then we wonder why it might have been added. What does the "original" passage mean without it? How does that meaning change with the addition? Can we understand scripture to mean both things?<br />
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Phew, a long one today. Some questions for thought:<br />
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1) How do we balance the desire to dig into the scriptures and analyze them at a microscopic level, with the desire to understand them in their context, and the big-picture message they give us at the macroscopic level?<br />
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2) How might God get in the way of those things that you chase after? How might God be calling you back to him?<br />
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3) How has God been faithful to you all along, whether you've been faithful or not?<br />
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4) You may have noticed that while I talked about the text-critical issue at the end of verse 10, I never did talk about the passage's meaning. So, how does the meaning change with or without that last phrase? What do you think the final meaning of it is?RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-78857215724713821972016-07-11T05:00:00.000-04:002016-07-11T05:00:10.519-04:00Metaphors and ProstitutionToday's reading continues with God's (Hosea's) lawsuit against Israel (Gomer).<br />
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6. And her children, I will not love,<br />
For they are children of promiscuity.<br />
7. For their mother was promiscuous.<br />
When she conceived them, she made herself wither.<br />
For she said, "I will go after my lovers,<br />
Who give my bread and my water,<br />
My wool and my flax,<br />
My oil and my drink."<br />
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To start with, I need to note a translation challenge in verse 7. The phrase, "She made herself wither," appears to be translated regularly instead by something like, "She acted shamefully" or "She behaved disgracefully." I have no doubt that this is a Hebrew idiomatic expression--one that I don't know. For the moment, I'm going to leave it as is; the literal translation has to do with withering or drying up. I tend to like these sorts of idioms, where the words themselves are far more colorful and imaginative than their meaning. When I get a chance to swing by the library, I may update it. The commentaries at my personal disposal don't mention it.<br />
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That said, the image from that idiom is an interesting one. In giving birth to her children, Israel has gone barren. By bearing children of her promiscuity, the nation has come to a point where it can no longer bear children. There are several ways we can take this metaphor.<br />
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With Wolff, we might clearly distinguish between Israel and her children; in this view, the mother is the land itself, and the children are the inhabitants. This view fits with the historical facts we know. The result of Israel's apostasy, according to the historical accounts in scripture, is the nation's defenselessness in the face of Babylonian attack. The nation is carted off into exile and the land becomes barren: There are few inhabitants; nobody is left to tend the fields, so they go to seed and stop producing food; Israel ceases to be a trade route crossroads.<br />
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The only real problem with Wolff's view is that it's a little too neat and tidy for the passage in which it is situated. Hosea seems to continually mix his metaphors. In verse four, he was talking TO the children, and now in verse six he is talking ABOUT the children. His continual shifting is frustrating to someone who cares a great deal about grammar and consistency. Hosea is known, though, for his imaginative creativity. As we continue to read this book, we will be treated to a vast array of metaphors for God and God's people. It is not so troubling in our society for a creative mind to do away with perfection of speech.<br />
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I will admit to being less than excited about this conclusion. It has always annoyed me a bit when scholars claim that the Biblical authors are lesser in some quality than authors might be today, and then substantiate themselves with the idea that people were lesser in some way "back then" than we are now. The perfect example can be found in the Gospel of Mark, which was long neglected in scholarship because it seemed that Mark made some foolish literary mistakes. One of these mistakes is obvious; Mark tells the story of the feeding of the 5,000 in the sixth chapter of his Gospel, and then in chapter eight, he tells the same story, with a few odd details changed (it's four thousand this time, for example). It seems like shoddy workmanship. And yet, on close examination, enough of the details are changed that it is likely Mark was trying to do two different things with these stories. In Mark 6, we have clear allusions to God the Good Shepherd, characterized in Psalm 23. In Mark 8, we have details that hint at God's appearance to Moses at Sinai. Mark is not a lousy writer. He is a master storyteller, working hard to shape his story so that we hear echoes of Israel's God throughout the Jesus narrative.<br />
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Whatever the truth is of Hosea's metaphor manipulation, the message comes through pretty quickly. The land, the people, the whole nation are disgraced, are unloved, are barren, are dry, because they have turned away from God and toward other idols.<br />
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We could imagine the slow, unintentional importation of other lands' deities into Israel. The idea seems plausible, and more in line with the way things works over time. But Hosea's words speak of a definite volition on Israel's part. "I will go after my lovers," Israel says. There are a few notable things about this phrase.<br />
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The first is the word for "lovers." Many weeks ago, when we first encountered the "Not-Loved" name of Hosea's daughter, I noted that Hebrew words are built on three consonants. In that case, the love spoken of was a word in the "R-CH-M" pattern. Here, the word for love is different, "'-H-B" (The ' is the letter aleph, which is not the same as our letter A; rather, it is a soft glottal stop, the sound in the middle of the word "uh-oh.") In English we have one word for the variety of forms of love we experience. The word for lovers, here, is never used of God's love for humankind; it is only used for our love of other people, or occasionally of our love for God. For us, hearing the mother-love in verse 6 followed so quickly with the human-love in verse 7 should startle us a little bit. At the same time, it is less likely that the native Hebrew-speaker would have heard the connection between the two.<br />
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Second is to notice how active this is. Many translations and commentators take Gomer (and therefore Hosea's metaphor for Israel) as a prostitute; Wolff and other scholars of his generation in fact suggest that Gomer was a cultic prostitute. That is to say, they believe that as part of the Canaanite (usually Ba'al-worshiping) religion, certain men and women were employed by the religious institution as prostitutes, offering sex as a ritual act, a sort of enacted copulation with the deity. There is some evidence to support this idea both in the ancient Near East as well as in other religious traditions throughout the world. Sexual congress with the deity is a common religious trope, and even within Christianity, some mystics throughout history have written about the Eucharist in sexual terms! The idea of a Canaanite sex cult is still alive in contemporary scholarship, but is starting to fall out of favor. In any case, I think that even if such practice was well-known in the ancient Near East it doesn't really seem to apply here, and this verse is the proof. Cultic prostitutes wait in the temple for their clients to come; non-cultic prostitues wait as well, in places like wells and city gates. But here, Israel is pictured as "going after [her] lovers." This is not typical prostitute behavior.<br />
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No, this is the act of an adulterer who has forgotten everything she loved about her spouse, and has sought out another, seeing in this new lover benefits beyond imagining. It is not that she has come to despise her husband; instead, she has forgotten him. She sees the delight in her new lover's eyes, and thinks it is better to dwell there. Familiarity breeds apathy. How human this is! And God remains like a jilted lover, simply forgotten by his beloved Israel.<br />
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I recall once going through a dry spell in my prayer life. I had gotten out of the routine of regular prayer, and just went about my life, not even noticing what was missing. The first time I sat down and focused on it again, I had an overpowering sense of what I had done--or rather, failed to do--in the preceding months. Had I been intentionally cutting God out of my life, it might have been more tolerable. Instead, I had the sense that God had been deeply hurt by my forgetfulness. This is what happens to us in our relationships with God. We don't come to hate God; even our angriest moments with God lead finally to deeper faith and deeper joy. But instead, we simply forget; other things in our lives distract us, pull us in other directions, and without noticing, we forget. We need something to remind us of what we are missing. And happily, we have a God who will never tire of chasing after us.<br />
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Some questions for thought:<br />
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1) How is this metaphor working for you? God, the jilted lover, and Israel/us as the adulterous spouse? What metaphors do you use (perhaps in your prayer life) as you imagine your own relationship with God?<br />
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2) What is it about the story of scripture that makes it seem so different, so ancient, and so far removed from us? How might we understand it as beautifully and meticulously crafted by master storytellers instead of as an old and therefore inferior form of writing?<br />
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3) How does the idea of sexual congress as a ritual act strike you? Why do you think this was such a popular religious idea, particularly in antiquity? Have you ever heard of Holy Communion in those terms before? How does that make you feel?<br />
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4) How does it change Hosea's story to think of Gomer/Israel as an adulterer, rather than a prostitute? What does your answer tell you about your moral opinion of prostitution or adultery? Does it matter which metaphor we choose?<br />
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5) What distracts you? What idols make you forget about God?RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-86639716006021329172016-06-27T15:51:00.002-04:002016-06-27T15:51:08.777-04:00Gomer and Hosea<div style="text-align: justify;">
Last week was a good time to take a little break. We're starting a new big section today. Here's the next two verses of Hosea 2:</div>
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<i>4. Accuse your mother! Accuse [her]!<br /> For she is not my wife,<br /> And I am not her hubsand.<br />Let her turn her promiscuity away from her face<br /> And her adultery from between her breasts.<br />5. Or else I will strip her naked<br /> And I will make her as on the day of her birth.<br />And I will set her as in the desert,<br /> And I will make her like a land of drought,<br /> And I will kill her with thirst.</i></blockquote>
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In verse 3, we were reminded of the opening of Hosea, where he was called to name his children "Not my people" and "Not loved." And then his children were renamed "My people" and "Loved." As we begin this new section, it would seem that Hosea is now speaking directly to those children about their mother.</div>
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The language of accusation that he uses is, at least according to one commentator (Hans Walter Wolff), legal language. Hosea's wife, Gomer, is being put on trial for her promiscuity. Or rather, Israel is being put on trial for its promiscuity. Or maybe both?</div>
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We need to stop for a moment and consider the metaphor that Hosea is using. The nation of Israel has turned to other gods. And in order to illustrate God's proclamation against Israel for doing so, Hosea is instructed to take a wife who has, and will, "turn to" other men. Fine, so long as this remains a visual metaphor--the prophet not just speaking but living out his prophecy. This is in the same realm as Ezekiel building a model city and "playing" war with it, or Jeremiah smashing pottery.</div>
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But then they begin to have children, and the children receive horrible names. Imagine what it might be like to literally grow up with a name like "Not Loved." What would that child's life be like? How would other children, or other adults, treat her? Enacting this prophecy on real children seems a bit terrible. And this is done at the command of God? No wonder some commentators (particularly those from the 18th and 19th centuries) insist that Hosea could not have actually done all this in real life.</div>
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And here, in chapter 2, it gets worse. Hosea proclaims judgment against Israel in the language of a lawsuit. Is he really putting his wife on trial, taking her before the city gates where the elders gathered to preside over legal matters? He married her knowing that she was a "wife of promiscuity" from the start. Does he now intend to hold this against her, just for the sake of the prophetic word? And does he really intend to strip her naked here in the streets? Or somehow to deny her anything to drink until she dies of thirst? Will the prophet really carry these things out against his wife, Gomer, in order to proclaim the word of the Lord? And if so, could God really be as cruel as to instruct these things?</div>
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The obvious answer is no. Unfortunately, the obvious answer is also not always the correct one. There is a strong precedent for prophets literally enacting their prophetic message. We of course do not know that Hosea did, in fact, sue Gomer for divorce in this way. But we also cannot say with surety that he did not.</div>
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In fact, the punishment is appropriate, in ancient Near Eastern parlance, for the crime. When a marriage dissolves, the man is no longer legally responsible for clothing the woman; publicly stripping her was a way of symbolically showing this change of responsibility. This really was done, if not in Israel, than at least among its neighbors.</div>
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It may soften our reading a bit by noticing that these consequences are to be carried out only if Gomer/Israel does not turn away from her promiscuity and adultery. But only a bit.</div>
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Of course, we cannot read this in isolation, either. In our consideration of whether Hosea is a prophet of doom or of hope, this passage is a clear vote in the doom category. But there have been, and will be, other passages that speak of good news instead. Hosea will threaten divorce, but the threat will not be carried out.</div>
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Even so, we are stuck with a theological problem if we consider the possibility that a loving God is instructing his prophet to enact such a violent response upon his wife. We'll find, again and again in our reading, that the words of the prophets are often hard to bear. How much more so, then, if we can envision the prophet Hosea dragging his wife to court, stripping her naked, and sending her out to die of thirst?</div>
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The problem of evil actions is a big one in Christianity. Some say that evil is the product of sin, and others that sin is the product of evil. Some modern Christians proclaim that there is no such thing as evil, not really. But this is myopic and foolish. And we all react differently to the evil we see in ourselves. Do we pretend it isn't there? Become captivated by it and let it grow and flourish? Pursue forgiveness and changed lifeways? Other possibilities abound.</div>
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My go-to passage at times like this comes at the end of the book of Genesis, when Joseph turns to his brothers and tells them that, "What you intended for evil, God intended for good." God can take even the evil that we work and turn it into goodness. God can take even the evil that Hosea works and use it to proclaim his message to the people of Israel.</div>
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I find it helpful to think of this story as the playing out of a broken family. Hosea is not, perhaps, a good or kind person. He has a wife and children, but doesn't manage to be a particularly good father or husband. Gomer, desperate for someone's love, seeks it out elsewhere. And Hosea finds out. In a fit of rage, he makes her infidelity public, and even weaves it into his prophetic word. And God speaks to Hosea directly as he's dragging his wife to court. "You want to make this public?" God asks. "All right. It will be remembered for generations to come." God uses the prophet's evil to speak words of judgement to Israel. And then, when the prophecy comes to a conclusion, God forces Hosea to return to his wife, to take her up and love her again.</div>
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Still maybe not so good for Gomer. And not necessarily the way things really went in ancient Israel. But it's still a faithful reading of this part of Hosea. I'm sure there are other possible readings, too.</div>
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Next week, more of Hosea's lawsuit against his wife. For now, here are some questions for thought:</div>
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1) What do you think about the problem of evil? Where does it come from? How should we respond to it? How does God fit into it?</div>
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2) God seems to command Hosea to do some cruel things to his wife and children. How does that make you feel? What does that make you think?</div>
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3) Is there another or better way to read the story of Gomer and Hosea?</div>
RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-54115690797727163362016-06-06T13:32:00.001-04:002016-06-06T13:51:51.496-04:00Learning Curve<div style="text-align: justify;">
People are slowly catching up this week, which means we're slowly seeing comments appear on old posts. If you're interested, peek back at a few. At the bottom of each entry on the main page, you can see how many comments exist for each post, and even jump straight to them. You can post comments of your own, too; if you don't have (or want to use) one of the accounts suggested, you can choose Name/URL from the drop down list, and just leave URL blank.</div>
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In addition his thoughts on a few of our posts, Mark adds this general question: </div>
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Hosea is proving to be complicated. There's a lot of new stuff to learn to understand the meaning. It reminds me of Revelation. Is it intrinsic in Old Testament study that the context and history are so much more involved than the New Testament? Or is this just a difference in the way we approach them?</blockquote>
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It's a good question, so I thought we'd look at that today. And like Hosea itself, the answer is complicated.</div>
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Yes, the tools we use for each testament are different. The main reason for this is that Old Testament studies and New Testament studies are treated in the academic system as if they were two completely different things, with little connection points between them. Most scholars pick one or the other. And so, over time, one field has developed tools that the other doesn't use. Some things cross genres, like textual criticism, the art of trying to find mistakes that crept into the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts of our Bible over the years as one person after another copied them by hand, and then figure out the best way to fix them. But even there, the methods used in the Greek are quite a bit different than those in the Hebrew. There's reasoning behind this division of labor, and that reasoning is more interesting than the division itself.</div>
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Revelation was hard because it uses a lot of symbolism that we aren't familiar with. Everything in the book is a metaphor, and we don't understand the metaphors. So, there's a steep learning curve. Even so, we're generally familiar with its background. Firmly situated in the middle of the Roman Empire—and for that matter, in Asia Minor (now Turkey), which means that even though it's the furthest reaches of Europe, it's still mostly Europe—we live in the same culture as the author and recipients of Revelation. That culture has undergone a lot of change over the last 2,000 years, to be sure. But we're still talking about Western culture, rooted in Greek/Hellenistic ideas. We're talking about the empire that sits at the beginning of the weaving of the same Western history we're living in today. We're at different ends of the cloth, but we're pulling the same thread.</div>
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The Old Testament, though? That's a different thread entirely. Ancient Near Eastern culture was very different than Postmodern American culture is today. It takes a lot more for us to wrap our heads around what's going on. We'd have an easier time being dropped into China today. And on top of the culture change, we're also talking about a society that lived centuries before the foundations of Western culture were being written. It's not just that they had different ideas than the Greeks and Romans who gave us our inheritance; the Greeks and Romans didn't even exist yet! In short, our learning curve is a lot more steep for the Old Testament than for the New.</div>
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Or in other words: If we're looking at the Gospel of Luke and talking about the Roman Empire destroying the Temple in Jerusalem, even if we've never been there, we can all kind of picture it in our heads. There's no need to identify the players, the time period, the instruments of warfare, the effect on people, etc. But if we start talking about the Syro-Eprhaimite War, about which Isaiah speaks in chapter 7 of his book, we'll have to talk about the 8th century; the Assyrian Empire; where on the map that was; the difference between Judah and Israel; the difference between Syria and Assyria; the difference between Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia; the whole dynasties of which King Tilgath-Pileser III, King Ahaz, King Rezin, and King Pekah were a part; perhaps how to pronounce "Tilgath-Pileser" in the first place; the economic, social, and religious contexts of each of the four nations involved in the war; how Ancient Near Eastern empires built their territories; what these empires did to the people they conquered; how one king can stay king of his nation even though the nation had been conquered, and how tribute was paid; the military technology available at the time; and so on, and so on—all that, just to get to the same level of basic background information for one chapter of Isaiah that we had for the whole Gospel of Luke.</div>
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To be honest, I always knew some of this was true. But I didn't really get it myself until we started this study. The thing that is driving this message home for me is the part of the study you mostly don't see—the translation work, turning the ancient Hebrew words into intelligible English. As many of you know, I'm something of a language nerd, and I'm pretty good at the Hebrew bits, far more than Greek, for example. To begin with, Hebrew is a language constructed in totally different ways than English is. Honestly, Hebrew is easier by far, but it forces you to think in totally different ways than the typical English speaker does. Sometimes, you look at two words that are standing next to each other, and you have to try them in twenty different ways before you can figure out how they relate.</div>
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On top of that, there's the problem of poetry. Prophets often—and especially when they're delivering God's own speech—speak in poetry. If you look at the running translation (click the link at the top of the page), you'll see that in chapter 1, verses 1-2a are prose, running text. Then God starts talking, and the words become poetic. Then in verse 3, we get a description of the results—prose again. "And then YHWH said to him,"—and we get poetry again. Verse 7 doesn't fit this pattern. It's God speaking, but it's prose. This is one of the reasons we know it was added later.</div>
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But how do you turn Hebrew poetry into English poetry? It's a piece of the translation process that defies translation. English poetry is primary about rhyme scheme, as well as meter. Hebrew usually has no rhyme, but it always adores alliteration. It does have meter, but it's complicated to say the least—and an area about the language about which I know nothing (Robert Alter's book on it is on my "someday" reading list). Hebrew poetry <i>does</i> like to relate the idea of one line to the idea of the one preceding it. So Isaiah will say (40:3),</div>
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<i>In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.</i></div>
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<i><i>Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.</i></i></div>
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Desert and wilderness being synonyms in Hebrew, it seems that Isaiah has said something, and then said exactly the same thing again but with different words. Why would he repeat himself? He does it because that's the most important feature of Hebrew poetry: Repetition. It's everywhere. So, how do you make that "feel" poetic, rather than just repetitive, in English?</div>
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And then you start worrying about problems with the Bible text. Words that make no sense at all--perhaps are they a copying error? Do any scholars on this passage suggest a fix for that error? Is that fix really a good idea? What about some of the weirdnesses of Hebrew, where the author will suddenly change tense (well not tense, but aspect; there is no such thing as tense in Hebrew, natch) or change person in the middle of a sentence? Some of the most beautiful parts of prophetic poetry are the metaphors that the prophets use; but how do you track with them when they mix their metaphors, using six different metaphors in the space of two verses?</div>
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The Old Testament is a very beautiful, but very strange, landscape, in which nothing quite looks like we expect it to. And if we believe, with current scholarship, that we need to understand what the prophet <i>meant</i> in his own context in order to understand what he <i>means</i> for us today, we've got a lot of information to learn about that "own context" before we can make any sense of it. No wonder it's so much easier to study Acts or even Revelation than Hosea.</div>
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So why bother? Why not stick to Acts? It's an old question. As old as Marcion in the early 100's, who was denounced as a heretic (despite a large following) when he came to the conclusion that the God of the Old Testament was a cruel God, and was different from God the Father of Jesus Christ. From time to time, when people talk today about the Old Testament, I hear variations on this theme. But the early church insisted that the God of (revealed in) Jesus was the same as the God of Abraham.</div>
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I won't say more about that at the moment. Instead, I leave it for you to ponder this week. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comment box below, especially because I think this is one of the fundamental problems of the Christian religion. And I think it's one of the most life-giving ones, if we can find a way to untie it. Let me know what you think about these Questions to Ponder:</div>
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1) Why should we care about the Old Testament at all, especially when it's so hard to understand? If God is revealed in Jesus Christ, why don't we just read the parts of the Bible that are about him? What does the Old Testament give to our faith?</div>
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2) If the old adage that "the translator is always a traitor" is true, what do we do about the problem of inaccurate translation? How do we know that the Bible we're reading is really the Bible? How do we deal with the fact that we're losing something in the translation process?</div>
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3) Is it worth learning all this history and background information for our study of the Bible? Can't we just, you know, <i>read</i> it?</div>
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4) What do you think the biggest learning curve is for you as you come to scripture?</div>
RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-44096061998602287882016-05-24T12:08:00.002-04:002016-05-24T12:08:46.416-04:00Prophetic Whiplash<div style="text-align: justify;">
I was reading a book recently which included in one of its appendices a bunch of notes about how that book quotes from the Bible. In one of these notes, we are told that the author won't always quote whole verses, as if this should be a surprise to us. But it occurs to me that there are some people in some traditions that would expect Bible verses to be whole units, always used in their entirety, never divided.</div>
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So it is worth pointing out here that the versification of our Bible was not passed down from antiquity. I know less about the way that the Hebrew text was broken into verses. In any Hebrew Bible, you'll find a large symbol that looks rather like a colon called a "Sof Pasuq." This symbol is roughly equivalent to an English period, symbolizing the end of the phrase. (Hebrew is actually a lot more complicated than that in its phrasing, but this will suffice for today.) The verses of the Hebrew Bible match these Sof Pasuq, and as they've been passed down from antiquity, the division into verses is probably quite old.</div>
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The New Testament is different. The books of the Greek Bible were written as a single long string of characters; even words weren't delineated by spaces in Greek in the period they were written. Chapters were added by the great Bible scholar of the early church, St. Jerome--maybe. Another source I've run into said that the chapter weren't in place until the 13th Century! In any case, if you look at any of the works of Martin Luther, for example, you'll find he consistently cites chapter numbers, but not verses. That's because the verse numbers didn't exist until around the mid-1500's. The Bible was meant to be read as a story, not a whole bunch of little axiomatic expressions.</div>
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The reason this comes up today is that we have a versification problem in this part of Hosea. The Hebrew Bible ends chapter one at verse 9, where we left off last time, and begins chapter two in the next verse. But the Greek version of the Old Testament, which we call the Septuagint (or LXX for short), is the one that informed the first, oh, fifteen hundred years of the Christian church, and in many ways is still the source of much of our Biblical understanding in the Western world. Among many of the problems this creates, we find here in Hosea a chapter one that runs on for eleven verses, and chapter two that begins a little late.</div>
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So before we can even begin talking about the next couple of verses, we need to know which verses we're talking about! I am going to follow the Hebrew verses, but if you're following along in an English Bible, you should be aware that today's verses 2:1-3 could be 1:11-2:1 in your edition. In either case, here they are:</div>
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<i>1. And the number of the sons of Israel will be like the sand of the sea which is not measured and is not numbered, and it will be that in the place where it was said to them, "You are Lo-Ammi, not my people," then he will say to them, "Sons of the living God." (2.) And the sons of Judah will be gathered, and the sons of Israel together, and they will name for themselves one head, and they will sprout up from the land, for great is the day of Jezreel.</i></blockquote>
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<i>3. Say to your brothers, "Ammi," and to your sisters, "Ruchamah."</i></blockquote>
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This is a strange little passage from Hosea, and the verse-numbering weirdness probably results from editors not being wholly certain what to do with it. In a way, all three verses seem to belong to what comes before--certainly more than they belong to what comes after them. They clearly refer to the prophecy spoken through the naming of Hosea's children. At the same time, they break pretty solidly from what has come before. They reverse, and perhaps even go further than, the previous verses.</div>
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Verse three is the most obvious in meaning. Where Hosea was told to name his son, "Lo-Ammi, Not My People," Hosea is now told to say to the brothers, "Ammi, My People." And where Hosea was told to name his daughter, "Lo-Ruchamah, You Are Not Loved," now he says to the sisters, "Ruchamah, You Are Loved." The gender of the children matches, but the prophecy against them is reversed. We don't have a reason why; it is simply told matter-of-factly.</div>
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Some scholars wonder who these "brothers" and "sisters" might be. Hosea's original prophecy was to the northern kingdom of Israel, so perhaps he is now speaking to Judah. But I don't think this is quite right, even taking into account the mention of Judah in verse 2. It seems simpler to expect that Hosea is simply talking of his fellow Israelites.</div>
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If this is good news for Hosea's audience, verses 1-2 are even better. Israel, standing at the brink of destruction by the Assyrians, is promised to be as numerous as the sand of the sea. Where once God called them, "Not My People," now they are not just God's people but God's own children. And where Judah and Israel are two separate kingdoms, divided after Solomon's reign, God promises they will become one again.</div>
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In his commentary, Hans Walter Wolff suggests that this prophecy was made later in Hosea's life, but before the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed. Israel and Judah actually became enemies in the last throes of the northern kingdom's existence, sending armies to battle against each other even as they were threatened by more powerful adversaries. It makes sense, in this environment, for Hosea to have spoken of the healing of that rift, even to reunification of the kingdoms. Of course, this reunification never happened. Israel was conquered by Assyria, more the half the population was carted away into exile, and with the exception of a hint of continuity in the Samaritan religion which still exists (though in very small part) today, the northern kingdom was wiped off the map forever. This urges us to take up the same question as last week: What happens when a prophet's words don't come true?</div>
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Many Christians would say that the promise of this prophecy is still to be fulfilled. That in the fulness of time, Jesus Christ has begun to effect this prophecy, and will ultimately bring all of the Children of Israel and Judah and everywhere else back together into one Heavenly kingdom. "You will be my witnesses to Jerusalem, and all Judea and Samaria [that's Israel], and to the ends of the earth," says Jesus in Acts 1:8. The early Christian Church saw itself as the fulfillment of these kinds of words from the prophets, and we do and should continue to do so today. It is part of our heritage, and part of our theology. It is dangerous, because it can lead to Christian triumphalism and a theology of glory instead of a theology of the cross. But we can't ignore this thrust of Christian history.</div>
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At the same time, we also need to understand the prophets' words for themselves. They can have Christological meaning, but they should also have meaning for us as they were spoken in their original Old Testament context. And for me, this is an even more powerful meaning. These few verses are jarring. They could be treated as a later addition to the book of Hosea, because they are so different from what comes before. But whether they were contemporary or late, the fact is, they show up here in the final version of the book. And we need to read them here.</div>
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Here, right on the heels of the prophecy of doom that comes before them. Here, where it is such a jarring reversal of the prophetic word that scholars can't agree where the next chapter should start. Here, in the same breath that God used to condemn his people. It seems to me that the urgency of this word of hope is in fact exactly its message. God pronounces judgement on Israel, but can barely stand to let that judgement sit for a moment before he changes his mind and "in the place where it was said to them, 'You are Lo-Ammi, not my people,' then he will say to them, 'Sons of the living God.'" God is so in love with us that his wrath cannot last even a nanosecond. God, who is a God of Justice, is also a God of Mercy, and his mercy always trumps his justice. It is so overwhelming that reading it can cause whiplash.</div>
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Hosea may have called his children horrible things like "Not my people" and "Not loved." But they were still his children. No matter their names, they were his people, and he loved them. And as we read on, we'll find the same is true for his "wife of promiscuity."</div>
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Questions for Thought</div>
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1) Keep thinking about what it means for a prophet's words to fail to come true. No restoration of Israel here. What do we do with that?</div>
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2) Is it okay to read prophecies of Jesus Christ into the words of the Old Testament prophets? How do we distort their original meaning if we do so? How do we understand the Jesus story as a continuation of the Old Testament story of salvation if we don't?</div>
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3) What meanings and images come to you as you meditate on the idea that God's love just can't hold back?</div>
RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-16691736588982339722016-05-16T17:16:00.000-04:002016-05-17T17:45:00.147-04:00Doom and Hope<div style="text-align: justify;">
We've gotten a look at the whole of chapter 1 of Hosea, except for verse seven. Here it is:</div>
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<i>But I will love the house of Judah, and I will save them by YHWH their God, and I will not save them by bow, or by sword, or by battle, by horses, or by horsemen.</i></div>
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Can you guess why we've left this until last? It's because it's out of context, in its way. It doesn't fit with the rest of the chapter. There are some links to the rest of Hosea, to be sure; the "love" in the beginning of the verse is "arachem" in Hebrew, and you can see in it the "R-CH-M" pattern we talked about last time in the name "Lo-Ruchamah." And Hans Walter Wolff, the great German commentator on the twelve minor prophets, says that the second half of the verse is full of words, "bow, sword, battle, horses, horsemen," that are part of Hosea's vocabulary in the rest of the book. But the tone of verse seven is remarkably different than the rest of the chapter.</div>
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One of the ongoing scholarly debates about the prophets is whether they were "prophets of hope" or "prophets of doom." Do they proclaim God's judgment against his people, or do they ultimately promise good news and salvation? You'd think such a fundamental question would have a pretty obvious answer, but the battle rages on. Even in my own seminary education, I had one professor (Dr. Klaus Peter Adam) who insisted that there was a lot more doom among the prophets than hope, while another professor (Dr. Ralph Klein) suggested that a prophet who doesn't proclaim hope is not, in fact, a prophet, but is merely a troublemaker. In my opinion, both are exactly right.</div>
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The thrust of the first chapter of Hosea's prophecy is that Israel has turned away from God and begun worshiping other idols, like a prostitute has sex with people other than her own husband. God is behaving like a jilted lover. He is angry, and he has decided to cast off his love. First the royal house of Israel is denounced, then the whole of the nation. Hosea's prophecy is bad news.</div>
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And yet, as we continue to read through the book of Hosea, we'll see a reversal of God's judgment. It will get worse before it gets better, but it will get better.</div>
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<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AKingdoms_of_Israel_and_Judah_map_830.svg" title="By Oldtidens_Israel_&_Judea.svg: FinnWikiNo derivative work: Richardprins (Oldtidens_Israel_&_Judea.svg) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons"><img align="right" alt="Kingdoms of Israel and Judah map 830" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bd/Kingdoms_of_Israel_and_Judah_map_830.svg/256px-Kingdoms_of_Israel_and_Judah_map_830.svg.png" width="256" /></a><br />
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Here, though, we get one little verse of good news in the middle of bad. Good news perhaps belongs later in the book of Hosea, but not here. Stranger than that, the prophet speaks throughout chapter one of the kingdom of Israel, the northern kingdom. But verse seven is directed at the kingdom of Judah, the south. The third hint--though one I can't speak to in detail due to lack of personal knowledge--is that God usually speaks in poetic language in the prophets, but this verse is marked in most editions of the Hebrew Bible as prose. As one more bit of evidence, the naming of Hosea's children Jezreel and Lo-Ammi don't have an additional bit of exposition like this; only Lo-Ruchamah does. In at least four ways, the verse doesn't belong to all the verses around it.</div>
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The simplest explanation, and probably the accurate one, is that this verse was added in later. Hosea wouldn't have been interested in Judah; he was a prophet of Israel. But our Bible is the legacy of Judah. When Israel was destroyed in 720 BCE, all of the religious writings of the northern kingdom disappeared--except for a few which had passed into and were preserved by the southern kingdom. Somehow, Hosea's words had been saved from the capture and destruction by the Assyrians. It's easy to imagine a Judahite copyist (or even prophet) picking up Hosea's words, seeing the prophecy that God will withdraw from the northern kingdom, and feeling uncomfortable enough with those words that he felt compelled to add a sentence about the salvation of the southern kingdom.</div>
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And perhaps, just perhaps, these words were added to Hosea's prophecy as the southern kingdom looked out at the Babylonian armies surrounding them in the 590's, worried about what might happen next. Would they be destroyed, like Israel was?</div>
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Imagine that in detail. The Babylonians, standing at Jerusalem's gate, were a formidable army. The Judean army was rather paltry in comparison. The king is panicked, and even goes as far as to ask their great old enemy, the Egyptians, for help. It never comes. What are they to do?</div>
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And the 6th century prophet, picking up the old words of long-gone 8th century Hosea, says this: "We won't be saved by bow or sword or battle or horses or cavalry. We will be saved by God."</div>
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And tradition tells us that the nation trusted in the Egyptians to come to their aid, instead. And were therefore captured and carted off into exile. God did not save them.</div>
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Whose fault was it? God's, whose promise in Hosea 1:7 didn't come true? Or Judah's, for not trusting God's promise in the first place, preventing it from coming true?</div>
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Or might we still hear that promise being fulfilled, even today, as God finds ways to continue to "arachem," to love us, in the midst of the destruction that we create, in the midst of our attempts to trust in things other than God, in the midst of our failure to trust the promises God has made with us? Maybe this verse belongs here after all. Maybe, in the middle of God's judgment, God still promises that his love for us will not let us go.</div>
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Questions for Thought:</div>
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1) From what you know of Hebrew prophecy, what do you think? Do the prophets speak doom, or hope? Why?</div>
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2) How do we deal with a Bible that seems to have changed from one generation to the next in its very beginnings? With a Bible that can have "additions" to the words of the prophets, things that didn't belong to the prophets themselves but were tucked in by a copyist later? What theological problems does that raise? What theological possibilities does that allow?</div>
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3) What happens when a prophet's words don't come true?</div>
RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-48626796926972136892016-05-09T17:08:00.000-04:002016-05-17T17:45:30.928-04:00More Children<br />
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Running a little late this week! But here's our next lesson, starting with a reminder of verse 3.</div>
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<i>3. And she [Gomer] conceived and she gave birth to a son for him [Hosea].<br />And YHWH said to him, call his name, "Jezreel..."</i></blockquote>
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<i>6. She conceived again, and she gave birth to a daughter.<br />And he said to him, call her name "Lo-Ruchamah,"<br />For I will not continue to love the house of Israel anymore, and I surely will not forgive...</i> </blockquote>
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<i>8. And she weaned Lo-Ruchamah,<br />And she conceived again, and she gave birth to a son.<br />And he said, call his name "Lo-Ammi,"<br />For you are not my people, and I am not your God.</i></blockquote>
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We're jumping a bit in this first chapter of Hosea, but the reason is that we want to compare the naming of all three children of Hosea. Their conception and naming is the first of the prophetic work of the prophet Hosea.</div>
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The first, Jezreel, we've already talked about in some detail, though I expect the discussion of just what the blood of Jezreel was all about may have been a little confusing.</div>
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The second child is named "Lo-Ruchamah." This is often translated as "I will not pity" or "I will not have mercy." But a better translation has to do with love. A quick word about how Hebrew is constructed will be needed: Words in Hebrew are built on three consonants, which carry the base meaning of the word. In order to make it be the part of speech you want, you change the vowels, and add prefixes or suffixes. For example, a "yeled" is a boy, a "yaldah" is a girl, and "yalad" is a verb meaning to give birth to a child. You can see in each of these words the three consonants "YLD." This is how all Hebrew words are formed.</div>
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The little "lo" on the front of the second and third children's name simply means "no". "Ruchamah" comes from the three consonants "R-CH-M." (That CH is not like the CH in cheese, but is like the CH in Bach.) A "rechem" is a womb. Changing that word into a verb, "racham," from which "ruchamah" comes simply means to love with the kind of love a mother has for her child.</div>
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There's something particularly beautiful in this, as well as something quite distressing. In the first place, we remember that each of these children represents God's attitude toward Israel. The use of the verb "ruchamah" means that God has loved his people with the same kind of love that a mother would have for her own child. The verb even has the feminine ending on it (the -ah on the end), and so God is cast into the role of Israel's mother. This is the kind of relationship that exists between God and Israel. On the heels of Mother's day, this is a particularly wonderful way to picture our relationship with God. We'll see that throughout the text of Hosea, the image used to describe that relationship shifts back and forth between mother-child and husband-wife.</div>
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But it's that little "lo" on the front of the name that should cause discomfort. Calling the child "Lo-Ruchamah" is saying, "God has loved Israel in the past, like a mother loves her children, but God won't love them anymore." Or better yet, not "them," but "us." God will not love us anymore. Remember that Hosea, speaking prophecy against Israel, is himself an Israelite.</div>
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This is an intensification of the first prophetic word, Jezreel. Remember that at the end of the last lesson, I noted that the prophecy was directed only at the royal family. Now, God is speaking out against the whole people of Israel. The whole nation falls under this prophetic judgment.</div>
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The third child, a boy, is named "Lo-Ammi," which means, "Not my people." We're used to hearing God speak through the prophets, "They will be my people, and I will be their God." Here we get the reversal of that promise. "You are not my people, and I will not be your God."</div>
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In fact, the Hebrew even more blunt. Although the translation above puts it in the more classical form of the statement, but literally, it says, "I am not, for you." 'Ehyeh is the word used in Exodus 3:14, where God proclaims to Moses for the first time, "'I AM that which I AM,' and he said, 'this is what you shall say to the children of Israel, I AM has sent me to you.'" Here, God instead says through Hosea, "as far as you are concerned, I AM NOT."</div>
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This time, instead of speaking about Israel in the third person, God gets personal. He is speaking directly to the listener. YOU are not my people. The room has gotten colder as we've read on in chapter one. There's even a tiny little feature of the language that adds to this. Look at the way the naming is introduced:</div>
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<i>3. And YHWH said to him<br />6. And he said to him<br />8. And he said</i></blockquote>
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It gets shorter each time. God is terse, and God is angry. In the course of just a few short verses, God moves from condemning the royal house, to giving the cold shoulder to Israel, to becoming all but nonexistent as far as YOU are concerned. Hosea's prophecy should make us very uncomfortable. It won't stay uncomfortable, of course, but for the next week, we'll have to dwell in that discomfort, because that's all for this time!</div>
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Questions for Thought:</div>
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1) As Christians, the idea that God is absent, the God called "I AM NOT," should seem very difficult to swallow. After all, our God is the God who comes to us as Immanuel, God with us. What are your thoughts as you hear about a God who completely removes himself from his people?</div>
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2) This isn't the only place in scripture that God's love is described with the word meaning "womb." How does that language make you think differently about God's relationship with us?</div>
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3) Let's be honest. These are unfair names for children to be forced to carry. What do you think about a God who would use a family, a broken relationship between husband and wife, and children with horrible names whose parentage is uncertain, as a means of embodying prophetic words?</div>
RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-52422205035369225442016-05-02T17:07:00.000-04:002016-05-17T17:45:53.973-04:00Jezreel<div style="text-align: justify;">
Today we continue on from where we left off last week--the middle of verse 1:3:</div>
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<i>And she [Gomer] conceived and she gave birth to a son for him [Hosea]. And YHWH said to him, call his name, "Jezreel," for soon I will avenge the blood of Jezreel against the house of Jehu, and I will cause the kingdom of the house of Israel to end. And it will be on that day that I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.</i></div>
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My thoughts last week ended with wondering what it was that Gomer felt about her God-instructed marriage to this prophet. Here, the specifics of Hebrew grammar make this first birth of a son "for him," for Hosea, not for herself, another sign of the writing's place in a patriarchal society. That little "for him" could have been left off, but the author of these verses keeps our focus trained on Hosea and the message he has to deliver. In our minds today, we can acknowledge that, but we need to take a moment to at least recognized that this prophet's message is being articulated through people. What must it mean to Gomer, to their son, Jezreel, and perhaps even to Hosea himself to be treated not like people with all their complexity, but merely as the symbols by which this prophecy is spoken? Or perhaps--though I admit to being less comfortable with this possibility--what a privilege it might be to serve as God's mouthpiece in this way?</div>
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For little baby Jezreel, we need to know that his name is not the name one gives to a person, but to a place. It would be like calling your child, "Toronto" or "Manhattan" or "Pacific Northwest." Not exactly the kind of name one might wish to carry around for their whole lives. It is the name of an area just north of Samaria in Galilee, southwest of the Sea of Galilee, south of Nazareth, east of Megiddo. In the region of Jezreel there is a city called Jezreel, and there, King Omri built a palace (also called Jezreel) which could serve as a second seat of government, providing rule over the northern half of the northern kingdom.</div>
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Omri's son was Ahab, the king of Israel who married Jezebel, worshiper of Baal, who Elijah fought against. Ahab's son was Ahaziah, and his son was Joram, also known as Jehoram. When he was reigning as king, the prophet Elisha was told by God to go to Ramoth-Gilead and anoint Jehu, son of Jehoshaphat, one of the military officers stationed there, as king over Israel. (See 2 Kings Chapter 9) The problem, of course, is that Joram is already king of Israel. Jehu goes to the palace at Jezreel to kill Joram--and in the process manages to also kill King Ahaziah of Judah, Jezebel, all of the descendants of both kings, and quite a few Baal worshipers. The blood of Jezreel. As a descendant of Jehu, Jeroboam of Israel, king during Hosea's prophecy, is responsible for all that death.</div>
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Except it seems a little unfair of God to enact vengeance against Jehu and his descendants. Isn't God the one who had Jehu anointed king in the first place, opposing Joram? How else was Jehu supposed to take his place?</div>
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Usually, when a king of Israel or Judah does something wrong, we get strong words of judgment against them in their epitaph in the books of Samuel and Kings. But here we simply get:</div>
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<i>Now the rest of the acts of Jehu, all that he did, and all his power, are they not written in the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Israel? So Jehu slept with his ancestors, and they buried him in Samaria. His son Jehoahaz succeeded him. The time that Jehu reigned over Israel in Samaria was twenty-eight years. (2 Kings 10:34-36 NRSV)</i></div>
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There is no mention that Jehu "did what was evil in the sight of God" or the like. It's clear that somehow, the book of Kings has a different perspective on the whole affair than does the book of Hosea. This might make us think about who decides issues of morality. Morals are supposed to be the realm of religion. We know, though, in our world today, that different people--faithful people--have different ideas about what constitutes a violation of morality, and what is acceptable. We can argue many sides of issues like abortion, homosexuality, stem cell research, racial tension, just to name a few, and still argue from good, Christian theology. It might be helpful to know that the Bible isn't even always clear on the moral rectitude of, say, the wholesale slaughter of entire bloodlines in the succession of kings.</div>
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Perhaps we'll get some insight by comparing this story with another king. David, too, was anointed as king by a prophet (Samuel) while another king was still in charge. The way that the book of 1 Samuel tells it, David refuses to take part in Saul's downfall. He actually goes to another country (Philistia) and hires himself out as a mercenary, then works against the Philistines quietly from within, because they're enemies of Saul! David knows that he's anointed to be the next king, but he waits until someone else kills Saul before taking office. (Some scholars, like Steven McKenzie, make a convincing argument that none of this was actually true, but for the moment, we'll take the Bible at its word.) David is celebrated for his decision to recognize Saul's authority, despite his not being a good king, and not take action against him. This is certainly a very different succession narrative than that of Jehu.</div>
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In any case, for Hosea, this was a terrible act, and retribution had to take place. It's interesting to note that his prophecy is directed specifically at the royal house of Israel. Much prophecy is aimed at the rulers, at the people in charge, and not at the whole society or the general inhabitants of the land. When that isn't the case--as it will be from time to time--we should take special notice.</div>
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Here's my last thought for today. How awful would it have been to grow up in a household where Mom is never home at nights, crazy Dad thinks he's the mouthpiece of God, and you're named after the place where a massacre of dozens of people took place?</div>
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Questions for Thought:</div>
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1) Are you feeling a little dizzy from the history lesson? Names of Kings and locations in the Middle East don't stick in the head all that easily. What do you do to help turn this kind of story into something alive, rather than just a list of names?</div>
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2) How do we know for sure what is right and what is wrong? What can help us make our decision on a moral issue, particularly when the Bible seems to be internally inconsistent?</div>
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3) Hosea's first prophecy is directed at the Royal House of Jehu. What courage it must have taken to speak out against the king! Where can we get the courage and authority to speak out against the powers that rule in our world?</div>
RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-52061102256350697852016-04-25T17:05:00.000-04:002016-05-17T17:46:30.937-04:00A Promiscuous Wife<div style="text-align: justify;">
Last week, we were talking a bit about the historical context of Hosea, a context that was split between a short 30 years in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, but spanned 75 or more years in the Southern Kingdom of Judah. That's one prophet with two different lifetimes. I invited you to think about how this could be, and now I'd like to consider the possible answer.</div>
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Most of the scholarship is agreed that Hosea was a prophet of the Northern Kingdom. Worth saying is that we don't have a lot like him. The Bible was recorded and preserved by the people of the south, in Judah, just before and during the exile in Babylonia. (A few books, like Daniel, were written after this time.) The northern kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians generations earlier, and any writings unique to their context would have been lost. That is to say, if Hosea was a prophet of the north, his prophecies must have passed to the south before they could have been preserved by the southerners.</div>
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What's more, when Hosea's prophecy came to Judah, the southerners must have found in it something worth keeping. The people who read his prophecy, written in about 760 B.C.E., heard something that still made sense for their context, around 710, in the south. It's possible, even, that they added more on to Hosea's prophecy to help others see how it still pertained to them.</div>
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I have to admit that my own reading of Hosea is in its infancy; I don't know the prophet as well as I might like. But I do know Amos quite well, and we'll see the same thing for him. It's clear that Amos wrote his prophecy to the people of Israel. Then a hundred years later, someone else adapted his prophecy to the people of Judah. And another hundred years passed, and yet a third writer added on some prophecy to give new hope to the people in the exile. Three layers (at least!) of Amos's prophecy, spanning centuries.</div>
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This could be troubling. We might be very uncomfortable with the idea that someone could have edited scripture! But the truth is, what we're seeing is a hint of the timelessness of prophecy, encoded in the very scriptures themselves. Prophetic words once spoken to one generation still have meaning to another. And of course this is true; otherwise, why would we read the prophets? To see what God once had to say to a people long past? Hardly! We read ancient prophecy in order to help us listen to what God is saying to us, now! We are like those who rewrote each layer of the prophet's work, reading Hosea's words for Israel, then for Judah, then for the exile, for the return, for the Roman empire, for medieval Christendom, for today's church.</div>
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And what strange prophecy it is! Hosea continues (1:2-3a):</div>
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<i>The first time the Word of YHWH came to Hosea, YHWH said to Hosea, "Take for yourself a wife of promiscuity and children of promiscuity, for the land has truly been promiscuous against YHWH." And he went, and he took Gomer, daughter of Diblaim.</i></div>
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There has been no end to the discussion of this promiscuous wife of Hosea. As early as the Aramaic translation and commentary on the book we now know as the Targum Johnathan (about 50 B.C.E.), scholars of the Bible suggested that this was all metaphorical, perhaps taking place in a dream of the prophet, or something like that. There is no way that God could have instructed Hosea to take a prostitute as a wife, is there? Those who have affirmed her likely career as a prostitute have looked to surrounding cultures and their practice of having temple prostitutes who would be involved in religious sexual rituals. This is complicated by some scholars' assertion that there never was any such thing.</div>
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In any case, modern scholars are less sensitive to seeming breaches of etiquette and morality. Even so, Gale A. Yee, in the Women's Bible Commentary, is careful to point out that the Hebrew word here has a wideness of meaning. Though traditionally though of as a prostitute, the prophet's wife could simply be an adulteress or known for promiscuity, giving the translation above. Not that this helps matters much.</div>
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It's a weird instruction for God to give the prophet. But prophets have been known to do worse things. (Jeremiah wore nothing but a dirty loincloth for some hundred days, if I remember correctly.) So he does it. Our first prophet in the Book of the Twelve performs a prophetic action by getting married. We're told that the reason is because the land (of Israel) has been promiscuous. Instead of worshiping God alone, people have turned to these other "gods," the idols of Canaan, the Baals and perhaps even the goddess Asherah, and have forgotten the Lord, who is feeling a bit like a jilted lover. Why exactly God decides that this needs to be acted out by the prophet is unclear, but it does perhaps get the message across.</div>
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The Bible is surprisingly (or not, based on your opinion of the oppressive patriarchy) silent on how Gomer feels about all this. A woman remembered for millennia for her sleeping around. Of course, one might take note that she has a certain kind of power and notoriety through her sexuality, one of the few arenas in which ancient women could find themselves powerful. One might equally wonder if this sets her up for possible abuse later on in the book? We shall see as we continue to read next week.</div>
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Questions for Thought:</div>
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1) Is it difficult to consider the editing history of the Bible? How does it change the nature of scripture to know that many hands, not just one, might have gone into writing it? How might a Biblical "literalist" encounter such an idea? Or on the other extreme, someone who feels the Bible is just "another" good book?</div>
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2) What about God's instruction to marry a wife of promiscuity? What about the moral implications of a prophet marrying a woman he knows won't be sexually faithful to him? Doesn't a prophet have a certain standard he should live up to?</div>
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3) Bring that thought into today's world. What if a pastor were to marry a prostitute? Don't pastors have to uphold certain moral standards? For that matter, don't all Christians? What should be our attitude toward prostitutes and the like?</div>
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4) How are we like the land that took up promiscuity against God? What do we worship instead of God? How might we see ourselves as unfaithful to God, prostitutes with our own devotion?</div>
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From Lorraine D:</div>
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1) The bible is first and foremost a story of love and salvation and, not unlike a great novel or movie, can change hearts and minds of it's readers. The "literalist" and the person who sees it as "just another good book" both short-change themselves. The first can get so absorbed in the details that they never see the big picture while the person who thinks it's "just another good book" never recognizes self as the beloved main character of the story, a love story that is both communal and personal.</div>
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2) I don't think "Political correctness" is the point. It is about a God who loves and is faithful even when that love and fidelity is not returned.</div>
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3) If only we could see one another through the eyes of THE Loving Father. Actually, I believe that to do so is the ultimate challenge for what it is to be Christian? Instead, Christians are often noted for being self-righteous. It reminds me of Satan's line from the movie "The Devil's Advocate" : "Ahhh, vanity, my favorite sin"!</div>
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4) Answering these questions could fill volumes. The last one calls to mind that even in our devotion and worship, we often measure i's value based on what we get out of it rather than what we put into it.</div>
RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-33005354950351109382016-04-11T17:02:00.000-04:002016-05-17T17:46:50.898-04:00Hosea and Context<div style="text-align: justify;">
Today we begin to read the prophecy of Hosea, the first of the minor prophets. We won't get very far; just through the first verse. But before we even do that, we ought to take a peek at the order of the prophets.</div>
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There are actually two orders that the twelve prophets are situated in, in different eras of the Bible. As Protestant Christians, we follow the same order that the Jewish Bible does, starting with Hosea and finishing with Malachi. At first glance, the ordering seems to be haphazard, inconsistent with the rest of the Bible. From Genesis to Nehemiah, the scriptures are told in historical order, starting at the creation of the world (the "Primeval history"), following through the exodus out of Egypt and the history of the nations of Israel and Judah, ending up with the reestablishment of the kingdom of Judah after the Babylonian exile. While the books themselves don't read quite like histories, they at least seem to follow historical order.</div>
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In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was in use during Jesus' lifetime, the twelve minor prophets are presented in roughly historical order. It makes sense. We read the words of the prophets in the order in which they were delivered, understanding them in the context of the communities to which they were spoken. There's some sense to this. It's important for us to know the historical context to which the prophecy was directed. If it's true that, as we said last time, the prophets are more interested in the here and now, it's helpful to know what the here and now is. When prophets talk about the royal family's injustices, we want to know which royal family they're talking about.</div>
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But the Hebrew Bible doesn't do that. Instead the prophets come in a seemingly random order. It will be an interesting question for us to consider as we read through the prophets, trying to figure out why they show up in the order they're in. We'll make some connections across multiple prophets when we get to certain ideas or turns of phrase, things that wouldn't be as evident otherwise. It will take some time for those things to reveal themselves.</div>
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For the time being, notice what it means to LOSE that sense of historicality by putting the prophets in a different order. As we de-emphasize the historical context of the prophets, what else comes into focus? Personally, I think it helps us to take the prophets not as words for a day long gone, but as words for today. Breaking the prophets free of their particular time and place helps us reimagine them as speaking to us. (Of course, in order to understand what they're saying to us, it helps to know what they were saying way back when. It's a give and take.)</div>
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As we look at Hosea, we begin with a firm grounding in the historical context of the book. Here's verse 1:</div>
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<i>The Word of YHWH which was to Hosea, son of Beeri,</i><i>in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah</i><i>and in the days of Jeroboam, son of Joash, king of Israel.</i></div>
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Many of the prophets do this, placing themselves firmly in their historical context by naming the kings under whom they prophesied. There's a little bit of a problem here, though. The first set of kings are of the southern kindgom, Judah. We get four listed. Uzziah reigned over Judah from about 770 B.C.E. to about 740. Not exactly the 52 years of his reign described in scripture, but we're taking estimates, so don't get concerned about that too much. Jotham followed him, for a brief reign, followed by Ahaz for a good 16 years, and then Hezekiah until about 687.</div>
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Then we're told that Hosea prophesied during the reign of Jeroboam II of Israel. He ruled Israel, the northern kingdom, from 785 to about 750. Which is to say that he died while Uzziah was still king of Judah. If the first part of the verse is correct, and Hosea prophesied until Hezekiah reigned in the south, we should get a longer list of kings of the north: Not just Jeroboam, but also Zachariah, Shallum, Menachem, Pekahiah, Pekah, and Hoshea. In fact, Hoshea was the last king of Israel; the northern nation was destroyed by the Assyrians before Hezekiah even began to rule the south!</div>
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For clarity (since that list of names is probably confusing): If the list of the kings of Judah in verse one of Hosea is correct, then the list of the kings of Israel should include six more names as well as acknowledging the destruction of Israel. If, however, the list of the kings of Israel is correct, the first list should simply read, "Uzziah." Why the disparity? In thinking about it, it might help to know that scholars understand Hosea to be a prophet of the Northern Kingdom (Israel), not of the southern kingdom (Judah).</div>
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I'm still feeling my way into the idea of doing this study online. My preferred way of "teaching" is to ask questions and let the group argue them out. It doesn't work so well in this medium. Let's try anyway. I'm going to leave that question hanging in the air. See if you can come up with some possible answers, and email them to me (which I'll post. Let me know if you'd rather I not use your name). I'll give my answer either later this week or in next week's post. So, here are the questions for thought this week:</div>
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1) Why might the prophets be given in the order they appear in our Bible? Why not historical order? What changes does that make to the way we understand what they have to say?</div>
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2) Why is it important to know the historical context in which the prophet spoke? What does that have to do with hearing the prophets for us today?</div>
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3) Why might the first verse of Hosea span 75 or more years of the Southern Kingdom's history, but only 30 or 40 years of the Northern Kindgom's history at most?</div>
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From Jed L:</div>
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1) Perhaps the order of the prophets is to get the reader to become aware of important lessons and ways to behave? The prophets could be grouped into similar ideas or lessons that Israel should remember? Thinking on the idea that history repeats itself, if the prophets aren’t ordered in historical order, but are grouped by types prophetic lessons that society should remember, we might be able to see good and bad leader behavior, types of responses people have to crisis, or how people have responded to God’s direction?</div>
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2) Knowing the historical context brings validity to the story and message. I’m a believer that talking about historical events and conditions at the time of the writer helps explain why people did or did not do at the time. The historical context of Hosea’s prophecy gives us perspective of the challenges during those times relative to the challenges of our times. We can then discuss what worked and what didn’t work during those times? Or how were relationships, such as between genders, rulers, families, tribes, similar or dissimilar to relationships in our times?</div>
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3) Hum, did Hosea spend most of his time in the Southern Kingdom and then later on in his writings go to the Northern Kingdom? It seems like he was busy. : )</div>
RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3421262775681099039.post-30139138800287782752016-04-04T16:59:00.000-04:002016-05-17T17:47:06.699-04:00Introduction to the Twelve<div style="text-align: justify;">
Congratulations! You've found the first entry in our new Online Bible Study!</div>
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For our first topic, we're going to be reading our way through the twelve minor prophets, those little books that come all in a row at the end of the Old Testament. Most of us haven't spent a great deal of time meditating on the words of Haggai or Habakkuk. These little books can sometimes be strange and foreign-seeming. But they are valuable for our encounter with God and His Word and vision for our world. Hopefully, this will be a fun journey!</div>
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For those who haven't done Bible study with me before, you should know that I move very, very, very slowly. Both of my in-person Bible studies began the Book of Acts in the fall of 2014. One has just finished, and the other still has almost ten chapters to go. I suspect things will go a little faster online, since it won't be so easy to get off topic! But we will be reading deeply, and that takes a while. (This is really just a warning for those of you who are more impatient in nature!)</div>
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I also like to have a book on hand as a guide and help to sit alongside the Bible. As Lutheran Christians, we believe that the interpretation of scripture takes place not for individuals alone, but within the context of the whole community of faith. For example, I never settle on the meaning and interpretation of scripture in the preparation of my sermons without consulting what several other people (usually scholars and theologians, but sometimes figures from the history of the church or devotional writers as well) have to say about it. It's important to check yourself, and make sure you're not inventing new things in the reading of scripture, imposing your own theology on the Bible (called eisegesis) rather than drawing true theology FROM the Bible (called exegesis).</div>
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The primary work I'll be using to give our journey through the twelve minor prophets that needed checkpoint is a book in the commentary series "Conozca su Biblia" published by Augsburg Fortress. This series is a set of short Spanish-language commentaries by Latino/a, Latin American, and South American authors. To be honest, the only reason I chose it was that it was convenient--already sitting there on my shelf, and short enough that I can scan its contents pretty quickly! The volume is called "Los doce profetas menores" (The twelve minor prophets) and is by Dr. Alejandro F. Botta, currently Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Perkins School of Theology. If I quote from this book, as I'm going to do today, I'll be using my own translation to English. I'll also be supplementing, I'm sure, from a variety of other sources, such as the Heremenia commentary series on individual prophets, or the more general works on the prophets by Gerhard von Rad, Klaus Koch, or Abraham Joshua Heshel. (You might notice that this list is missing a woman's name. I'll be looking for a female scholar to complement these others as well, but I haven't had the chance to go looking yet.)</div>
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Now that housekeeping is out of the way, I want to get started by talking a little bit about prophecy in general. These thoughts apply not just to the twelve minor prophets, but to prophecy throughout the Old and New Testaments and beyond.</div>
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We tend to get our idea of what prophecy is all about from the Greeks. The most famous of these is probably Tiresias, the blind prophet that appears in the Oedipus cycle by Sophocles. Tiresias announces to Oedipus' parents that he will grow up to kill his father and marry his mother. Of course, the actions they take to stop this from happening have no effect, and indeed, Oedipus kills Laius on the road, and then marries Jocasta when arrives in Thebes, not knowing until later what he has done. This prophet can see the future, and the actions he predicts will come to pass, no matter what.</div>
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Related to this is the "craft" of divination, the various means by which a person could consult an oracle or seer to try to predict the future. The Oracle at Delphi was the most famous of these sorts of prophets. She sat above a a naturally-occurring steam grate in the earth, breathing the (probably mildly-hallucinogenic) fumes and using this state of mind to make predictions. Most were probably pretty vague. This sort of divination practice came in many forms in the ancient world. One of the most popular in the lands around Israel was the reading of the internal organs of a sacrificed animal--especially the liver. Long lists of different shapes and signs would be consulted. Perhaps an enlarged left lobe to the liver would mean that crops would be fruitful this year. What we can most learn from this sort of practice is that people are weird.</div>
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Weird as it may be, though, the idea of prophecy has come down to us from these sources, and we generally try to apply that understanding of prophecy to our Bible. The prophets, so our reasoning goes, were people in ancient Israel who could predict the future. That's what we expect to find in them. And that is not, in fact, what the prophets wrote to do.</div>
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Here's what Alejandro Botta has to say: "The Hebrew Bible presents a vision of the prophetic work that is very distinct from the one that the modern reader usually attributes to it. Contrary to that what is often assumed, the prediction of the future does not play a significant part in the work of the prophet. Instead, it is the present, the here and now and their immediate consequences for the people that concerns him most. The prophet is a human being called by God to a specific mission: To proclaim the divine vision for the world and society, and to call to conversion to that vision. The prophet has a very peculiar vision of society. That which for us are marginal issues are for the prophet essential questions. In our society, we are only barely concerned with the many orphans, widows, or aliens (both legal and illegal) who are unable to find a way to sustain themselves. But for the prophet, this situation is a disaster of cosmic proportions that will cause the ruin of the entire nation and bring divine punishment on those responsible." (1)</div>
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This is a pretty different understanding of the prophet than we usually use as we approach the Biblical text, but it's far more accurate a description of the real work of Israel's prophets than our typical conception of prophecy. The most useful part of this description, I think, is Botta's idea of a "divine vision." Similarly, another scholar (Koch, I think) described prophets as people who see the world the way God does. They use different lenses to perceive what's going on around them than most of us do. Instead of seeing what is, they see what could be, the potential that creation had in it when God first created everything and called it good.</div>
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As we begin reading the prophets, try to keep this idea in mind. With God's help, perhaps we too will be able to glimpse the world as God does, to develop lenses through which we can see God's hopes and dreams for His creation. And, perhaps, that will lead us to begin living our lives differently, to live more fully in that vision than in the view our society tends to have for the world.</div>
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Some questions for thought:</div>
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1) What about this idea of prophecy surprises you? How does it change your expectations as you think about reading the prophets' words?</div>
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2) What might we be missing about the world by not seeing it through God's eyes?</div>
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3) How might we cultivate a new set of lenses for ourselves, one that will bring what "for us are marginal issues" into focus as "essential questions?"</div>
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Comments:</div>
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Mark says:</div>
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1) When I first learned it, it came as a welcome surprise. I don't know how to predict the future, but I do understand how someone can understand scripture and proclaim it, even to unwelcome ears. So I'd say it makes the prophets more human than divine, and it's easier to relate to that.</div>
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2) Someone who sees the world through God's eyes can spot those who don't, but not the other way around.</div>
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I'll turn the question around and ask "How do we know when we're seeing the world through God's eyes?"</div>
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3) It's hard to do it alone. I'll wager all the great theologians and prophets of history initially trained and studied in a community that supported and guided their understanding. Group bible study is a good start!</div>
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Carl says:</div>
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1) It seems we think of most prophecies as passive bestowals of knowledge from God to a prophet. A private encounter, a sign, or a dream were among the vehicles of enlightenment. A prophet was aware of God's promises, commandments, and will; couple this with a mirroring of history, and not surprisingly, a prophecy could be generated.</div>
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This changes my expectations in that prophets become wise men, not just messengers or scribes.</div>
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2) Many things, some of which may be or are beyond comprehension, but some ideas about God's might emerge. ...what do I know? Perhaps discussion will help.</div>
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3) Perhaps by focusing on people, their needs, and causes for their attitudes and actions, we may begin to approach seeing things through God's loving eyes. I think we are going to find this perspective is a summation of microcosms, not a broad brush observation.</div>
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Pastor Aaron says:</div>
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1) I really like the idea of thinking of the prophets as wise men instead of messengers; as more human, rather than somehow mystically in touch with The Divine. We should be careful not to push *too* far in that, though. There are phrases that come over and over again throughout the prophetic literature. In Hebrew it's na'um YHWH, or ko 'amar YHWH. In English, "This is a saying of YHWH," or "This is what YHWH says." The prophet presumes to speak for God, perhaps even in God's own words. That's a step back away from "wise men" and toward "messengers."</div>
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Which is to say, I prefer the understanding I gave of people like Botta and Koch. But if they're *just* seeing things the way God does, why do they think they can speak God's own words? We're going to have to look for the nuance in this idea as we read.</div>
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2) From both of your thoughts, I wonder if this question doesn't have a clear answer (yet). I like you turning it on it's head, Mark, to wonder how we know. There are lots of people who claim to see things through God's eyes, but seem to others to be pretty distant from the God we know. How can we be sure we've got it right?</div>
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3) The idea of reading and studying and being formed in a community is awfully important. I remember trying to gather a group for Evening Prayer at seminary. There was a little prayer chapel on the second floor, which was where we initially tried to have our services. It was small enough for the crowd that gathered, though I always felt it a bit stark. But it was situated as a balcony overlooking the main chapel. Often there would be other people using the main chapel space, perhaps for organ practice or the like. It felt disruptive. So we started looking for another space. But a passing complaint to a faculty member elicited a surprise response: The prayer chapel was intentionally designed to be open-air to the rest of the chapel, as a reminder that our prayer, even when done privately, really took place in community. (Honestly, I didn't find this a particularly helpful response, practically speaking. But the theology was good and the point was well-made.)</div>
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I like, too, the idea of seeing through God's eyes in a "summation of microcosms." That sense of God's intimate involvement with each one of us, personally, valuing us highly on our own, seeing us for who we are, rather than just a big mass of humanity--that's pretty central to my own theology. It makes a lot of sense that it's going to be the needs of people, their attitudes and actions, that reveal to us God's will and God's vision, rather than some sweeping glance at our politics or social systems. It will be interesting to see how the prophets do this. They often speak TO nations, and TO kings and governments. But they also often speak ABOUT people. (And we'll see whether I'm right about that when we start to dig in!)</div>
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RevAaronDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06878662273333865068noreply@blogger.com2