Jan
08
2026

Wise Men, or Magi?

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In this season after Epiphany (in the Christian West, January 6–the first day after the twelve days of Christmastide), I have been thinking about the translation of Matthew 2:1-12, and especially, about its opening verses:

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the territory of Judea during the rule of King Herod, magi came from the east to Jerusalem. They asked, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We’ve seen his star in the east, and we’ve come to honor him” (Matt 2:1-2, CEB).

In the CEB and the NIV, Jesus’ foreign visitors are called “magi.”  Likewise, in the newly updated edition of the NRSV, one of the 12,000 substantive changes made to that translation was changing the NRSV’s “wise men” to “magi.”  The old NRSV had left the translation “wise men” in place from its predecessor, the RSV, which had taken the rendering over from the old King James Version–part of the RSV’s commitment to preserve the familiar rhythms and language of the KJV as much as possible “in the light of our present knowledge of the Hebrew and Greek texts and their meaning on the one hand, and our present understanding of English on the other” (from the preface to the RSV).

Unquestionably, “magi” is more accurate and specific than “wise men.”  The Greek text has magoi (singular magos), a loan word from Old Persian, where it describes a clan of Zoroastrian priests and astrologers.  The word appears six times in our New Testament: four, all plural, in Matthew’s Christmas story (Matt 2:1, 7, 16 [two times]) and twice in the singular for the sorcerer Bar-Jesus (also called Elymas), an adversary of Paul and Barnabas who was stricken blind by the apostle (Acts 13:6, 8).

Evidently related to magos are the Greek noun mageia (“magic”) and verb mageuo (“practice magic”), found only once each in our New Testament; both are used for Simon (called in later tradition Simon Magus), a Samaritan magician converted under Philip, who is harshly rebuked for trying to buy the gifts of miracles and healing from Peter (Acts 8:9, 11).  Our English words “magic” and “magician” likewise come from this Old Persian root, by way of Greek and Latin (it is the Latin Vulgate which renders magoi as magi.)

The CEB and the NIV alike use modern colloquial English: the NIV assumes a high school reading level, while the CEB is aimed at a seventh grade reading level.  So, their decision to use “magi” is an interesting one.  Evidently, those translators believed that most modern readers would have no trouble identifying who the Magi are.  Certainly, “magi” has entered into broad English usage, specifically for Jesus’ foreign visitors.

Consider O. Henry’s famous short story for the Christmas season, “The Gift of the Magi,” in which a poor couple each sell the most precious thing they own to buy a gift for the other: he, his pocket watch to buy combs for her hair; she, her hair, to buy him a golden watch chain.  The story concludes:

The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men— who brought gifts to the newborn Christ-child. They were the first to give Christmas gifts. Being wise, their gifts were doubtless wise ones. And here I have told you the story of two children who were not wise. Each sold the most valuable thing he owned in order to buy a gift for the other. But let me speak a last word to the wise of these days: Of all who give gifts, these two were the most wise. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are the most wise. Everywhere they are the wise ones. They are the magi.

As O. Henry reminds us, in the KJV of Matthew 2, the Magi are called “wise men”–which is, frankly, a bit odd.  Generally, those 1611 translators followed the Vulgate in such matters.  For example, they follow the Vulgate’s lead in leaving the Aramaic words mammon and maranatha untranslated.  So too, in Luke 23:33, where the place Jesus was crucified is called Kranion (Greek for “skull;” the other gospels use Golgotha, Aramaic for “skull;” see Matt 27:33; Mark 15:22; John 19:17), the KJV follows the Vulgate Calvariae (Latin for “skull”), and famously calls the place “Calvary.”  So, why did the King James translators break with the Vulgate regarding the Magi?

I became curious as to how widespread English usage of “magi” was, and how far back it goes.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the answer is fairly wide, and pretty early!  In his “House of Fame” (1384), Geoffrey Chaucer’s satiric dream visions, he describes, in the same context as famous musicians and entertainers, famous witches and magicians,

And clerkes eke, which konne wel

Alle this magik naturel (House of Fame 3.1265-66)

Among such famous fakers, Chaucer saw “eke Symon Magus” (“House of Fame” 3.1274; see Acts 8)!

From 1638–not that long after the 1611 translation of the KJV–come Sir Thomas Herbert’s discouraging words regarding magi:

Let me rather busie my brains in quest of what a Magus was. . . under which Title, many Witches, Sorcerers. . . and Diaboliques have cloakt their trumperies (Travels in Persia, 214).

In contrast, the OED lists numerous attempts to distance the biblical Magi from the disreputable magus.  From Three Kings of Cologne, a 15th century Middle English translation of John of Hildesheim’s Historia Trium Regum comes Seynte Austyn’s view that “Magi in the tung of Chaldee is as moche to seye as a Philosophre.”  William Langland’s Piers Plowman (1377) declares that “Wherfore and whi wise men that tyme, Maitre and lettred men Magy hem called.”  So there was precedent both for a reluctance about associating the visitors to the Christ child with sorcerers, and for the translation, “wise men,” that King James’ translators chose to use. Intriguingly, the Roman Catholic Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate into English (the American 1899 edition, which relies on Bishop Richard Challoner’s mid-eighteenth century revision to the seventeenth century original) also renders magi as “wise men.”

Of course, tradition says that there were three Magi, that they were kings from three continents and three races, and that they were named Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar–hence John of Hildesheim’s History of the Three Kings (1370).  The Middle English translation’s title refers to the traditional location of the bones of the three kings, in an opulent shrine in Cologne, Germany built to house these relics (collected, as so many were, by Constantine’s mother Helena).

 

None of this, of course, is found in Matthew’s account.  Matthew does not tell us how many Magi came–the traditional number three comes from their three gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh (Matt 2:11-12). The idea that they were kings from distant lands and races comes from Isaiah 60:1-6, traditionally read as fulfilled in the visit of the Magi:

Nations will come to your light
    and kings to your dawning radiance.

. . . the nations’ wealth will come to you.
 Countless camels will cover your land,
    young camels from Midian and Ephah.
They will all come from Sheba,
    carrying gold and incense,
    proclaiming the Lord’s praises.

 

Still, there is an appropriateness to the tradition’s reading of the Magi as representing the whole outside world.  After all, they come to baby Jesus as the ultimate outsiders.  They come not only from outside of Judea, but from outside the Roman empire itself–from the land of the feared Parthians, an armed and unstable threat on the empire’s eastern frontier. They are not Jews, either ethnically or religiously; while nothing is said of their religious heritage by Matthew, they would have been Zoroastrians.  Yet it is Matthew who tells their story: Matthew, the most Jewish of the gospel writers, is the one who records a visit to the Christ child from foreigners and unbelievers, who come, not as enemies to threaten the Child, but as pilgrims to honor him.

Herod’s religious experts also see the Magi’s star, and rightly interpret the Scriptures that witness to the coming king:

As for you, Bethlehem of Ephrathah,
    though you are the least significant of Judah’s forces,
        one who is to be a ruler in Israel on my behalf will come out from you.
    His origin is from remote times, from ancient days.
 Therefore, he will give them up
        until the time when she who is in labor gives birth.
        The rest of his kin will return to the people of Israel.
He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord,
        in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
        They will dwell secure,
        because he will surely become great throughout the earth;
        he will become one of peace (Micah 5:2-5; see Matt 2:4-6)

But these faithful, patriotic citizens stay in the false security of Herod’s walled palace, and never see the miracle.  Instead, in Matthew it is the foreign Magi who become the first, faithful witnesses to the new thing God is doing–breaking into our world as one us in Bethlehem.

Title: Star of Bethlehem with Pomegranate Trees [Click for larger image view]

Epiphany celebrates the light of God shining into the entire world with the birth of Christ, and indeed, the light of God’s revelation shining into all our lives yesterday, today, and forever!  May we learn from the wise men to be “wise guys” ourselves: to be ready to receive God’s blessing from the hands, and to hear God’s word in the voice, of a stranger.  May we say to all hatred, racism, and fearmongering a firm and unequivocal “No.”

AFTERWORD:

The photo of the Three Kings reliquary is from astropelusa / Atlas Obscura User.  The quilt above, “Star of Bethlehem With Pomegranate Trees,” was made by an anonymous quilter in 1850, and is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  This image comes from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56278 [retrieved January 30, 2023]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Star_of_Bethlehem_with_Pomegranate_Trees,_New_York,_c._1850_-_Museum_of_Fine_Arts,_Boston_-_DSC02710.JPG.

 

Dec
22
2025

Merry Christmas!

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This year, St. Paul’s minister of music Dr. Mark A. Boyle led us in a Christmas Cantata by David von Kampen, setting texts by Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676), as well as selected passages of Scripture.  It was the best expression of the meaning and power of Christ’s Incarnation that I have encountered.  I am sharing here the words of that cantata as my Christmas greeting to all.  God bless you, friends–and Merry Christmas!

MOVEMENT 1:  “Oh Jesus Christ, Thy Manger Is”

O Jesus Christ, Thy manger is

My Paradise, at which my soul reclineth.

For there, O Lord, Doth lie the Word of God made flesh for us;

Here-in Thy grace forth shineth

Image result for nativity icon

MOVEMENT 2: “A Great Light”

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light:

they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death,

upon them hath the light shined.

For unto us a child is born,

unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder:

and his name shall be called Wonderful,

Counsellor, The mighty God,

The everlasting Father,

The Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:2, 6 KJV).

MOVEMENT 3: “He Whom the Wind and Sea Obey”

He whom the sea and wind obey

Doth come to serve the sinner in great meekness.

Thou God’s own Son, with us are one,

Dost join us and our children in our weakness.

MOVEMENT 4: “The Word was Made Flesh”

And the Word was made flesh,

and dwelt among us,

and we beheld his glory,

the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,

full of grace and truth.

MOVEMENT 5: “How Greatly God Must Love Thee”

Thou Christian heart, Whoe’er thou art,

Be of good cheer and let no sorrow move thee!

For God’s own Child, In mercy mild,

Joins thee to Him; How greatly God must love thee!

The world may hold Her wealth and gold;

But thou, my heart, keep Christ as thy true treasure.

To Him hold fast, Until at last

A crown be thine and honor in full measure.

AFTERWORD:  You may better know hymnist Paul Gerhardt for his translation from Latin of “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” (No. 286 in the United Methodist Hymnal).  John Wesley himself translated some of Gerhardt’s hymns from their German originals (for example, “Give to the Winds Thy Fears,” No. 129; and “Jesu, Thy Boundless Love to Me,” No. 183).  If you care to hear our choir’s presentation of the von Kampen cantata in worship, you can watch and listen here.

Dec
04
2025

The Peaceable Kingdom

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While Edward Hicks’ name may be unfamiliar to you, I’m betting you will immediately recognize his work. From 1820 until his death in 1849, this Quaker preacher and American folk artist painted the same scene over and over again—perhaps as many as a hundred times, although only sixty-two pictures survive.  Likely you have seen at least one of them; the one depicted above is in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

In each painting, little children stand solemn, unmenaced, and unafraid among lions, wolves, and bears, accompanied by equally unfazed sheep and cattle. Each face, human and animal, gazes calmly out of the canvas, meeting our eyes in serene invitation. To each painting, Hicks gave the same title: “The Peaceable Kingdom.”

Hicks drew this imagery from Isaiah (Isa. 11:1–10; 65:17–25):

The wolf will live with the lamb,
    and the leopard will lie down with the young goat;
    the calf and the young lion will feed together,
    and a little child will lead them.
The cow and the bear will graze.
    Their young will lie down together,
    and a lion will eat straw like an ox.
A nursing child will play over the snake’s hole;
    toddlers will reach right over the serpent’s den (Isa. 11:6-8; compare 65:25).

But Isaiah’s vision is likely drawn in turn from the peaceful, ordered world depicted in the first of the two Genesis accounts of creation, Genesis 1:1–2:4a, in which there are neither predators nor prey:

 

Then God said, “I now give to you all the plants on the earth that yield seeds and all the trees whose fruit produces its seeds within it. These will be your food. To all wildlife, to all the birds in the sky, and to everything crawling on the ground—to everything that breathes—I give all the green grasses for food.” And that’s what happened (Gen. 1:29–30).

 

Of course, neither of these passages look like the world in which we live!  Both the world as it one day would be in Isaiah’s prophecy, and the world as it once was in Genesis, are Gegenwelten: imagined ideal counterworlds of calm and perfect order. In this dream of life as it should be, once was, and will be again, God’s world is a peaceable kingdom, where bloodshed and violence play no role.

Often, as in the painting in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum, Hicks included in the background of his “Peaceable Kingdom” paintings William Penn making a treaty with the Lenni Lenape Indians in 1682 (see the detail above). But why?  What does this have to do with Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom?  To answer that question, we need to look more closely at Isaiah 11:1-10: the Hebrew Bible reading for this second week of Advent.

Likely, this passage comes from the mid-8th century BCE: after the depredations of the Syro-Ephraimite War in Judah, and the fall of Israel and deportation of its people (722 BCE; see Isa 7–8).  In the wake of these tragedies, Isaiah describes his people and their leadership as a tree chopped down to the ground.  But, the prophet declares, there is still life in the stump!

A shoot will grow up from the stump of Jesse;
    a branch will sprout from his roots (Isa 11:1).

Image result for Isaiah sistine

Isaiah’s vision of Judah’s resuscitation is also a vision of the renewal of kingship. Jesse was the father of David, ancestor of Judah’s kings (see Ruth 4:17–22).  This passage sets forth the prophet’s hope for just rule: his idealistic vision of what the king should be, and one day would be;

The LORD’s spirit will rest upon him,
    a spirit of wisdom and understanding,
    a spirit of planning and strength,
    a spirit of knowledge and fear of the LORD.
He will delight in fearing the LORD.
He won’t judge by appearances,
    nor decide by hearsay.
He will judge the needy with righteousness,
    and decide with equity for those who suffer in the land.
He will strike the violent with the rod of his mouth;
    by the breath of his lips he will kill the wicked.
Righteousness will be the belt around his hips,
    and faithfulness the belt around his waist (Isa 11:2–5).

For Isaiah, just government in the social realm reflects divine order in the natural realm (see Psalm 19), and so he dreams of a world in which (as in Genesis 1:1–2:4a!) nature reflects God’s intent for creation perfectly.  Although his vision comes from a time of devastation and despair, for Isaiah despair always yields to hope; God’s judgment is always tempered by God’s mercy.

The last verse of this passage looks out to the nations–as the Quaker painter realized:

On that day, the root of Jesse will stand as a signal to the peoples. The nations will seek him out, and his dwelling will be glorious (Isa 11:10).

That is why Hicks places William Penn and the Lenni Lenape in his depiction of Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom.  God’s peace and justice are not the property of any one nation or race, but are given to unite the whole world.  Further, Hicks believed that Isaiah’s vision was more than a dream for someday. He saw the treaty with the Lenni Lenape as evidence that God was already at work in the world, bringing God’s peace and justice to fruition here and now.  Hicks heard that hope in the account of Isaiah’s vision.

 

Image result for Paul rembrandt

Paul heard it, too! For this apostle to the Gentiles, Isaiah’s vision demonstrated that God’s grace extends beyond the borders of Israel.  In the epistle for this Sunday (Romans 15:4-13), Paul quotes Isaiah 11:10 (it sounds a bit different, as he is quoting from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of that passage):

 And again, Isaiah says,

There will be a root of Jesse,
    who will also rise to rule the Gentiles.
The Gentiles will place their hope in him (Rom 15:12).

For Paul, of course, the branch from the root of Jesse is Jesus, who has fulfilled Isaiah’s dreams of what a king should be, and who comes, as Isaiah envisioned,  to all peoples.

Romans is an unusual epistle.  Usually, Paul wrote to churches he had established himself or had already visited, responding directly to the circumstances and concerns of each particular community.  But at the time he wrote to the Romans, Paul had never been to Rome (see Rom 1:8-15). Why then did he write this letter, to people he had never met?

New Testament scholar Robert Jewett proposes that Paul wrote Romans as an ambassador for Christ, seeking to reconcile the estranged gentile (non-Jewish) and Jewish Christian communities in Rome.  So, Paul begins by asserting his confidence that Jesus has come to and for Jew and Gentile alike: 

I’m not ashamed of the gospel: it is God’s own power for salvation to all who have faith in God, to the Jew first and also to the Greek (Rom 1:16)

He returns to this theme in Sunday’s epistle:

So welcome each other, in the same way that Christ also welcomed you, for God’s glory. I’m saying that Christ became a servant of those who are circumcised for the sake of God’s truth, in order to confirm the promises given to the ancestors, and so that the Gentiles could glorify God for his mercy (Rom 15:7-9).

Paul is persuaded that the Gospel is for all people:

May the God of endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude toward each other, similar to Christ Jesus’ attitude. That way you can glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ together with one voice (Rom 15:5-6).

 

Echoing Paul’s call to unity and inclusion,  Jurgen Moltmann, who died last year at 98, warned Christians not to be seduced by nationalism:

The church of Christ is present in all the people on earth and cannot become ‘a national religion’. The church of Christ ecumenically embraces the whole inhabited earth. She is not a tribal religion, nor a Western religion, nor a white religion, but the church of all humanity. The church of Christ is not national, but it is a church of all the nations and humanity.

Moltmann’s warning came from grim experience. His famous theology of hope had its beginnings when he was a German POW in England, having seen first-hand in Nazi Germany the destructive consequences of a church allied with a state defined by exclusion.

 

Image result for baptism of jesus icon
In the Gospel for this second Sunday of Advent (Matthew 3:1-12), our attention is drawn to John the Baptist, the forerunner of the Christ, who famously baptized all comers: all who repented of their sins. The gospel is not the property of any nation, or race, or group, but is given to the whole world.  To the religious leaders, so proud of their distinct heritage, John issued this warning:

Produce fruit that shows you have changed your hearts and lives.  And don’t even think about saying to yourselves, Abraham is our father. I tell you that God is able to raise up Abraham’s children from these stones.  The ax is already at the root of the trees. Therefore, every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit will be chopped down and tossed into the fire (Matt. 3:8–10).

John’s fiery denunciation of those who had thought themselves to be beyond reproach, and his summons to righteous action, may seem a strange fit with Paul and Isaiah’s visions of peace and hope–but remember William Penn in the corner of Hicks’ painting!  In Isaiah 11, the peaceable kingdom follows a depiction of just and wise rule (Isa. 11:1–5). Jesus taught us to pray for God’s kingdom, and for the realization of God’s good will “on earth as it’s done in heaven” (Matt 6:9-13)–that is, not just someday, but today.  As the rabbis say, we are called to tikkun ‘olam: the healing of the world.  But the healing of our world cannot be accomplished apart from repentance, followed by concerted, political action. Our choices matter, friends, for good or for ill.

AFTERWORD:

Thanks to St. Paul’s friend Carolyn Kelley Evans, a docent at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, for letting me know that the picture I originally shared was not the version of Hicks’ “Peaceable Kingdom” in that museum after all, and for sharing with me an image of the actual painting, on view in Gallery 17.  That error is now corrected!

 

Nov
24
2025

A Thanksgiving Prayer

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30 Scripture Verses to Celebrate Thanksgiving with an Attitude of Grat - Clothed with Truth

FOREWORD: In 2021, my friend, former student, and colleague in ministry Karen Slusser led our congregation at St. Paul’s UMC in this beautiful thanksgiving litany, from poet, theologian, and civil rights activist Howard Thurman.  I share it with you for your own meditation and devotion this festive week.  God bless you, friends–Happy Thanksgiving!

Who Was Howard Thurman? | BU Today | Boston University

Howard Thurman’s Thanksgiving Prayer

Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.
I begin with the simple things of my days:
Fresh air to breathe,
Cool water to drink,
The taste of food,
The protection of houses and clothes,
The comforts of home.
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!

I bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that I have known:
My mother’s arms,
The strength of my father
The playmates of my childhood,
The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives
Of many who talked of days gone by when fairies
And giants and all kinds of magic held sway;
The tears I have shed, the tears I have seen;
The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the
Eye with its reminder that life is good.
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day

I finger one by one the messages of hope that awaited me at the crossroads:
The smile of approval from those who held in their hands the reins of my security;
The tightening of the grip in a simple handshake when I
Feared the step before me in darkness;
The whisper in my heart when the temptation was fiercest
And the claims of appetite were not to be denied;
The crucial word said, the simple sentence from an open
Page when my decision hung in the balance.
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.

If John Wesley Came to General Conference – Part 1 - United Methodist Insight

I pass before me the main springs of my heritage:
The fruits of labors of countless generations who lived before me,
Without whom my own life would have no meaning;
The seers who saw visions and dreamed dreams;
The prophets who sensed a truth greater than the mind could grasp
And whose words would only find fulfillment
In the years which they would never see;
The workers whose sweat has watered the trees,
The leaves of which are for the healing of the nations;
The pilgrims who set their sails for lands beyond all horizons,
Whose courage made paths into new worlds and far off places;
The saviors whose blood was shed with a recklessness that only a dream
Could inspire and God could command.
For all this I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.

 

I linger over the meaning of my own life and the commitment
To which I give the loyalty of my heart and mind:
The little purposes in which I have shared my loves,
My desires, my gifts;
The restlessness which bottoms all I do with its stark insistence
That I have never done my best, I have never dared
To reach for the highest;

The big hope that never quite deserts me, that I and my kind
Will study war no more, that love and tenderness and all the
inner graces of Almighty affection will cover the life of the
children of God as the waters cover the sea.

All these and more than mind can think and heart can feel,
I make as my sacrament of Thanksgiving to Thee,
Our Father, in humbleness of mind and simplicity of heart.

AFTERWORD:

Howard Thurman, 1899–1981 (from Rich Barlow, “Who Was Howard Thurman?”, Boston University Today, January 7, 2020)

“In 1944, Thurman cofounded San Francisco’s Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, the first integrated interfaith religious congregation in the United States. In 1953, he became the dean of Marsh Chapel, the first black dean at a mostly white American university, mentoring, among many others, Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) as he developed his philosophy of nonviolence.

Yet Thurman didn’t live the dramatic public activism of King or suffer a similar martyrdom. In fact, critics called him a backbencher in the Civil Rights Movement, more preoccupied with mystical meanderings than frontline protesting. Thurman countered that the first order of social change was changing one’s individual internal spirit. ‘He rather gently and powerfully moved through the world in a spirit of grace, dignity, and humility,’ says Walter Fluker (GRS’88), the School of Theology Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor of Ethical Leadership, who published Thurman’s papers, taught a seminar on the man last semester, and wrote his dissertation on Thurman and King.

Who exactly was Howard Thurman?

In an interview shortly before his death, Thurman said he caught the ‘contagion’ of religion from his grandmother, who cared for him after his father died when Thurman was seven and his mother became the family breadwinner. His grandmother recited for Howard the mantra of the black preacher she’d heard as a child on her owner’s plantation: ‘You are not slaves. You are not niggers. You’re God’s children!’ His grandmother’s charismatic rendition, Thurman told the interviewer, inspired in him the belief that ‘the creator of existence also created me.’

That belief took him to Morehouse College in Atlanta, then to seminary and a series of jobs as pastor and professor. His first pastorate after his 1925 ordination as a Baptist minister, in Ohio in the 1920s, led to study with Quaker pacifist Rufus Jones, which Thurman said changed his life. His thinking was honed by a 1935 trip to India with other African Americans to meet Mohandas Gandhi, who completed Thurman’s conversion to nonviolent social activism.

Thurman’s association with Martin Luther King, Jr., predated BU. Thurman and King’s father, an Atlanta minister, were friends when the young King was growing up. ‘Thurman was at the King home many times,’ says Vita Paladino (MET’79, SSW’93), former director of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, which houses King’s donated papers. Their BU time overlapped for only a year, and King considered his father and Thurman a different, older generation, Paladino says. Nonetheless, King carried Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman’s most important book, while leading the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott.

Published in 1949, the book argues that Jesus taught the oppressed a faith-based unconditional love that would enable them to endure their oppression. Thurman’s message moved not only King, but Jesse Jackson, who in 1982 penned an essay for a postmortem tribute to Thurman by BU. Jackson the activist wrote that he’d been drawn to Thurman the academic by his insistence that ‘if you ever developed a cultivated will with spiritual discipline, the flame of freedom would never perish.’”

Nov
19
2025

Christ the King

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Close readers of Scripture have long been intrigued by the plurals in Genesis 1:26.  “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness” (NRSVue)?  Just who is God addressing?  In Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 8:3, Rabbi Ammi says, intriguingly, that God is talking to Godself (‘el libbo, “to his heart”)!  Similarly, many Christian readers over the years have found in this verse a reflection of the Trinity, with the Father addressing the Son and the Holy Spirit (for example, Augustine, On the Trinity, 7.6.12; 12.6.6; and Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 3/1. 41.2).  The early Christian poet Prudentius found in the plural the presence of Christ specifically at the creation of the world:

            What but to say that he

            Was not alone, that God stood by God’s side

            When the Lord made man in the image of the Lord?  

(Cited by Andrew Louth and Marco Conti, Genesis 1—11, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001], 29).

Certainly the New Testament speaks of Christ as the agent of God’s creation.  The Epistle for this Sunday is Colossians 1:11-20, which says of Jesus,

The Son is the image of the invisible God,
the one who is first over all creation,

Because all things were created by him:
both in the heavens and on the earth,
the things that are visible and the things that are invisible.
Whether they are thrones or powers,
or rulers or authorities,
all things were created through him and for him.

He existed before all things,
and all things are held together in him (Colossians 1:15-17).

 

Elsewhere in the New Testament, other “Cosmic Christ” passages further underline and emphasize Christ’s role in the creation, maintenance, and destiny of the cosmos. In Hebrews 1:2, “God made his Son the heir of everything and created the world through him.”  Ephesians 1:9-10 identifies Jesus as the end—that is, the telos, the purpose and goal—of the cosmos:

God revealed his hidden design to us, which is according to his goodwill and the plan that he intended to accomplish through his Son.This is what God planned for the climax of all times: to bring all things together in Christ, the things in heaven along with the things on earth.

This Sunday will be the last Sunday after Pentecost, marking the end of the Christian year; next Sunday, with Advent, a new year begins. The last Sunday of the Christian year is called the Reign of Christ, or the feast of Christ the King.  The icon at the head of this blog is a manuscript illumination from the Catedral de Toledo in Spain, depicting Jesus as Pantocrator: the Ruler of all.  In the icon, Christ Pantocrator is drawing a circle demarcating the bounds of reality, above and beyond which he stands as its creator (see Isa 40:22, NRSVue).  As our Colossians passage confesses, 

all things were created through him and for him.

He existed before all things,
and all things are held together in him (Col 1:16-17).

The appropriateness of such exalted language to the celebration of Jesus’ reign is obvious.  But the Gospel for Sunday, Luke 23:33-43, oddly pairs the Colossians text with Luke’s account of Jesus’ crucifixion: scarcely a regal scene!  

Yet, Luke tells us, the placard on Jesus’ cross describing the crimes for which he was being executed read, “This is the king of the Jews” (Luke 23:38//Matt 27:37; compare John 19:19). When Christians reflect on the cross, we tend to forget, or perhaps even to ignore, this obvious truth.  Rome didn’t crucify thieves, or bandits, or rapists, or even murderers.  It crucified slaves, and those who rebelled against Roman authority. Although in the King James, the criminals crucified with Jesus are called “thieves” (Matt 27:38; Mark 15:27; in Luke 3:33, the KJV calls them “malefactors”), the NRSVue more properly calls them “rebels.” Jesus, like them, was a political prisoner, executed by the Roman state on the charge of insurrection.

Surely, we can imagine nothing further from the image of Christ Pantocrator than a crucified, naked, dying man! Yet in Luke, Jesus is recognized as king on the cross, by his fellow victims:  

One of the criminals hanging next to Jesus insulted him: “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!”  Responding, the other criminal spoke harshly to him, “Don’t you fear God, seeing that you’ve also been sentenced to die? We are rightly condemned, for we are receiving the appropriate sentence for what we did. But this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:39-42).

So it is precisely from his cross, as the paradoxically crucified Lord, that Jesus extends his kingly offer of inclusion to that rebel: ““I assure you that today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43).

The connection between Christ’s kingship and his cross is also upheld in Colossians 1:19-20:

Because all the fullness of God was pleased to live in him,
and he reconciled all things to himself through him—
whether things on earth or in the heavens.
He brought peace through the blood of his cross.

Particularly in the face of the current heresy of Christian nationalism, this is a vital link.  Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC), identifies the tenets of this American heresy:

The way I understand Christian Nationalism is it’s a political ideology and a cultural framework that tries to merge American and Christian identities, suggesting that to be a real American, one has to be a Christian – and not just any kind of Christian, but a Christian who holds certain fundamentalist religious beliefs that are in line with conservative political priorities. Christian Nationalism overlaps significantly with White supremacy, with a narrative that the only people who truly belong in this country are the people who held power at the beginning of the country – and that is White Protestant Christian men who own property. Everyone else is effectively a second-class citizen in the eyes of White Christian Nationalism.

If we forget the cross, the image of Christ the king becomes an excuse for our own claims to political dominion, and a justification for violence against anyone who is not like us.  But to remember the cross is to remember that it was our own hatred and violence that killed our Lord.  In her powerful devotional book God Is No Fool (Nashville: Abingdon, 1969), Lois A. Cheney writes:

Would we crucify Jesus today? It’s not a rhetorical question for the mind to play with.

I believe,

We are born with a body, a mind, a soul, and a handful of nails.

I believe,

When a man dies, no one has ever found any nails left,

            clutched in his hand

                        or stuffed in his pockets  (Cheney, 40-41).

To remember the cross is to remember what kind of king Jesus is.  He is not a cruel despot.  He is the Crucified One, who knows our suffering from the inside, and who by his blood has freed us from the power of our own sin.

Oct
27
2025

All Saints Day, All Souls Day, and Dia de los Muertos

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In my last post, I spoke briefly about All-Saints Day by way of claiming Hallowe’en as a legitimate Christian celebration.  As a celebration of all the saints who lack a feast of their own, All-Saints was declared an official holy day of the church by Pope Gregory IV in 837.  The feast was later moved to November 1 in response to the European (specifically Celtic) holiday of Samhain on October 31, which thus became for Christians All-Hallows Eve, or Hallowe’en.

All Saints Day was John Wesley’s favorite Christian celebration.  Joe Iovino writes:

John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, enjoyed and celebrated All Saints Day. In a journal entry from November 1, 1767, Wesley calls it “a festival I truly love.” On the same day in 1788, he writes, “I always find this a comfortable day.” The following year he calls it “a day that I peculiarly love.”

Like Wesley, I have long loved All-Saints Day, regarding it as a fitting celebration and memorial of all the faithful dead.  This is my favorite All-Saint’s Day hymn, composed by William Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield, and usually sung, with a crashing opening chord, to Ralph Vaughn Williams’ stirring tune!

I must confess, though, that I long thought that All Souls Day was just another name for All-Saints, and that Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) was likewise the same day, in Spanish.  I have learned, though, that these are actually three different, although related, festivals.

All Souls Day is a separate, specifically Roman Catholic celebration on November 2.  Odilo, abbot of Cluny (who died in 1048) thought it fitting that, having honored all the saints in heaven on All-Saints Day, we spend the following day remembering all the other faithful dead, praying for their release from purgatory.  This picture from Encyclopedia Britannica (© kristo74/Fotolia) shows candlelit graves in a Catholic cemetery–the candles left as a sign of the prayers going up for each departed soul.

As a rule, Protestants aren’t much on purgatory–after all, didn’t Jesus tell the bandit crucified with him, “I assure you that today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43)?  But the Christian hope has not been, traditionally, that our disembodied souls will be absorbed into the changeless, timeless eternity of the Godhead.  In Scripture and in the tradition, the hope for a life beyond this life has been joined to our personality continuing, in an embodied existence: everlasting, then, rather than timelessly eternal.

The earliest explicit statement about a life beyond death in the Bible is Daniel 12:2, a text that in its final form dates to the second century BCE: “Many of those who sleep in the dusty land will wake up—some to eternal life, others to shame and eternal disgrace.”  Notice that this passage is not about the assured immortality of the soul, but rather about the hoped-for future resurrection of the body.    Indeed, the resurrection of the body at the end of the age is the teaching of the rabbis in the Mishnah, and is assumed throughout the Christian New Testament (for example, Luke 14:14; John 5:29; 11:24; 1 Corinthians 15:20-28).  The creeds of Christianity, too, confess the resurrection of the body, not the immortality of the soul.

Most importantly, the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection everywhere emphasize the empty tomb (Matthew 28:11-15; Mark 16:6) and the physical, tangible nature of the risen Jesus, who displays in his body the wounds of crucifixion, invites his friends to touch him, and even shares a meal with them (for example, Luke 24:36-43; John 20:26-29). The risen Jesus is not Jesus’ ghost, but Jesus himself: the same Jesus who was crucified.

Crucifixion of Jesus - Wikipedia

So–what does all this mean?  What do I believe happens when we die?  When I was a young Christian, I could have told you, with all the confidence of youthful arrogance.  But now, I am an old Christian, and no longer quite so glib or blithe.  I believe in the resurrection of the dead, friends.  And that means, first of all, that I believe that the dead really do die.  One day soon (although I hope, not too soon), I too will really die.  But I am also certain that the last word belongs to the Lord of life.  The God who raised Jesus can, and will, raise us up at the end of the age, in the world to come.

Christian theologian Jurgen Moltmann put it this way: “The immortality of the soul is an opinion – the resurrection of the dead is a hope.”  Christian hope is not Pollyanna optimism–a saccharine denial of the hard realities of life, and of death.  It is rather the confidence that we may place ourselves, our world, our future, and even our mourned and beloved dead into the hands of God, trusting that the power at the heart of all things is indeed just and loving and kind, and that nothing beautiful will be lost.

Anglican priest, physicist, and theologian John Polkinghorne described the soul as “what expresses and carries the continuity of living personhood,” not only beyond this life, but within it, from the past to the present and into the future (The God of Hope and the End of the World [New Haven: Yale University, 2002], 105). Drawing on information theory, he proposed that “the carrier of continuity is the immensely complex ‘information-bearing pattern’ in which that matter is organized” (Polkinghorne 2002 105–6). That pattern, preserved as a “disembodied existence” in the mind of God after death, will ensure continuity of the self into the world to come, when God reembodies us in the new creation (Polkinghorne 2002, 107).

What will that waiting-time be like, I wonder?  Will I sleep, as Luther believed?  Will there be, as Catholic dogma holds, the opportunity to strive further toward perfection–something like purgatory?  And what will happen once we are resurrected?  Frankly, I do not know.  But like Paul, I believe that nothing can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38), and so when I leave this life, I will be with him (Philippians 1:23).  Whatever else Jesus’ words to the thief on the cross may mean, they surely mean that we may trust him not to let us go.

Which bring us to Dia de los Muertos: the Day of the Dead. In its origins, this festival is neither European nor Middle Eastern but, as the Disney film Coco jubilantly recognizes, Mexican.  While it shows some influence from Celtic Spain (Samhain is called Samaín in Galicia), and from the Christian All Saints and All Souls Days, the pre-Christian roots of Dia de los Muertos go back to indigenous Meso-American cultures such as the Aztecs.  Significantly, while (much like Samhain) Dia de los Muertos involves belief in the dead crossing over to the world of the living, those dead are not feared: their families remember, celebrate, and welcome them.

According to tradition, the gates of heaven are opened at midnight on October 31 and the spirits of children can rejoin their families for 24 hours. The spirits of adults can do the same on November 2.

Latin Christians, not just south of the border but everywhere, rightly find in these days a celebration of new life in Christ defeating death.

Happy Hallowe’en, friends!  A joyous All Saints Day, All Souls Day, and Dia de los Muertos to you all.

Oct
19
2025

Screwtape

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The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.

This saying of Christian Reformer Martin Luther was used as the epigraph to C. S. Lewis’ famous Christian satire The Screwtape Letters: Letters From a Senior to a Junior Devil–letters of advice from the demon Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, on how Wormwood could tempt his “patient” into hell: an appropriately “Halloweeny” read, to be sure!  

The Screwtape Letters was published in book form in 1943, but began as a wartime serial in The Guardian between May and November of 1941–just after the Blitz, a terrible period during which England was under almost continual attack from Nazi Germany.   Indeed (spoiler alert!), Wormwood’s attempts to seduce his “patient” away from his faith fail decidedly when the man is killed by a German bomb, and taken into heaven:

One moment it seemed to be all our world; the scream of bombs, the fall of houses, the stink and taste of high explosive on the lips and in the lungs, the feet burning with weariness, the heart cold with horrors, the brain reeling, the legs aching; next moment all this was gone, gone like a bad dream. . . Did you mark how naturally–as if he’d been born for it–the earth-born vermin entered the new life? (The Screwtape Letters, letter 31).

I commend this book wholeheartedly, friends.  It is full of wisdom, and wit.  For example, Screwtape advises Wormwood to prevent his patient from attending worship by disillusioning him:

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans.        . . . When he gets to his pew and looks around him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like “the body of Christ” and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous (The Screwtape Letters, letter 2).

The Screwtape Letters is dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien, the Roman Catholic friend who led Lewis into the Christian faith. That connection is particularly interesting, as some of the same Christians who condemn Hallowe’en as a pagan holiday also mistrust the fantasies of both Lewis and Tolkien, fearful of their alleged “occult” influences–despite the explicitly Christian worldview evident in both the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings.

Those well-meaning Christians are of course correct about Hallowe’en’s pagan origins.  The night before November 1 was once called Samhain, an old Celtic festival of the quarter-year (falling between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice). In Celtic culture, it was believed to be a night when the borders between this world and the next became particularly thin, so that the unquiet dead could cross over into this world and molest the living. Food offerings, lamps, and even the severed heads of enemies (grimly recalled, perhaps, by Jack o’lanterns) could be set out to appease or turn aside the ghosts.

We call October 31 not Samhain, but Hallowe’en (that is, “Hallow Even”), because October 31 is of course the night before November 1, All-Hallows Day–hence, All-Hallows Eve.  All-Hallows, or All-Saints, Day began in the days of Pope Boniface IV as a feast day for all martyrs, and was first celebrated on May 13, 609.  Pope Gregory III (731-741) shifted the focus from the martyrs to the celebration of all the saints who lack a feast of their own (and by extension, of all who have died in the Lord), and as such All-Saints was declared an official holy day of the church by Pope Gregory IV in 837.  The feast was shifted from May to November 1 in response to the European (specifically Celtic) holiday of Samhain.

When the Celts became Christians, this night was transformed by the realization that Jesus Christ had triumphed over death, hell, and the grave. Death, and the dead, no longer needed to be feared.  Those Celtic Christians now knew, as Ephesians 2:4-7 affirms,

God is rich in mercy. He brought us to life with Christ while we were dead as a result of those things that we did wrong. He did this because of the great love that he has for us. You are saved by God’s grace!  And God raised us up and seated us in the heavens with Christ Jesus.  God did this to show future generations the greatness of his grace by the goodness that God has shown us in Christ Jesus.

The association with All-Hallows Day made this a night of rejoicing! Hallowe’en, friends, is a celebration of life, and of Christ’s victory over death and the fear of death.  I think it is fitting that this night, which used to be a grim and grisly night of fear, has become a night of laughter and joy, when it is little children who come to our doors to receive our offerings of food.  Surely, as Luther and Lewis alike understood, there is no better medicine against fear and despair than joy and laughter!

These waning days of October prompt anticipation, not only of Hallowe’en, but also of Election Day on November 4.  In addition, October 18 saw “No Kings” rallies, held across the country, draw nearly seven million people (this picture is from Pittsburgh).  In response to Hallowe’en, the forthcoming election, and to these protests of injustice and inequality, the following item, allegedly from The Screwtape Letters, is once more making the rounds on social media:

The claim is clear: caring about politics, trying to fix a “broken system,” and particularly participating in protests like No Kings are demonic distractions from Christian faith and spiritual growth.  However, this is NOT a quote from The Screwtape Letters, or indeed from anything else by C. S. Lewis.  Further, it makes claims with which Lewis himself would have surely disagreed.

To be sure, in The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape does advise Wormwood to get his client thinking obsessively about politics–whether conservative or liberal (“Patriotism or Pacifism”, in Lewis’ World War II English context) doesn’t matter:

Let him begin by treating Patriotism or Pacifism as a part of his religion.  Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part,  Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which religion becomes merely part of the “cause” (The Screwtape Letters, letter 7).

However, this does not mean that Lewis believed we should be concerned simply for the salvation of our own souls.  First, while Lewis would certainly agree that sin and salvation are personal, he would certainly not agree that either sin or salvation is private. Second, Lewis would certainly not agree either that concern for a “broken system” is misplaced, or that trying to fix what is wrong in our world is futile.

Remember that The Screwtape Letters was born in the Nazi Blitz!  Lewis was well aware of the dangers posed by systemic, political evil, and of the responsibility owed by citizens to work for the common good.  Our Christian faith does not call us to quietism–indeed, loving what God loves will engage us positively and passionately with what God is doing in the world.

If you believe that your involvement cannot make a difference in the world, please don’t think to justify your passivity and cynicism by appeal to Lewis–though, come to think of it, Screwtape and his ilk likely are involved.  And should we despair in the face of the powers that be, our Christian faith also reminds us that we, together with all the saints who have gone before us, are part of something larger than politics: the Church of Jesus Christ, “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners.”

AFTERWORD: October 31 is also my Dad’s 91st birthday, and October 3rd was my 69th.  So, happy birthday to US!

Sep
24
2025

Why the Rapture Will Not Happen Today

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I was surprised to learn yesterday that thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, of people had heard of a prediction unfamiliar to me–that the Rapture would occur September 23-24, 2025–and that many who heard this prediction believed it.

An article in the New York Times traced this prediction to a video posted by South African Christian Joshua Mhlakela:

In the video, he says that Jesus came to him in a dream in 2018 and told him, “On the 23rd and the 24th of September, 2025, I will come to take my church.”

The context, as Mr. Mhlakela understood it, was the 2026 FIFA World Cup. “He was telling me that by June 2026, the world is gearing up toward the World Cup,” he said, but because chaos would descend after the Rapture, “there will be no World Cup in 2026.”

According to Google Trends, searches for “rapture” and “the rapture Tuesday” started to climb around Sept. 20.  The hashtag #rapturenow leads to over 311,000 videos.

Sadly there is nothing new about this kind of end-time hype.  The Rapture did not occur yesterday, obviously, and although this day is not yet over, I am writing confidently to predict that it will not happen today, either.  In fact, the Rapture will not happen at all.

How can I say that?  And why do I say it so forcefully?  A bit of personal history, friends.  Over fifty years ago, when I was fifteen, I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit at a prayer meeting in my family’s living room.  I have no doubt about the reality of that experience, or of its profound effect on my life.  Although I had grown up in the church, I now felt an increased zeal for the Lord.  I always wore (as in this picture) a cross around my neck.  I carried my Bible–for which I had a renewed and passionate hunger–with me everywhere, and was always careful that it was on top of my pile of schoolbooks.  I told everyone about Jesus: in study hall, in the lunch line, on the school bus–whether they wanted to hear or not.  I covered my notebook with Christian slogans: “One Way,” “PTL” (Praise the Lord), and of course, “In case of Rapture, this notebook will be abandoned.”

You see, one of the cornerstones of my young, passionate faith was the certainty that I would one day, very soon, be taken up out of the world in the Rapture.  I never expected that I would ever grow up and marry, that I would ever have children, or a career.  I knew–I knew–that the world was going to end very soon.  Curiously, for all my love for Scripture and my passionate study of God’s Word, I never realized that the Rapture was not in the Bible.

If you search any Bible concordance for the term “Rapture,” you will not find it (for a little about where the notion of the Rapture originated, see this blog). Not only do neither Matthew 24:40-41 nor 1 Thessalonians 4:13, the two passages commonly alleged to describe the Rapture, use that term, but neither describes a miraculous end-time escape from the world.

Matthew 24:40-41 reads,

At that time there will be two men in the field. One will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding at the mill. One will be taken and the other left. 

For many readers, the one “taken” is Raptured, taken up to glory. The one left is, as Timothy LaHaye’s series title has it, “Left Behind,” to suffer the torments and tortures of Tribulation.  But I am not at all persuaded that this is the best reading of that verse.

Matthew 24 is Matthew’s version of the Synoptic apocalypse: a description of the end of time (compare Mark 13 and Luke 21) that offers warnings of coming persecution and trial, not instruction on how to escape them.  Indeed, Jesus tells his followers, “They will arrest you, abuse you, and they will kill you. All nations will hate you on account of my name” (Matt 24:9).  Jesus compares those days to “the time of Noah,” when devastation came suddenly upon a people unprepared:

In those days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark. They didn’t know what was happening until the flood came and swept them all away (Matt 24:37-39).

Likely, then, the “one taken” is not saved, but lost: perhaps metaphorically taken by death or disaster, or perhaps quite literally taken–arrested by the Roman authorities, and hauled away to prison or forced labor.

Image result for christ pantocrator

Matthew 24 is not after all about us “going up,”  but about Jesus “coming down”!  The return of Jesus, the Human One (literally “Son of Man”), will be unexpected, and unpredictable:  “But nobody knows when that day or hour will come, not the heavenly angels and not the Son. Only the Father knows” (Matt 24:36; emphasis mine).  Jesus himself does not know when this will be!  He compares himself to a thief:

But you understand that if the head of the house knew at what time the thief would come, he would keep alert and wouldn’t allow the thief to break into his house.  Therefore, you also should be prepared, because the Human One will come at a time you don’t know (Matt 24:43-44).

The point, then, is to be ready–whenever his coming might be–so that we will not be taken unawares.

Apostle Paul, c.1410 - Andrei Rublev - WikiArt.org

1 Thessalonians, Paul’s first letter, is the oldest book  in the New Testament (dating to around 50 CE).  Paul writes to offer reassurance to a struggling church: the first he had established in Europe (see Acts 17:1-10).

The Christians of Thessalonica were concerned because some of their members had died: perhaps from persecution, but perhaps too from illness or old age (1 Thes 4:13-14).  Believing, as Paul had taught them, that Christ’s second coming was imminent, they feared that those faithful dead would have no share in Christ’s kingdom.  Paul, however, assured them that, far from being left behind, those believers who had died would have the inside track in the world to come:

What we are saying is a message from the Lord: we who are alive and still around at the Lord’s coming definitely won’t go ahead of those who have died.  This is because the Lord himself will come down from heaven with the signal of a shout by the head angel and a blast on God’s trumpet. First, those who are dead in Christ will rise.  Then, we who are living and still around will be taken up together with them in the clouds to meet with the Lord in the air. That way we will always be with the Lord.  So encourage each other with these words (1 Thes 4:15-18)

Paul does not describe an escape from this world prior to Christ’s return. Rather, “the Lord himself will come down from heaven with the signal of a shout by the head angel and a blast on God’s trumpet,” and as he does so, both the resurrected dead and also “we who are living and still around” (note the present tense; Paul fully expected the end to come in his own lifetime) rise to meet him in the air.  Jesus is not taking the church out: he is descending to the earth, to rule.  Paul describes not an escape plan, but a welcome back party!

 

There is not going to be any “Rapture,” today, or ever.  So, what difference does this make?  If we believe that we are going to be “Raptured out” of this world, we will be far more concerned with being certain that our ticket is punched, and that we don’t miss our flight, than we will be with trying to solve this world’s problems.  After all, if this world is doomed anyway, why should its problems matter to us?  What motivation do we have to care for the world, or for its people?

 

The damage done by this unbiblical ideology is far reaching. It has made us ignore the plain teaching of Scripture in favor of a fantasy.  Belief in the Rapture has caused us to forsake our God-given responsibility to care for the earth (Genesis 1:26-28) because we are leaving this world anyway.  So called “Bible prophecy”  has caused us to reject Palestinian cries for justice, despite the Bible’s admonitions (Exod 22:21-24; Lev 19:33-34; Deut 10:18-19), because Israel must be re-established out to its ancient borders so that Jesus can come back.  Although the Bible plainly states that Christ’s church is called to be one (John 17:20-23), this manufactured future history has made us suspicious of ecumenism, because the One World Church will be the tool of the Antichrist.

But what if salvation is not about escape from this world, but about God’s transformation of this world?  Then, we will seek to be a part of what God is doing, here and now, to bring in God’s kingdom.  We will want to be found at our Lord’s coming doing those things that Jesus did among us: feeding people, healing people, freeing people, proclaiming the good news of God’s salvation.

 

Sep
23
2025

The Days of Awe

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It is now officially Fall: Monday September 22 was the autumnal equinox.  Today, September 23, is Rosh Hashanah: the beginning of the High Holy Days and the Jewish New Year.  Starting the new year in the fall has always felt right to me.  For most of my life I was in school, whether as a student or as a teacher, so even now, four years after my retirement, September feels more like the beginning of things than icy January ever did!

But as Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin writes, the proper Jewish greeting for this season is not “Happy New Year.”

  • You can say shanah tovah, “a good year.”
  • Some would say: l’shanah tovah.
  • You can say l’shanah tovah tikateivu, “may you be inscribed for a good year.”
  • You can say: shanah tova u’metukah, “a good, sweet year.”
  • You can say, in the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and on Yom Kippur itself and beyond, l’shanah tovah tikateivu v’techateimu, “may you be written and sealed for a good year.”
  • You can say gmar chatimah tovah, “may you be finished and sealed for a good year.”
  • You can say, for the rest of today and tomorrow, heading into and on Yom Kippur, tzom kal, “an easy (and/or meaningful) fast.”

Rabbi Salkin explains, “[O]n the Jewish New Year, there is no mention of ‘happy.’  It’s about goodness. It’s about shanah tovah — a good year.”

Tovah, goodness, is not always the same thing as happy. Tovah, goodness, is mostly about what is meaningful. There is a fundamental difference between wishing that someone have a year of happiness, and the wish that they find meaning.

May be a doodle of text that says 'On Rosh Hashanah, it is written... On Yom Kippur, ít itis is sealed. To those I have wronged, I ask forgiveness. To those I have helped, I wish I did more. To those I neglected, I ask for understanding. To those who have helped Te, I sincerely thank you. -mOiOz'

The ten Days of Awe following Rosh Hashanah culminate in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  Tradition holds that as the new year begins, God writes for each person what this next year will bring.  However, it is only after Yom Kippur that those plans are sealed.  Therefore, this is a time of reflection on the year past, and resolution that in the year to come one will be better.  So in modern  Judaism, Yom Kippur is a fast day–a day to reflect upon the year past, to repent before God, and to resolve to live faithfully in the year to come.

The day and its significance as they developed in Jewish life and practice are quite different from the ancient rite for Yom Kippur described in Leviticus 16. The centerpiece of that ancient ritual involved two goats.  One was selected by lot as the goat to be offered as a khattat: traditionally translated “sin offering” (see the KJV, NIV, ESV, NKJV, and NASB).

In an interview in the Christian Century, when asked about the most controversial changes made in the NRSVue, Joseph Crockett, the (now retired) CEO of the NCC’s publishing house Friendship Press, and John Kutsko, then executive director of SBL, noted the decision to render the Hebrew khattat as “purification offering” rather than “sin offering.”  This was not, they said, an attempt to take “sin” out of the Bible (Kutsko: “I can assure your  readers that there is still a lot of sin in the Bible.” Crockett: “And it doesn’t stop with the Bible!”), but rather a reflection of the best scholarship on the meaning and use of this particular ancient Israelite ritual.  As Jacob Milgrom’s footnotes to Leviticus in the HarperCollins NRSV Study Bible observe, the khattat was meant to cleanse the sanctuary, undoing the damage done to it by Israel’s ritual uncleanness.  Like the NRSVue, the CEB reads “purification offering;”  note too that the NASB has “purification offering” as a footnote.

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The second goat was for Azazel.  H0nestly, we have no idea what “Azazel” means!  The goat for Azazel was driven out into the wilderness, symbolically carrying away the defilement of the people, so perhaps Azazel was a monster or demon believed to live in waste places; or perhaps Azazel is simply an old word for “wilderness.”  The KJV read “scapegoat,” which has entered our language as a person or group blamed for wrongs done by others.

The other goat, selected by lot as belonging to the LORD, was sacrificed as a khattat.  Usually the blood of the khattat was sprinkled outside the inner room of the shrine, called the Most Holy Place, where God was believed to be specially present, or placed on the golden altar of incense outside that chamber.  But on Yom Kippur, the blood was taken by the high priest into the Most Holy Place itself, which held a golden box called the Ark (the Hebrew word for the Ark, ‘aron, simply means “box,” or “chest”).

File:Benjamin West - Joshua passing the River Jordan with the Ark of the Covenant - Google Art Project.jpgThe lid of the Ark was a slab of gold, molded in the image of two cherubim: terrible semi-divine heavenly beings like winged sphinxes.  The cherubim‘s inner wings overlapped to form a throne: the divine title “the LORD, who is enthroned on the cherubim” (for example, 1 Sam 4:4; Ps 80:1) recalls this connection.  On Yom Kippur, the blood from the people’s purification offerings was applied to the lid of the Ark (kapporet in Hebrew; translated as “mercy seat” in the KJV and the NRSV, but best rendered, as the CEB and NRSVue have it, simply as “cover” or “lid”).

The Ark served as the LORD’s footstool, making this golden box the intersection of divine and human worlds.  In the days of Israel’s wilderness wandering, Moses and Aaron encountered the LORD at the Ark (for example, Exod 25:22).  This meant that, once a year, the blood of the purification offering was brought to the very feet of God.  In ancient Israel, the Day of Atonement was the day when all lingering defilement from the previous year, either accidental or deliberate, was expunged, making full access to and communion with God possible in the new year.

For Christians, the Atonement is a fundamental doctrine, linked mysteriously to the cross.  One way to unpack that mystery is to connect Calvary and Yom Kippur, as Paul did in Romans 3:23-25 (NRSVue):

since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.

Many Christians accordingly understand the cross, and the Atonement, to mean that Jesus took our place: as our scapegoat and sin offering, he innocently bore our just punishment, and so satisfied God’s justice and assuaged God’s wrath (an interpretation  called “Penal Substitution,” developed in particular by Anselm of Canterbury and the Reformer John Calvin).

As a young Christian, this was the only way of understanding the cross I knew: that Jesus had taken on himself God’s wrath, and the deserved punishment for my sin, so that I could be forgiven.  I grew up singing “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood” and “Jesus Paid It All,”  although the language of Keith Getty and Stuart Townend’s contemporary  hymn “In Christ Alone” may be more familiar today:

In Christ alone, Who took on flesh,
Fullness of God in helpless babe!
This gift of love and righteousness,
Scorned by the ones He came to save.
Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied;
For ev’ry sin on Him was laid—
Here in the death of Christ I live.

Much as I love this hymn, I cannot sing that bold-faced line anymore.  Like many believers, I no longer find this interpretation of the Atonement acceptable.  What does it say about God, if God’s wrath can only be assuaged by blood, even the blood of his innocent Son?   Further, focusing solely on the death of Jesus makes his life, and his teaching, irrelevant.

This certainly does not mean that I no longer believe in the Atonement!  But I am persuaded that both the origins of our English word “atonement” and the biblical texts relating to Yom Kippur point us in another direction.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates our word “atonement” to the early 16th century, when it was coined out of  the phrase “at one”–influenced by the Latin adunamentum (“unity”), and an older word, “onement” (from an obsolete verb form, “to one,” meaning “to unite”). Sadly, as modern English dictionaries make clear, “to atone” has come to mean “to make amends, restitution, or reparation.”  But the then freshly-minted word was used instead to talk about reconciliation, specifically, the reconciliation, the “at-one-ment,” of God and humanity accomplished by Christ.

When the King James Version of the Bible was translated in 1611, the relatively new expression “make atonement” was used to translate the Hebrew verb kipper, particularly in connection with Yom Kippur.  This Hebrew term originally meant “cover,” but kipper came to be used specifically for cleansing and purification–not, note, for punishment or payment.  Certainly, nothing in Leviticus 16 suggests this: the goat for Azazel, or “scapegoat,” was not killed, and wasn’t called a sacrifice.

In Romans 3:25, the Greek word translated “sacrifice of atonement” in the NRSV (the KJV has “propitiation”) is hilasterion.  But in the Greek translation of Jewish Scripture, the Septuagint, hilasterion refers neither to the sin offering nor the scapegoat, but to the lid of the Ark: the kapporet.

The CEB translation of hilasterion in Rom 3:25 (see also the footnote in the NRSVue) as “place of sacrifice” is a little better, though still misleading.  Paul’s point appears to be that the cross where Jesus’ blood was spilled has become the kapporet: the point where divine and human worlds intersect, and so the place where reconciliation–atonement–happens.  The Common English Bible, which translates Yom Kippur as “Day of Reconciliation,” nicely captures the original meanings of both the English word “atonement” and the Hebrew rite of Yom Kippur.

In  Philippians 2:1-13, Paul quotes a hymn of the earliest church:

Though he was in the form of God,
        he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit.
But he emptied himself
        by taking the form of a slave
        and by becoming like human beings.
When he found himself in the form of a human,
         he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death,
        even death on a cross.
 Therefore, God highly honored him
        and gave him a name above all names,
    so that at the name of Jesus everyone
        in heaven, on earth, and under the earth might bow
        and every tongue confess
            that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

In this hymn, Jesus is neither a scapegoat nor a sin offering.  He is not our replacement, but our representative.  Being at once God and Human, he overcomes in his own Person the gap between humanity and divinity.  But of course, being fully and truly human means being finite: like us, Jesus was born, lived, learned, grew, suffered, and died.  But the specific death Jesus died–that he indeed chose to die–placed him with the shamed and outcast; the scorned and unjustly persecuted. As Immanuel, God with us (Matt 1:22-23), Jesus proves God’s presence with us even in the midst of pain, abandonment, and death itself.

Elsewhere the apostle Paul puts it this way:

If we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son while we were still enemies, now that we have been reconciled, how much more certain is it that we will be saved by his life? And not only that: we even take pride in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, the one through whom we now have a restored relationship with God (Romans 5:6-11).

In Christ’s death, the gap between humanity and divinity is bridged: we are reconciled (Greek katalasso) to God.  In Christ’s resurrection, we are given the hope and the promise of our own deliverance from death.  By entering into our life, and even into our death, Jesus draws God near to us, and us near to God.  He brings God’s divinity down to where we are, and lifts our humanity up to where God is.

Regarding the Atonement (and that Getty and Townend hymn!) New Testament scholar N. T. Wright observes,

 We must of course acknowledge that many, alas, have offered caricatures of the biblical theology of the cross. It is all too possible to take elements from the biblical witness and present them within a controlling narrative gleaned from somewhere else, like a child doing a follow-the-dots puzzle without paying attention to the numbers and producing a dog instead of a rabbit. This is what happens when people present over-simple stories, as the mediaeval church often did, followed by many since, with an angry God and a loving Jesus, with a God who demands blood and doesn’t much mind whose it is as long as it’s innocent. You’d have thought people would notice that this flies in the face of John’s and Paul’s deep-rooted theology of the love of the triune God: not ‘God was so angry with the world that he gave us his son’ but ‘God so loved the world that he gave us his son’. That’s why, when I sing that interesting recent song and we come to the line, ‘And on the cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied’, I believe it’s more deeply true to sing ‘the love of God was satisfied’, and I commend that alteration to those of you who sing that song, which is in other respects one of the very few really solid recent additions to our repertoire.

L’shanah tovah, friends.  A good, and meaningful, year to you and yours, in which you experience daily the power and presence of God.

Sep
04
2025

“We Love Because God First Loved Us”

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My current research on Proverbs has taken me into a consideration of wisdom traditions in other cultures, and so, to The Analects of Confucius from the sixth century BCE (I am working with the translation of Simon Leys [New York: W. W. Norton, 1997]).  In my reading, I was brought up short by Analect 15:24:

Zigong asked, “Is there a single word that could guide one’s entire life?”  The Master said, “Should it not be reciprocity?  What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.”

I immediately was reminded of the saying of Rabbi Hillel,

That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study (b. Shabbat 31a).
and of course, of the teaching of Rabbi Jesus:
Therefore, you should treat people in the same way that you want people to treat you; this is the Law and the Prophets (Matt 7:12).
When I posted this marvelous consensus online, Facebook friend Erica Rushing responded simply, “1 John 4:19.”  In the Common English Bible, this verse reads (as the title of today’s blog records)
We love because God first loved us.
Reading those words, I realized (as sometimes happens to me), that I remembered that passage differently.  Sure enough, the King James Version  has,
We love him, because he first loved us.
The Bible of my zealous teen years, the Living Bible paraphrase, similarly reads,
So you see, our love for him comes as a result of his loving us first.
On the other hand, not only the CEB, but both the “liberal” NRSVue and the “conservative” Evangelical NIV and ESV lack that “him.”  Eugene Petersen’s popular paraphrase The Message has
We, though, are going to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first.

Why the difference?  A warning–answering that question takes us into the weeds of text criticism.  Friends, we do not have the single, pristine, “original” text of ANY biblical book, New Testament or Old.  For every passage of Scripture, we have multiple witnesses, among which we must choose.

Going to the Greek, I found that the CEB, NRSVue, NIV, ESV, and The Message were faithfully following the text in my critical edition of the Greek New Testament–which, however, notes that some old texts do provide an object for the verb “love”: either “him” (like the KJV) or “God.”  In fact, the reading “him” is found in the majority of our old manuscripts, Byzantine texts collectively called (after their characteristic style of handwriting) the minuscules.  Its prevalence prompted Erasmus to include this reading in his Textus Receptus: an influential source for the KJV translators.

Biblische Ausbildung: Bruce Metzger, 1914-2007

However, the majority text is not necessarily the best text, since the most commonly available texts all come from the same tradition.  As Bruce Metzger notes in his A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, the best evidence from a range of textual witnesses across traditions supports reading simply ‘agapomen (“we love”) without a specific object.  Metzger writes, “Feeling the need of an accusative object after the verb. . . some copyists added ton Theon [“God”] . . . and others auton [“him”].

The best concise statement I know of why text criticism matters comes from Julia O’Brien: “Knowing what words are in the text is often as complex as understanding what those words mean” (The Oxford Handbook of the Minor Prophets, ed. Julia M. O’Brien [Oxford: University Press, 2021], xxii).  Certainly, for this passage, “what words are in the text,” the choice we make of which traditional reading to follow, makes a world of difference.

The majority reading followed by the KJV, the Living Bible, and some other translations yields a more spiritual reading–but also, let’s face it, a pretty tepid one.  I respond to God’s love with piety, by loving God back.  It is all about my internal life: what happens in my own heart.

But if what is arguably the best reading is followed, then this passage is rather about how we live, and the choices we make, in the world.  As Eugene Petersen said in his paraphrase, “First we were loved, now we love.”  We respond to God’s love for us by loving–without discrimination or distinction.

As Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus all recognized, respect for the other–any other–is fundamental to living rightly in the world.  And as the Elder realizes in 1 John, we are able so to act because of the transforming love of God, concretely demonstrated and powerfully communicated by Jesus Christ.  How do we live?  We love.  Why do we do so?  Indeed, how can we do so?  Because we have ourselves been loved by God, who knows us inside and out, we can–indeed we must–extend that grace to others.

Wide shot of the Annunciation Catholic Church exterior. Many flower bouquets are placed in front of a bronze statue.

To bring this home, friends: just last week in Minneapolis, a shooter fired through the windows of Annunciation Catholic School, killing two children and wounding 18 more, as well as three adults.  In response to the now rote “thoughts and prayers” response to yet another tragic school shooting, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called for action on gun violence: “Of course we’re standing up with love.  Of course we’re standing up with thoughts and prayers.  But thoughts and prayers are not gonna cut it.”  Former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki posted on X

Prayer is not freaking enough. Prayer does not end school shootings. Prayers do not make parents feel safe sending their kids to school.  Prayer does not bring these kids back. Enough with the thoughts and prayers.
Perhaps predictably, Mr. Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded as though Mayor Frey and Ms. Psaki were attacking prayer itself:
Yes I saw the comments of my predecessor Ms. Psaki and, um, frankly I think they’re incredibly insensitive and disrespectful to the tens of millions of Americans of faith across this country who believe in the power of prayer, uh, who believe that prayer works and who believe that in a time of mourning like this when beautiful young children were killed while praying in a church, it’s utterly disrespectful, um, to deride, um, the power of prayer in this country.
So–how are believers to respond to violence in the world?  Are pious “thoughts and prayers” enough?  Are they an adequate response to and reflection of the love of God?  Is our faith just a matter of private piety?  Or are we called to do something in the world, to show God’s love by working for a more just and peaceful world, in which school children are not threatened by gun violence, and parents do not live in constant fear for their safety?  As 1 John 4:19 calls us to do, friends, let us love, “because God first loved us.”