Category Archives: Blog Post

Mar
11
2013

Why “The Bible Guy”?

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Growing up, the only thing I ever wanted to be was a preacher.  My studies in college and seminary, and my experiences as an associate and a student pastor, only confirmed my sense of call.  When I graduated from seminary, my bishop appointed me to serve two country churches in West Virginia—and I was happy.  Even with its frequent frustrations, parish ministry was a joy.

My first inkling that God might be leading me in a hitherto unsuspected direction came a year or two into my ministry, when I was visiting one of my elderly shut-ins.  This day, her brother was with her.  He had heard about me from his sister, and wanted to meet me—in order, I soon learned, to confirm his suspicions.  Though he had never set foot in the churches I served or heard me preach, he knew that I was a heretic because 1) I was a United Methodist, 2) I wore a clerical collar, and (I strongly suspect), 3) because I had a beard!  Almost immediately, he began to quiz me.  “What does the Bible say about baptism?”  When I started to answer that the Bible says a lot of things about baptism, he interrupted me: “No.  Acts 2:38:  ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.’”  And so it went.  For every question, a memorized proof text was the right answer; my fumbling attempts to address other texts, to express a range of biblical answers, were brushed aside.  All the while, I kept thinking, “Why can’t I talk to this man?  We both care for his elderly sister.  We both love the Lord.  We both love the Bible.  Why can’t we communicate?”

After this encounter, my wife Wendy and I prayed long and hard about where God was leading us.  We realized that I needed to go back to school, to pursue deeper study into the Bible and how to communicate its message more effectively.  When my doctoral degree in Hebrew Bible was completed, a friend invited me to interview at a small, church-related college in South Carolina, where I discovered a new passion: I love to teach!  For the next seventeen years of my life, I found myself a college professor, teaching Bible and religion to undergraduates first in South Carolina, later in Virginia—something I had never thought about doing, but now found to be God’s new direction for my ministry.

While I was teaching in Virginia, a colleague one day emailed me a question about the Bible, prefacing it with “Since you are the Bible guy. . .”.   Immediately I thought, “That is exactly who I am.  I love the Bible: I love studying it, I love teaching it, and most of all, I love the God revealed in its pages.  I am a Bible guy.”  Now, eight years into a new career as a seminary professor, helping women and men prepare for the pursuit of God’s call on their lives, I am even more persuaded that this is my calling.  I am a Bible guy!

In this blog, I want to share the Bible I love with you, and invite you to join me as fellow Bible guys. As time goes on, I hope that we will engage in conversation across these pages.  Perhaps I can answer some of your questions; certainly, I will pose many of my own. John Wesley, founder of Methodist Christianity, referred to himself as homo unius libri: that is, “a man of one book.”  I pray we will find ways to speak across our differences, united by our love and respect for Scripture—that we might become, following Wesley’s example, a people of one Book.

 

Feb
21
2013

What Color Is Lent?

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winterThis has, thankfully, been a mild winter in Pittsburgh (the picture above comes from 2010).  Still, this year as every year, Lent began while winter still held sway.  Indeed, even now, with February at long last over and done (how strange that, according to the calendar, February is the shortest month of the year!), the official first day of spring, March 20, seems a long way off.

All of which may seem appropriate.  Lent certainly seems a wintry season of the church year: dark, cold, grim, unforgiving.  The liturgical color for Lent is purple—an appropriately dark and lugubrious shade.  But we are likely to think of Lent even more in winter shades: the penitential black of clerical garb, the gray of Ash Wednesday’s daubs on hands or foreheads, the off-white of sackcloth.

Yet, curiously, the term “Lent” has nothing to do with winter, or darkness, or fasting, or penitence.  Etymologically, “Lent” derives from the Middle English lenten and the Old English lencten, and is related to the Old High German lenzin, all of which mean “Spring”!

ground-tuell

Likely we will have difficulty wrapping our heads around this concept.  Lent as springtime?  Our springtime associations wrap about Easter (a name which, by the way, derives from the Saxon goddess of fertility and the dawn!)—the feast of Christ’s resurrection, acclaimed by John of Damascus (6th century) as “the Spring of souls.”  Even in the secular world, Easter is celebrated with signs and symbols of newness and life: eggs, brightly dyed in the shades of spring flowers; bunnies (famous for their fecundity!); and new clothes.

By contrast, these forty days of preparation are appropriately penitential, marked by self-examination, prayer and fasting. Likely, we would prefer to skip the preparation and jump directly into the celebration!  But the Lenten disciplines are not optional.  Mark reminds us that, after Jesus’ baptism, “the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness” (Mark 1:12).  Jesus could not avoid this time of trial, and neither can we.  But this Lenten season need not be grim and colorless.  Lent is a green season—a time of growth.  Lent provides the opportunity for us to dig down deeper in our tradition, to break up the fallow ground of our cold hearts so that the Water of Life may seep down into the center of who are.  Lent is the time for the Spirit to prune away our dead branches so that we may bear fruit.  It is then a season of new life—a springtime for our souls!

God grant you, sisters and brothers, a green, growing, God-filled Lent!

By The Rev. Dr. Steven Tuell, James A. Kelso Associate Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.