I recently read a wonderful interview in The New Yorker with Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, the director of the Vatican Observatory, who is (as the article’s title reveals) often introduced as the Pope’s astronomer.  I was so taken with the interview that I have been chasing down his books; right now I am reading God’s Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008) and the delightfully named Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? . . . and Other Questions from the Astronomer’s In-box at the Vatican Observatory (New York: Random House, 2014)–written as a dialogue between Brother Guy and his fellow Jesuit, historian and philosopher of science Paul Mueller.

As a planetary astronomer, Brother Guy’s specific scientific interest and admittedly wonky area of research involves meteors: their ages, origins, composition, and (the area to which he has made his most particular contribution) their density and porosity.

However, Brother Guy was also actively involved in the recent decision by the International Astronomical Union to designate Pluto as a dwarf planet–one of a vast swarm of transneptunian objects–rather than a planet like Earth.  That designation has nothing to do with the facts about Pluto, of course; Pluto has not been “demoted.”  Rather, it has to do with how astronomers can most naturally talk about this distant body, and relate its study to like bodies:

You know, when it was just another planet, Pluto was always an ugly duckling.  It was the wrong size and in the wrong kind of orbit.  Every time I would teach a class giving an overview of the solar system, I would have to always add, “except Pluto” . . .

But now that Pluto has been defined as a “dwarf”–a fascinating and important category of solar-system objects that until recently we never knew existed–it’s no longer an ugly duckling.  It’s one of a whole family, among dozens of similar objects.  And, indeed, it has become the new standard against which all the other dwarf planets are defined (Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial, p. 106).

In the New Yorker interview, Brother Guy expresses a frank puzzlement as to why anyone would think that the science he does and the faith he practices are somehow at odds:

If people think you have to be a weird kind of scientist to be religious, or a weird kind of religious to be a scientist, then we’ve missed the point. The point is that our faith—our ordinary faith—fits perfectly with our ordinary, but wonderful, delightful science.

In America, sadly, the perception that science is at odds with faith–and further, that we must choose between the two–is very much alive and well.  But that animosity is not actually that old; it traces back little more than a century: specifically to the 1920’s, the Scopes Trial, and the emergence of Fundamentalism.

The Fundamentalist movement began as a response to modernity–and particularly, to the threat that modernity was believed to pose to the foundations of a moral society.  Brother Guy recognizes that that fear was not without warrant:

In the nineteenth century, social Darwinists used the brand-new theory of evolution to justify their greedy, rapacious version of capitalism.  The Nazis used the same theory to justify eugenics and other horrors, convinced as they were of their own racial superiority. . . .  The abuse of the theory of evolution by pseudo-scientists has given nonscientists a very understandable reason to distrust what started out as a perfectly innocent and quite valid observation of nature (God’s Mechanics, p. 34).

However, the founders of Fundamentalism believed that only by recovering the “fundamentals” of Christianity could the church meet that perceived threat.  The “sure foundation” of the true church was an inerrant and infallible Bible, and if what that Bible said differed from what science had to say about anything–from the origins of species to gender and human sexuality–then the person of faith must believe what the Bible says, and reject science.

Concerns about the reading and interpretation of Scripture were a major justification for the pastors and congregations who have left the United Methodist Church (where I continue to worship and serve).  A no longer available FAQ on the website of the Wesleyan Covenant Association, one of the organizing groups behind the present Global Methodist Church, read:

Pastors and congregations have expressed an interest in creating a “place” where traditional, orthodox UM churches can support and resource each other – both for ministry to our changing culture and for facing the challenges presented by a denomination that is unclear about its commitment to Scripture.

But I do not believe that I or other United Methodist Christians like me are at all “unclear about [our] commitment to Scripture”!  Indeed, I am absolutely clear about my commitment to Scripture.  I believe that God has called me to the study and teaching of the Bible–that is why I am, after all, a Bible Guy! However, at least some in the GMC have a very different idea than I do about what the Bible says, and means.  As Brother Guy notes,

Scripture is written in many different genres.  There are historical accounts, mythic stories, morality tales, poetry, and more.  At least from the perspective of the Catholic faith and mainline Protestantism, it’s a mistake to try to read every line of Scripture as if it were intended by its author to be understood as a literal account of historical events that actually happened.  That’s just not how many parts of Scripture were meant to be read (Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial, pp. 177-78).

Many evangelical Christians will be surprised to learn that C. S. Lewis also did not hold to a fundamentalist view of Scripture.  In a letter to a Mrs. Johnson, on November 8th, 1952, C. S. Lewis wrote:

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our ancestors too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and read without attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.

Lewis, whose love for Nordic mythology first awakened him to the reality of the Spirit, had no difficulty using “myth” to describe important elements in Scripture.  Unfortunately, in popular parlance, a “myth” is a lie: something at odds with the facts. Little wonder that folk bridle when Bible scholars refer specifically to the accounts of beginnings in Scripture as “creation myths.”

But if, as Joseph Campbell wrote, “the first function of mythology” is “to evoke in the individual a sense of grateful, affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence” (Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation [Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004], 6), then myths are of course true. Our problem comes from the post-Enlightenment view in the West that “truth” and “fact” are one and the same.

A little reflection reveals the poverty of that assertion. Consider what matters most to you—your faith, your friendships, those you love, what you find beautiful, what brings you joy.   Now, ask how you might go about establishing these claims as facts. How would you prove them, empirically: what evidence could you marshal? What tests could you use?

I love my wife. But how would I establish that, empirically? I could analyze my actions toward Wendy, but could those same actions not be performed if I were practicing a deception, and only pretending that I loved her? If I were a chemist or biologist, I could talk about glands and hormones and chemical reactions in my brain. If I were a sociologist or anthropologist, I might compare our marriage with others statistically, and determine the likelihood of our relationship enduring; or examine courtship rituals in Western cultures. None of this, however, has anything to do with what I mean when I tell Wendy that I love her, or how I feel when she says that she loves me.

Certainly we want to affirm as truth much that we cannot demonstrate as fact. To put this more precisely, we realize that what we can demonstrate as fact does not adequately express truth: as if love were reducible to bioelectrical impulses in the brain or hormones or social convention. Such oversimplifications fail to comprehend the tremendously complex world of human life and experience, wherein the whole cannot be reduced to the mere sum of its parts.

Yet, curiously, avid creationist Kenneth Ham and militant atheist Richard Dawkins share that reductionist worldview. On his website “Answers in Genesis,” Dr. Ham writes:

If Christians doubt what at first appears [sic] to be insignificant details of Scripture, then others may begin to look at the whole Bible differently, eventually doubting the central tenets of the Christian faith, namely the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus the historicity of Scripture is quite important.    

. . . Ultimately, the controversy about the age of the earth is a controversy about the authority of Scripture. If millions of years really happened, then the Bible is false and cannot speak with authority on any issue, even the Gospel.

For his part, in his book The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Dr. Dawkins writes:

Of course, irritated theologians will protest that we don’t take the book of Genesis literally anymore. But that is my whole point! We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories (p. 238).

The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book. . . . When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn’t happen with holy books (p. 282).

As Brother Guy observes,

Religious fundamentalists insist that every line of Scripture must be literally true, and that we should refuse to accept anything science says that is at odds with the literal sense of Scripture.  Scientific fundamentalists also insist that the Bible be interpreted literally; however, from this they conclude that the Bible should be rejected, since portions of it, when interpreted literally, are at odds with modern science (Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial, p. 178).

To say that the Bible is true, according to both Ham and Dawkins, must mean that it is factual.  A close reading of the Bible, however, demonstrates from its very beginning that this assumption is wrong-headed.  When we read Genesis 1 and 2 closely and carefully, it becomes evident that we really are looking not at one story of creation, but at two.  Since both cannot be “factual,” we must either choose one and reject the other, or find some way to collapse the two into a single account.

The NIV attempts to resolve this perceived conflict grammatically. In this translation, Genesis 2:8 reads, “Now the LORD God had planted [Hebrew wayyitta‘] a garden in the east, in Eden” (emphasis mine). Rather than rendering the verb as a simple past tense, the NIV has a past perfect, implying that the plants had been made before the human was formed (as Gen 1:11-13 describes), even though Genesis 2:5 says that when the Human was formed, “no plant of the field was yet in the earth for there was no one to till the ground.”  Similarly, in Genesis 2:19, the NIV reads, “Now the LORD God had formed [Hebrew wayyitser] out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky”–implying that these creatures had been created before the Human, as Gen 1:20-25 describes.

This translation is possible for the Hebrew verb form used in Gen 2:8 and 19 (the so-called “wayyiqtol”), but the verbs in these verses are typical of Hebrew narrative style, and no different than the forms that surround them (including the verb for the creation of ’adam in Gen 2:7, where the NIV uses a simple past tense). There is no grammatical warrant for rendering these two verses in a different tense. Indeed, the translation of the NIV loses the narrative logic of the story, where the LORD God sets out to solve the problem posed by human loneliness (Gen 2:18). Collapsing the two stories into one does not solve our problems; it only creates different ones.

If, however, we let go of our insistence that these accounts are factual, scientific descriptions of the world’s origins, then we can embrace the implications of both traditions, while still permitting each its autonomy.

For example: in Gen 1:1—2:4a, God calls everything into being, including time and space (see Gen 1:1-8). To use the theological language of Karl Barth, God is “‘wholly other’ breaking in upon us ‘perpendicularly from above’”; there is an “‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between God and man” (The Humanity of God, trans. John Newton Thomas [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960], 42)—that is, God is transcendent.

But in Gen 2:4b-25, the LORD formed (yatsar) ’adam “from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen 2:7, NRSVue); a very intimate, personal, indeed human-like view of the Divine. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, that we are shaped by the LORD’s hands “expresses. . . the bodily nearness of the Creator to the creature, that it is really he who makes me—man—with his own hands; his concern, his thought for me, his design for me, his nearness to me” (Creation and Temptation, trans. John C. Fletcher [London: SCM Press, 1966], 45). In theological shorthand, God is immanent.

Clearly, believers want and need to affirm both: God is transcendent and God is immanent. If all we had was the first account of creation, we could well think of God as distant, abstract, and uninvolved. If all we had was the narrative in Gen 2, we could well lose the wonder, majesty, and mystery of the Divine. But Genesis 1 and 2 together present God as transcendent and immanent. These two views of God and the world need not be seen as in conflict, either with one one another or with science.  As Brother Guy affirms, “[T]here is a sublime beauty to how the universe works that we can only begin to touch. That, to me, is where I see the presence of God.”

FOREWORD:  I am reposting this blog from 2019 concerning Amos’ alleged “plumb line”: a common, and I am persuaded, mistaken reading of Amos 7:7-17.  What the LORD is placing in the midst of the people is not a plumb line, but the prophet–just a God has placed us.  May we too with holy boldness stand and speak, empowered by the God of justice, on behalf of the poor and oppressed.

The Hebrew Bible text for Sunday in the Revised Common Lectionary is Amos 7:7-17, which begins with a vision report:

This is what the Lord showed me: The Lord was standing by a wall, with a plumb line in his hand.  The Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?”

“A plumb line,” I said.
Then the Lord said,
“See, I am setting a plumb line
    in the middle of my people Israel.
        I will never again forgive them.
The shrines of Isaac will be made desolate,
            and the holy places of Israel will be laid waste,
            and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword” (Amos 7:7-9).

This famous prophetic image is beautifully reflected in a prayer for the day from the Lectionary’s editors:

Steadfast God, your prophets set the plumb line
of your righteousness and truth
in the midst of your people.
Grant us the courage to judge ourselves against it.
Straighten all that is crooked or warped within us
until our hearts and souls stretch upright,
blameless and holy,
to meet the glory of Christ. Amen.

The trouble is, this translation of our passage is suspect.  The word rendered “plumb line” in the Common English Bible is ‘anak, which actually means “tin.” In Amos’ vision, the LORD is standing  al-khomath ‘anak (“beside a wall of tin”), holding ‘anak (“a piece of tin”) in God’s hand.

The ancient versions attempt in various ways to come to terms with this Hebrew original.  The Greek Septuagint reads teichous adamantinou (an impenetrable, that is metal-sheathed, wall), and in the LORD’s hand is a piece of metal (adamas).  The Latin Vulgate, understanding the piece of metal in God’s hand to be a trowel (trullu cementarii), has the LORD standing on a plastered wall (murum litum).  The Aramaic Targum, as it generally does, eschews metaphor for what its translators thought the metaphor actually intended–here, the wall is a place of judgment (Aramaic din), and a judgment against Israel is in the LORD’s hand.

The reading “plumb line” is relatively recent, going back only to the medieval Jewish interpreter Ibn Ezra (1089-1164).  However, it was popularized by Martin Luther in his 1534 translation of the Bible into German (which uses the German Bleischnur, meaning “plumb line,” here) and today is found in nearly every English translation (see some examples here).  Even the Jewish Publication Society’s Tanak (an abbreviation for Torah [Law], Nebi’im [Prophets], and Kethubim [Writings], the three parts of the Hebrew Bible) has “plumb line,” although footnotes in the NJPS translation suggest that the LORD holds a pickaxe, and that the wall is “destined for a pickaxe”!   In the end, the footnotes say, the meaning of the Hebrew is uncertain.

However, as we have seen, the Hebrew is not at all uncertain: in Amos’ vision, the LORD stands by a wall of tin–or perhaps, a wall sheathed in tin–holding a piece of tin.  God says that God is placing tin “in the middle of my people Israel; I will never again forgive them” (7:8).  What the text says is plain.  The question is, what does this mean?

Both Ibn Ezra and Luther apparently understood the metal in this vision to be the weight on a plumb line, and the wall to have been built using a plumb line.  The point of the vision therefore is that God is holding Israel to account, testing that they are true to the LORD as a mason uses a plumb to test whether a wall is truly vertical.  However, plumb bobs were made of stone or lead, not tin (note that the German Bleischnur used by Luther literally means “lead line”).  The ancient versions all seem, similarly, to interpret based on the metal.  But comparison with Amos’ other visions suggests another possibility.

In Amos 8:1-2, the prophet is shown a basket of summer fruit (Hebrew qayits) and told, “The end [qets] has come upon my people Israel; I will never again forgive them” (compare 7:8, where that same expression is found).  His vision is not about qayits (“summer fruit”) at all, but about the word “qayits”—a punning reference to Israel’s end (qets). So too, Jeremiah sees the branch of an almond tree (Hebrew shaqed), and is told, “I am watching [shoqed] over my word to perform it” (Jer 1:11-12).  So what if Amos 7:7-9 is also a pun?  What if the point of Amos’ vision is not ‘anak (“tin”), but something that sounds like ‘anak?

As S. Dean McBride, Jr. notes, the second person singular pronoun (“you”) in Hebrew has a complex history.  The free-standing form of the pronoun is ‘atta (contracted from an original ‘anta) or ‘at; however, the pronoun may be appended to a noun as ka or ak (meaning “your”).  The first-person pronoun may offer a clue to this complexity.  While later Hebrew texts prefer the shortened form ‘ani, the older form ‘anoki is also common.  Some Semiticists propose that the older form of the second person pronoun may have similarly been something like ‘anak.  McBride proposes that Amos’ vision of ‘anak, “tin,” in 7:7-9 is a pun on an archaic ‘anak[?], “you” (like qayits/qets in 8:1).

If this is so, then God is telling Amos, “I am placing YOU in the middle of my people Israel” (7:8)–making this vision Amos’ call to prophesy.

The narrative in Amos 7:10-17 shows us Amos snatched from his home in the village of Tekoa, in the southern kingdom of Judah, and placed by God in Bethel, one of the great cities of the northern kingdom of Israel.  There, Amos’ message of justice places him in opposition to both the high priest Amaziah and the northern political leader, Jeroboam II–which is not comfortable for the high priest or the king.  However, it is not comfortable for Amos, either!  He protests to Amaziah (and to us!) that this life was not his choice:

I am not a prophet, nor am I a prophet’s son; but I am a shepherd, and a trimmer of sycamore trees. But the Lord took me from shepherding the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ (Amos 7:14-15)

I am reminded of Michelangelo, who always regarded himself as a sculptor rather than a painter.  So, throughout the years he spent painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling at the Pope’s command, Michelangelo stubbornly signed his letters “Michelangelo, Sculptor.”

Similarly, Amos saw himself as a shepherd, not a prophet.  Had he had his own way, he would never have left home!  But there is no doubt in Amos’ mind that he is in the right place, whether it is the place he would have chosen or not.  He is where he is because God has put him there: “the LORD took me from shepherding the flock” (7:15).  Amos was not comfortable.  Nor strictly speaking, was he successful: his passionate summons to God’s way of justice (Amos 5:21-24) went unheeded, and as he had warned, the northern kingdom fell to the Assyrians.   But Amos was faithful–and that is what mattered.

Just as God spoke to Amos, so God says to us, in our day, “I am placing you in the midst of my people.”  If we believed that following Christ’s call would save us from conflict and discomfort, we were laboring under a major misapprehension!  It is not hard to see how we could have gotten there: knowing that God is love, we concluded thereby that God is nice, and wants us to have a nice life: peaceful and conflict-free.  But it was not so for Amos, or for John, or for Jesus, and it will not be so for us!  God is love–but love wills the good, not the nice; justice, not expedience.  Elsewhere in his prophecy, Amos makes this plain: “Woe to them that are at ease in Zion!” (Amos 6:1, KJV).

We too, I am persuaded, have been placed in the midst of God’s people in our day, and so in the midst of conflict and controversy. God has called and empowered us, friends, for just such a time as this.  As Charles Wesley’s powerful hymn reminds us,

To serve the present age,
My calling to fulfill:
Oh, may it all my pow’rs engage
To do my Master’s will!

Wesley is starkly–indeed, terrifyingly!–forthright regarding the stakes of our faithfulness to that call:

Help me to watch and pray,
And on Thyself rely,
Assured, if I my trust betray,
I shall forever die.

God grant that we, like Amos, will be faithful to our call.

This Friday, July 4th, is of course Independence Day—the 249th birthday of our nation.  The Great Seal of the United States, depicted above, is emblazoned with the Latin motto, E Pluribus Unum.  This Latin phrase was adopted by an Act of Congress in 1782 as the motto for the Seal, and it has been used on our currency since 1795.

“E [an abbreviation for ex] pluribus unum” means “out of many, one.” It was suggested as a motto by Pierre Eugene du Simitierre, one of the designers working on the seal. While the Founders didn’t go with his design (which is rather fiddly!), they liked his motto!

Apparently, du Simitierre got the motto from the title page of The Gentleman’s Magazine, a popular magazine of the day that (rather like Reader’s Digest) took its content from a number of places. But where did the editors of this magazine find it? Some think the Latin phrase came originally from a line in “Moretum,” a poem attributed to Virgil, which describes grinding together many ingredients to make a cheese spread:

Till by degrees they one by one do lose
Their proper powers, and out of many comes
A single colour [color est e pluribus unus]

A more dignified proposal is that the phrase was adapted from Cicero’s De Officiis (“Concerning Duties”) 1.17.56, regarding friendship:

When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many [unus fiat ex pluribus], as Pythagoras wishes things to be in friendship.

But whatever the original source, we can see why du Simitierre proposed this motto, and why the Founders liked it.  It well describes the United States of America, as many states unified into a single nation.

However, while E Pluribus Unum graces our currency and our Great Seal, it is not our national motto.  That would be “In God We Trust”–approved by our Legislature and signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on July 30, 1956 (the year I was born).  That same law also stipulated that this motto, which had already been placed on some coins since 1864, be printed on all currency issued after that date.

Having two mottoes only becomes a problem if we see a conflict between them.  Does diversity threaten our trust in God?  Some may think that it does: that real Americans (or real Christians) must look like me, or at least, think and act like me, and that the borders between those inside and those outside must be clearly marked and defended.

Already in these first months of the Trump administration, masked ICE agents have been seizing immigrants–or those they suspect to be immigrants–off the street, out of workplaces, and even in courtrooms where those seized were in the process of pursuing legal residence.  The images above come from a three minute video clip, filmed by Pastor Ara Torosian, an Iran-born pastor at Cornerstone Church West LA, as two members of his congregation, Iranian Christian asylum-seekers, were arrested by masked federal agents:

The pastor told the agents the husband was an asylum-seeker as they carried out the arrest, to which one responded, ‘It doesn’t matter, sir, we’re just following orders, he’s got a warrant,’ according to the video footage. . . . both individuals are now in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, according to the CBP statement.

Pastor Torosian “said the scene shocked him and reminded him of his home country, which he fled in 2010.”

“Seeing this masked man on the floor, with this woman, I got triggered. I said, ‘Where am I?’ in one moment. I said, ‘Where I am, in the street of Tehran or the street of Los Angeles?’” 

Roman Catholic bishops across the United States have begun  objecting to this treatment of migrants, including Christians fleeing persecution, and challenging the president’s policy.

For years many bishops focused their most vocal political engagement on ending abortion, rarely putting as much capital behind any other issue. Many supported President Trump’s actions to overturn Roe v. Wade, and targeted Democratic Catholic politicians who supported abortion access.

But now they are increasingly invoking Pope Leo XIV’s leadership and Pope Francis’s legacy against Mr. Trump’s immigration actions, and prioritizing humane treatment of immigrants as a top public issue. They are protesting the president’s current domestic policy bill in Congress, showing up at court hearings to deter Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and urging Catholics and non-Catholics alike to put compassion for humans ahead of political allegiances.

The image in Los Angeles and elsewhere of ICE agents seizing people in Costco parking lots and carwashes “rips the illusion that’s being portrayed, that this is an effort which is focused on those who have committed significant crimes,” said Cardinal Robert W. McElroy of Washington, in an interview from Rome.

This brings us to the Hebrew Bible reading for Sunday: the healing of Naaman the leper, in 2 Kings 5:1-14.  In this passage, Naaman is the ultimate outsider. Not only is he a Gentile (a non-Israelite), he comes from Aram, or Syria—in those days, Israel’s sworn enemy. Further, not only is he a Syrian, he is a soldier in Syria’s army, and not only a soldier, but a general—one of Israel’s oppressors!

Believe it or not, it gets worse: Naaman finds about about the wonder-working prophet Elisha from a Hebrew slave, a young girl stolen from her home and family in one of Syria’s raids (2 Kgs 5:2-3)!  Adding insult to injury, Naaman then tries to deal his way to a healing, through political pressure (my king writing to your king) and bribery (2 Kgs 5:5-7).

Naaman’s healing comes in a way that makes abundantly clear that it is God, not Elisha, who does the healing.  Elisha never even sees Naaman! Through his servant, he commands the Syrian general to immerse himself in the Jordan seven times.  In his snobbery, Naaman is on the point of refusing to do what the prophet commands:

Aren’t the rivers in Damascus, the Abana and the Pharpar, better than all Israel’s waters? Couldn’t I wash in them and get clean?” So he turned away and proceeded to leave in anger (2 Kgs 5:12).

Yet, despite all of this, Naaman is persuaded to do as the prophet directed: and he is healed, anyway.  Moreover, even though he misunderstands who God is (Naaman takes “two mule loads” of dirt from Israel so as to worship Israel’s God, as though the LORD were somehow tied to Israel’s soil) and what commitment to God means (the Syrian general continues to go to Rimmon’s temple, for political expediency; see 2 Kgs 5:17-18), God does not take the healing back!  Indeed, if we read closely, God’s presence and involvement with Naaman began long before he ever came to see Elisha: “through him the LORD had given victory to Aram” (2 Kgs 5:1).

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus retells Naaman’s story for exactly this reason—to show that God is at work even among those unlike us, whom we see as outsiders. The response of Jesus’ hometown crowd in Nazareth shows how popular that sermon was–they try to throw him off a cliff!

In the Gospel reading for Sunday (Luke 10:1-11, 16-20 RSV and NRSV), Jesus sends out seventy (or, as the CEB and NRSVue read with other ancient texts, “seventy-two”) followers: that is six, the number of humanity, times twelve, the number of Israel.  Traditionally, this was the number of the foreign nations, based on the Table of Nations in Genesis 10. The theme, again, is a call to outreach and inclusion for all the world.

It is not that we insiders, who have Christ as our possession, take him with us to those outside. It is, rather that we go to find him among the outsiders, where Christ already is: with foreigners and lepers and clueless, unclean folk like Naaman.

After the slaughter of 49 LGBTQ people, mostly Latinos and Latinas, in Orlando in 2016, Lutheran pastor and emergent church leader Nadia Bolz-Weber preached a message that resonates powerfully still today–and reminds us why this unseemly grace is such good news:

I mean, I may want a vigilante saviour. But what I need is a saviour who brings a swift, terrible mercy. What I want is a dividing saviour – who will draw the same lines I would draw…but what I need is a saviour who makes us one, a saviour, who lifted up, draws all people to himself. Not just the worthy. Not just the lovely, the likely and the lucky. All people. I need a saviour who commands me to love my enemies and pray for those who persecute me – pray for those whose hate blinds them to their own goodness and the worth and dignity of others. And I need a saviour this merciful because it is I who needs this much mercy.

This, in the end, is the reason that for those who believe, “In God We Trust” belongs inextricably with E Pluribus Unum.  Those who trust in God know that making one out of many is God’s design and delight:

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 (Ephesians 1:10).

This Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost, is Trinity Sunday.   The Old Testament reading for the day is Proverbs 8:22-31.  The ancient sages of Israel, of course, would not have thought about God in Trinitarian terms. Still, in Israel’s traditions, a particular attribute or manifestation of God can be treated as an independent entity, or hypostasis. Indeed, Hebrews intriguingly uses that very expression for Jesus, who is character tes hupostaseos auto (“the imprint of God’s being,” Heb 1:3): that is, Jesus is the hypostasis of God’s very character!

In Proverbs, Wisdom is personified as a woman (1:20-33; 8:1-36; 9:1-6), as the Hebrew word for wisdom (khokmah) is feminine. Influenced by this tradition, the Apocryphal book of Wisdom (sometimes called “Wisdom of Solomon”), likely written in Alexandria around the time 0f Jesus, also personifies Wisdom as a woman (for example, Wisd 6:12-25; 7:7—9:18), whom the sage seeks as a bride (Wisd 8:2)!

Much as in Genesis creation begins with a Word (Gen 1:3-4), so in Proverbs creation begins with Wisdom. This is stated early on: “The LORD laid the foundations of the earth with wisdom, establishing the heavens with understanding” (Prov 3:19). However, in Prov 8, Wisdom herself speaks:

The LORD created me [Hebrew qanani; better “acquired me”] at the beginning of his way,
    before his deeds long in the past.
I was formed in ancient times,
    at the beginning, before the earth was.
When there were no watery depths, I was brought forth,
    when there were no springs flowing with water.
Before the mountains were settled,
    before the hills, I was brought forth;
    before God made the earth and the fields
    or the first of the dry land.
I was there when he established the heavens,
    when he marked out the horizon on the deep sea,
    when he thickened the clouds above,
    when he secured the fountains of the deep,
    when he set a limit for the sea,
        so the water couldn’t go beyond his command,
    when he marked out the earth’s foundations.
I was beside him as a master of crafts [Hebrew ‘amon; as the  CEB footnote observes, its meaning is uncertain]
    I was having fun,
    smiling before him all the time,
    frolicking with his inhabited earth
    and delighting in the human race (Prov 8:22-31).

Understanding Wisdom’s role in the creation of the world depends upon the translation of the word ‘amon in Prov 8:30—a word which unfortunately appears only here.  The CEB “master of crafts” and NRSVue “master worker,” like the Greek Septuagint harmozousa (“fitting together”?) and the Latin Vulgate cuncta conponens (“forming all things;” compare Wisd 7:21[22]; 8:6, which describes Wisdom as a technitis: a designer, artificer, or technician) suggest a derivation from the Akkadian ummanu, “workman.”

The Greek translator Aquila’s rendering tithenoumene may mean someone brought up (as in the Greek text of Lam 4:5 or Sir 30:9)—hence the translation in the NRSVue footnote, “little child.” William Brown reads “I was beside him growing up” (The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder [New York: Oxford, 2010], 164), and observes that “the repeated reference to play at the end” also supports the image of Wisdom as a growing child (Brown 2010, 286 n 16).

On the other hand, Robert Alter (The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. Vol 3: The Writings [New York: W. W. Norton, 2019], 380) has “I was by him, an intimate.” Such a reading could be supported by the use of the Hebrew qanani in Prov 8:22. While the CEB translates this as “created me,” a better reading would be “acquired me”—perhaps, as a wife (see Ruth 4:5). So too the Septuagint harmozousa for ‘amon may mean “betrothed” (see 2 Cor 11:2).   This reading also fits the emphasis on play in Prov 8:30-31, although of course in a different sense: “Before there were creatures to occupy God’s attention, Wisdom was His delightful and entertaining bosom companion” (Alter 2019, 380).

In his discussion of ‘amon, Richard Clifford looks to “the relatively well-attested picture of the Mesopotamian transmission of wisdom, originating with the gods and concluding with human sages and their institutions” (“The Community of the Book of Proverbs,” in Constituting the Community: Studies on the Polity of Ancient Israel in Honor of S. Dean McBride, Jr., ed. John T. Strong and Steven Tuell [Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005], 282). From Enki/Ea, the god of wisdom, the stream ran through “the mythic sages or culture-bringers of the primordial time”—the apkallu and the ummanu (!)—and so finally to the Babylonian wisdom schools. In Prov 8:30, then, Wisdom is herself a sage—counsellor to the LORD, and teacher of the sages of Israel.

Perhaps we need not select from among these possibilities a single meaning for ‘amon. After all, as Carol Fontaine notes, Wisdom’s role in Proverbs is complex and multi-faceted:

Speaking directly to prospective students, Woman Wisdom sounds like prophet, lover, counselor, scolding mother, or goddess as she expounds the goals of the sages and entices her hearers with the promise of rich reward: life itself (“Proverbs,” in The HarperCollins Bible Commentary, ed. James Luther Mays [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000], 449).

Many descriptions of Christ reflect that ancient image of Wisdom.  Certainly the New Testament speaks of Christ as the agent of God’s creation. The apostle Paul writes:

Granted, there are so-called “gods,” in heaven and on the earth, as there are many gods and many lords.  However, for us believers,

Ephesians identifies Jesus as the telos—that is, the purpose and goal—of the cosmos.  From the beginning, “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” (Eph 1:10).

This way of describing the person and work of Christ in creation is closely related to the depiction of Wisdom in Israel’s traditions. For example, compare Col 1:15 and Heb 1:3 to the description of Wisdom in Wisd 7:26: “She’s the brightness that shines forth from eternal light. She’s a mirror that flawlessly reflects God’s activity. She’s the perfect image of God’s goodness.”

The treatment of Wisdom as a hypostasis likely witnesses to the desire of the sages to find a way of speaking of the Divine in ways at once transcendent and imminent. After all it is Wisdom, and not, expressly, the transcendent God, who is imminently “frolicking with [God’s] inhabited earth and delighting in the human race” (Prov 8:22-31).  The language of Israel’s sages is of course not Trinitarian, but arguably speaks to a need and desire similar to that felt by early Christians, which led them ultimately to the confession of the Trinity.

Theologian George Lindbeck argued that Trinitarian theology grew out of the struggle of early Christians to speak plainly about their experience of God. Early on, the first Christians needed to affirm, on the one hand, the continuity of their faith with the faith of ancient Israel: the God they loved and worshipped was the one  transcendent God, who called time and space into being.  But on the other hand, they had come to know God, intimately and personally, in and through Jesus.  Therefore, they needed to speak of the Christ in the most exalted language possible (what Lindbeck terms “Christological maximalism”). So, the New Testament calls Jesus God’s Son (George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine [Nashville: Westminster John Knox, 1984], 94).

Theologian, poet, playwright, literary critic, and from 2002 to 2012 Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, reflecting on his debates with prominent atheists, observes

On May 2, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders concerning religion in America.  One created the Religious Liberty Commission, led by Chair Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, and Vice Chair Dr. Ben Carson, a one-time Republican presidential candidate and former Trump administration official.  Despite its broad title, both the leadership and the membership of this commission suggests that it is not actually concerned with the liberty of all religions:

Among the commission’s members are Trump allies, including White House faith adviser Paula White, talk show host and author Eric Metaxas and evangelist Franklin Graham, head of Samaritan’s Purse, along with other faith leaders like Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, Minnesota Bishop Robert Barron of the popular Word on Fire media ministry, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York and talk show host Phil McGraw.  

Apart from Cardinal Dolan and Rabbi Soloveichik, the commission is dominated by Evangelical Protestant Christians. Its prevailing ethos is clear from “Dr. Phil” MacGraw’s comment at the ceremony establishing the commission: “Mr. President, I can’t tell you, first off, how proud I am to see religion coming back to the White House. God bless you. God bless you.”  Although President Joe Biden was a pious and visibly practicing Roman Catholic Christian, his was apparently not the right kind of religion, and he was evidently not the right sort of Christian.

Mr. Trump’s second executive order established a task force on “eradicating anti-Christian bias,” chaired by Attorney General Pamela Bondi and staffed by government officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy.  As Elizabeth Bruenig writes in The Atlantic, this means the government will now rule on what exactly constitutes authentic Christian belief and practice—not a straightforward determination, she argues, nor one that should be entrusted to the administration.⁠
⁠
The executive order creating the task force cites a multitude of examples of what the Trump administration considers to be unacceptable discrimination against Christians, including Biden-era prosecutions of Christian anti-abortion protesters under the Freedom to Access Clinic Entrances Act, the promulgation of a (later retracted) FBI memo referring to radical traditionalist Christians as a potential domestic-terrorism threat, and the designation of Easter Sunday of 2024 as the year’s Transgender Day of Visibility. Conservative Christians may generally agree with Trump’s characterization of those episodes. But determining the authentically Christian perspective on an issue is not always a simple task.”
⁠⁠
For example, the International Transgender Day of Visibility has since its founding in 2009 been on March 31, while Easter is a movable feast whose date is determined by complex calculations (on which Eastern and Western Christians differ).  So, the fact that for Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians Easter in 2024 fell on March 31 has nothing to do with “anti-Christian bias.”

Bruenig argues that the task force (and the Religious Liberty Commission, I would suggest) is actually part of “a broader project to recapture political and cultural ground that Christianity has lost over the past several decades.”

If the task force’s mandate of mere fairness is essentially a pretext for persecuting perceived enemies of the faith, then its real purpose is to restore this past vision of American Christian dominance.
⁠
Perhaps that’s the irony of this new task force: Nobody appears to view Christianity as just another interest group as much as Donald Trump. . . . Christians should as a rule be skeptical of versions of the faith that are informed overly much by partisan politics, which always have something other than Jesus at their core.⁠

As a Bible Guy, I tend to think in biblical terms.  So reflecting on religious liberty and diversity brought to my mind a crucial incident in the biblical account of Moses’ life and ministry  involving Moses’ father-in-law Jethro, a Midianite priest (and not a Jew), detailed in Exodus 18.

That he is called “Jethro” here (Exod 18:1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12; cf. Exod 3:1; 4:18) is suggestive: southern traditions call him Reuel (Exod 2:18) or Hobab (Jdg 4:11; Num 10:29, which says that Hobab was the son of Reuel, may represent an attempt to consolidate these traditions).  Most likely, Exodus 18 belongs to the old northern traditions in the Pentateuch–often called E because of their preference for the Divine title ‘elohim (“God”) rather than the personal Name Yhwh (typically rendered as “the LORD,” in all caps).  While these traditions do use Yhwh after the Name is revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:9-15, they remain reluctant to use it too frequently. So, while the Divine is referred to throughout this chapter as “God” (Exod 18:1a, 4, 5, 12 [twice], 15, 16, 19 [three times], 21, 23), in two places (Exodus 18:1 and 8-11) “the LORD” is used, as these verses recall Yhwh delivering Israel from Egypt–calling the Name particularly to mind.

So, when Moses tells Jethro of the LORD’s deliverance of Israel from Pharaoh, and from the hardships they have faced so far in the wilderness, Jethro rejoices, and declares: “Now I know that the LORD is greater than all gods [kol–ha’elohim], because he delivered the people from the Egyptians, when they dealt arrogantly with them” (Exod 18:11 NRSVue). Note that the Name is essential in this verse, as it distinguishes Israel’s God Yhwh from all other gods (‘elohim).

Then, the Midianite priest offers a sacrifice to the LORD, followed by a sacred meal in which Moses’ brother, the priest Aaron, also participates (Exod 18:12).  Many early Jewish and Christian interpretations wrestle with this inclusion, and can only accept Jethro’s role by seeing his confession in Exod 18:10-11 as a religious conversion. In Targum Pseudo-Jonathan of Exod 18:6, Jethro tells Moses that he has come in order to convert (Aramaic l’tgyyr’).  Other traditional Jewish sources also regard this as a conversion story: for example, Exod Rab 1:32; Tankha Buber Yitro, 5.  Among Christian interpreters, Cyril of Alexandria and the Venerable Bede also see this scene as Jethro’s conversion (cited by Brevard Childs, Exodus, OTL [Louisville: Westminster, 1974], 332).

On the other hand, Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael, Tractate Amalek 3 compares this meal to one served by the great Rabbi Gamaliel:

Pope Francis warns against “a divinization of power” that “emerges in the name of God.  Those who do it are people who construct themselves as God.”  He reflects,

The second commandment [cf. Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-28] proposes that you love your neighbor as yourself.  No believer can limit the faith to himself, his clan, his family, or his city.  A believer is essentially someone who goes into an encounter with other believers, or non-believers, to give them a hand (On Heaven and Earth, 21).

Still further evidence that I am indeed older than dirt–I can remember the old “Doublemint Gum” commercials (“Two! Two! Two mints in one!”), with Jayne and Joan Knoerzer, the original Doublemint Twins, singing “Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint Gum.”  That old earworm came back into my head this morning as I was reading Sunday’s Gospel, John 20:19-31, for my devotions.  When I got to the end of the chapter, where the purpose of John’s Gospel is revealed, I was surprised to read,

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name (John 20:30-31, NRSVue)

“So that you may continue to believe“?  I was pretty sure that wasn’t what I remembered.  Sure enough, when I consulted my old Bible, in the now-defunct NRSV, it read, “But these are written so that you may come to believe.”  Intrigued, I turned to the Greek, where I was puzzled to see this:

The Greek grammatical form pisteusete is the second person plural active aorist subjunctive: that is, as the old NRSV had it, “so that (all of) you  [addressing the whole community of  intended readers] may come to believe.”  But the sigma (the Greek letter “s”) is in brackets!  Without it, the verb form becomes pisteuete: the present tense, not the aorist–as the NRSVue now reads, “so that you may continue to believe.”  So, what gives?

In his Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (New York: United Bible Societies, 1971: p. 256), Bruce Metzger explained the decision to place the sigma in brackets.  Both readings, he notes, the aorist and the present tense forms, “have notable early support,” so the question was, who is the audience of the Gospel?

The aorist sense, strictly interpreted, suggests that the Fourth Gospel was addressed to non-Christians so that they might come to believe Jesus is the Messiah; the present tense suggests that the aim of the writer was to strengthen the faith of those who already believe.

Being unable to satisfactorily answer that question, “the Committee considered it preferable to represent both readings by enclosing σ in square brackets.”  Two! Two! Two verbs in one!

Of course, translators don’t have the freedom to leave that tension unresolved–they must choose one or the other!  In John 20:31, the NRSV followed the old King James, which has, “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.”  So do the ESV, and the NIV (although the NIV footnote on the verse reads, “Or may continue to believe“).  Similarly the CEB, which I have used as my base text in these blogs, has “so that you will believe.”

All of these, like the old NRSV (and for that matter, the RSV before it!), follow the KJV here and assume the aorist form–but then, that was how Erasmus’ Textus Receptus, which had a powerful influence on the King James translators, read.  In favor of that reading (quite apart from the unresolvable question of the Fourth Gospel’s “intent”) is the fact that texts using that form come from both notable Western and Eastern text traditions.  The present tense has more witnesses in its favor, but they come mainly from the same text family–making it a bit odd to me that the NRSVue chose to go with the present tense reading.

This is not the only place in the Fourth Gospel where the editors of the Greek New Testament have made that curious typographical choice.  In John 19:35, the Evangelist claims to be an eyewitness to Jesus’ pierced side, and the flow of water and blood from that wound.  The NRSVue reads:

He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth, so that you also may continue to believe.

Here too, the Greek text reads pisteu[s]ete, which is printed as at once aorist and present tense!  Here, the present tense reading is the one found less often, but in texts from different families, while the aorist text is the majority reading.  But this time, the old NRSV simply skipped over the ambiguous word.

What I really wish is that we could somehow do what the editors of our Greek New Testament have done, and typographically represent both at once!  The good news of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, and future coming must of course be proclaimed to those who have never heard it–or whose previous hearing, for whatever reason, was kept from taking hold on their hearts.  But it also needs to be told again and again to  believers, whose faith may have become stale and rote.  Christ is risen, friends!  And whether we are hearing it for the first time or the fiftieth, “ain’ta that good news“?

CORRECTION:

Whoops!  “Two! Two! Two mints in one!” was not a Doublemint Gum slogan.  It was a Certs slogan: Certs is both a candy mint and a breath mint.  Saturday Night Live famously mocked those ads with its own false ad for “Shimmer”: both a floor wax and a dessert topping (a bit that sadly no longer appears on YouTube)!

Laurent de la Hyre. 1606-1656. Paris. Apparition du Christ aux trois Marie. Vers 1653. Louvre.

Ever since I discovered Laurent de la Hyre’s “Christ Appears to the Three Marys” (1606), it has been my favorite Easter image.  I love the joyous surprise on every face–including the face of Jesus!  I love that their hands are not quite touching him as he ascends into glory: radiantly alive, at once in our world of time and space and transcending it.

It is Easter, friends; the day of Christ’s resurrection: a day of untrammeled, rollicking joy!  But this Easter; I am also aware of the melancholy of that garden scene.  Jesus is alive, yes–but he is also leaving.  This joyous hello is also a poignant goodbye.

Perhaps it is because, as I approach my biblical “three score years and ten,” death and resurrection have become less and less a matter of abstract theological speculation for me, and more and more of (relatively imminent) expectation!  But this year, I am reminded that, while in Christ death is not the end, that does not change the fact that, for those left behind, it really is the end–at least, for now.

It is also spring, of course: but this autumn poem by Mary Oliver captures for me at once that Easter hope of resurrection joy, and the reality of grief.  Here is “In Blackwater Woods.”

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Happy Easter, friends.  God bless you.

Apart from its stellar collection of books and journals, and its ever-helpful staff, one of the things I like best about the Clifford E. Barbour Library at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary is the whiteboard by the front desk.  Periodically, someone on the staff posts a whimsical question, usually with a biblical connection (one I recall was, very simply, “Hebrew or Greek?”), to which library patrons are encouraged to respond.  The picture at the head of this blog shows a recent question, relating to the book of Daniel: “Would you rather sit in the lion’s den with Daniel, OR get thrown into the furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego [that is, with an eye to Veggie Tales fans!] (Rack, Shack, and Benny)?

In keeping with the whimsy of the question, I said that I’d rather be with Daniel, because “I like kitties!”  But, Bible Guy and professor emeritus that I am, I couldn’t resist adding an exegetical note.  If you have trouble deciphering my purple scrawl, it says,

Also, Daniel’s deliverance is assured in the traditions; the Three go in not knowing if deliverance will come. . .

The ellipsis at the end was very deliberate, meant to indicate an open-endedness to the moment before their (would-be) martyrdom.  Another patron added a note of their own: “meeting God, though?”    So, what happens in this biblical narrative?

In Daniel 3, Nebuchadnezzar invites officials from throughout his empire to the dedication of a huge golden image reminiscent, perhaps, of the king’s dream (see Dan 2). The Aramaic word used here, tselem, is found in an ancient inscription (perhaps 9th or 10th century BCE) on a memorial statue from Tell Fekhariyeh in Syria, where it describes the statue as the “image” of Adad-it’i, governor of Guzan, Sikan, and Azran (cf. A. R. Millard and P. Bordreuil, “A Statue from Syria with Assyrian and Aramaic Inscriptions,” BA 45 [1982]: 135-42). This term is closely related to the Hebrew tselem (“image”), used in Genesis 1:26-27 NRSVue for the creation of human beings “in the image of God.” So, the CEB rendering “statue” is appropriate.  The image is gigantic: six cubits broad by sixty cubits high, or, about 9 by 87 1/2 feet.  We are not told anything about who or what this golden statue was supposed to represent. For the writer of Daniel, all that matters is that it was to be an object of false worship.

Nebuchadnezzar invited officials from throughout his empire to the dedication of the huge golden image. To the assembled crowd of people and dignitaries from across Nebuchadnezzar’s empire, a herald proclaims that, when the music begins, all are to fall down and worship the image.  The herald warns that when the music plays “Anyone who will not bow down and worship will be immediately thrown into a furnace of flaming fire” (Dan 3:6)–or, as the KJV famously reads, “a burning fiery furnace.”

To us, this story may well seem needlessly repetitive. Elements such as the list of seven officials in Daniel 3:2-3, the list of six musical instruments in Daniel 3:5, 7, 10, and 15; the account of the people’s actions upon hearing the music, even the stereotypical description of the furnace as “a furnace of flaming fire” are repeated again and again. However, repetition is an earmark of the traditional storyteller’s art. The stereotyped elements make the story easier to remember and recite, and carry the listener along with a sense of the familiar.  And, as any parent or grandparent who has ever read a favorite story to a child can tell you, audiences of traditional stories anticipate those repeated elements, and will insist on hearing them!

Of course, Daniel’s three friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (see Dan 1:6-7; intriguingly, nothing is said of Daniel himself in this narrative) refuse to bow down. Perhaps envious of the high position the three Hebrews enjoy in Nebuchadnezzar’s court, Babylonian rivals accuse the three before the emperor himself. In a rage, Nebuchadnezzar orders them brought before him.

In Daniel 3:14-15, the three Hebrews are commanded to worship the statue not through a herald, but by Nebuchadnezzar himself. There is no room now for them to claim that they had misunderstood the command, or to otherwise hedge their disobedience. Nebuchadnezzar makes their choice painfully clear. Even now, if they will fall down and worship when the music sounds, all will be well. “But if you won’t worship it, you will be thrown straight into the furnace of flaming fire. Then what god will rescue you from my power?” (Dan 3:15).

To any reader of Israel’s story, Nebuchadnezzar’s proud boast will sound familiar. Similarly, when the armies of the Assyrian empire had come to the gates of Jerusalem in the days of King Hezekiah, Sennacherib the Assyrian king had taunted the city’s defenders, “Which one of any of the gods of those lands has rescued their country from my power? Why should the LORD rescue Jerusalem from my power?” (2 Kgs 18:35). Of course, against all expectations, the LORD did deliver Jerusalem from Sennacherib. So, too, as anyone familiar with this story knows, the LORD will deliver Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

However, the three Hebrews cannot know the end of their story:  they do not know that they will be delivered!  Their refusal to obey Nebuchadnezzar is not rooted in the certainty that God will keep them from harm, but rather in the absolute demand of their faith.  The threat of being burned alive would have been tragically familiar to the audience of this story.  Antiochus’ minions had done precisely that to members of the pious Judean community this book addresses. 2 Maccabees 7:1-42 describes the horrific death by torture suffered by seven Jewish brothers, one after another, who refused to surrender their faith–ending with their being burned alive.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to even attempt a defense. There is no doubt that they are guilty of the charge–they did not bow to the golden statue, nor will they bow to it now. Instead, they take their stand:

If our God—the one we serve—is able to rescue us from the furnace of flaming fire and from your power, Your Majesty, then let him rescue us. But if he doesn’t, know this for certain, Your Majesty: we will never serve your gods or worship the gold statue you’ve set up (Dan 3:17-18).

“If our God whom we serve is able”?  This statement may come as a surprise. Many older translations, such as the KJV and the RSV, read “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us”–as do the NIV and The Message.  However, the clearest and best translation of the Aramaic would appear to be the one chosen by  NRSVue, and the CEB, printed above.

One might think that this remarkable statement expresses doubt about God, questioning God’s ability to save–but in fact, it is a statement of the purest faith. Whether God delivers us or not, the three men declare, we will not worship false gods. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego do not serve God because it is convenient, or because it brings them benefits. For these believers, faith is not a hobby, or a form of therapy. For them, faith is life, and life without faith is not worth having

Like the martyrs in 2 Maccabees, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego act in accordance with the absolute demand of their faith. Whatever comes next–whether God delivers them or not–they will not worship other gods.

In his book The Alphabet of Grace, Christian author Frederick Buechner wrote of a day when he was driving home from church “full of Christ, I thought, giddy in the head almost and if not speaking in tongues at least singing in tongues some kind of witless, wordless psalm.”  But then, he turned on the radio, and heard a story of horrific child abuse (please take warning if such an account is triggering for you).  To punish a crying baby, its parents had filled a tub with hot, hot water and immersed the child in it, scalding their baby to death.  Abruptly, Buechner writes,

as I heard it reported on the radio on my way back from of all places church and prayed to almighty God to kick to pieces such a world or to kick to pieces Himself and His Son and His Holy Ghost world without end standing there by the side of that screaming tub and doing nothing while with his scrawny little buttocks bare, the hopeless little four-year-old whistle, the child was lowered in his mother’s arms. I am acquainted with the reasons that theologians give and that I have given myself for why God does not, in the name of human freedom must not, by the very nature of things as he has himself established that nature cannot and will not, interfere in these sordid matters, but I prayed nonetheless for his interference.

Of course, that interference had not come–as it did not come for those Antiochus had burned to death; as it did not come for six million Jews marched into gas chambers and ovens by the Nazis and their willing confederates; as it did not come for Jesus, despite his earnest prayer in the garden, “Father, if it’s your will [there is that “if” again!], take this cup of suffering away from me” (Luke 22:42).

Buechner imagines someone asking why, then, he believes?

I believe without the miracles I have prayed for then; that is what I am explaining. I believe because certain uncertain things have happened, dim half-miracles, sermons and silences and what not. Perhaps it is my believing itself that is the miracle I believe by. Perhaps it is the miracle of my own life: that I, who might so easily not have been, am; who might so easily at any moment, even now, give the whole thing up, nonetheless by God’s grace do not give it up and am not given up by it.

We too have no assurance that everything is going to turn out well for us, or even that we will be able to discern a reason for what happens in our lives.

April 20th, which this year is Easter for Western and Eastern Christians alike, is also the day when, according to an executive order issued on January 2oth by the president,

the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall submit a joint report to the President about the conditions at the southern border of the United States and any recommendations regarding additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational control of the southern border, including whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.

I wish that I could tell you that it won’t happen–that the Insurrection Act will not be invoked, that the U.S. military will not be turned against American citizens, even legal immigrants and peaceful protestors.  But I can’t.  What I can say is that whatever happens next, our Lord who did not spare himself even the suffering and death of the cross will never abandon us–as the story of the fiery furnace confirms.

In his rage, Nebuchadnezzer orders the furnace fired up seven times hotter than before (Daniel 3:19-23). The three friends are bound, and hurled helplessly into the fire. So fierce are the flames that the people who throw Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into the furnace are themselves consumed.

But the three Hebrews are not killed! When Nebuchadnezzar looks into the blazing furnace, he sees that though their bonds have burned away, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are themselves untouched by the blaze. Even their clothing remains unsinged!  Further, to his astonishment, the king sees that the three are not the only ones in the furnace:

Look! I see four men, unbound, walking around inside the fire, and they aren’t hurt! And the fourth one looks like one of the gods (Dan 3:24-25).

The Aramaic phrase bar-‘elohin, translated “one of the gods” in the CEB, means literally “a son of god.” In the Hebrew Bible, the expression “sons of God” or “sons of the gods” (bene-‘elohim) is sometimes used for heavenly beings (see Genesis 6:1-4; Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7). Nebuchadnezzar’s shout means that the fourth one in the furnace looks like a heavenly being.  However, later Christian interpreters found here a reference to Jesus, the Son of God.

For Christians, there is a definite appropriateness to this idea. Jesus, after all, is the one who promised “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt 28:20 NRSVue). Similarly, the writer of Hebrews urged his community to remain faithful in times of trial and temptation, remembering that Jesus, “who was tempted in every way that we are, except without sin” (Heb 4:15), is in heaven interceding for us.  That, friends, is our hope.

AFTERWORD:

I need to report, friends that as of today (April 22–Tuesday of the first week of Easter) the Insurrection Act of 1807 has not been invoked, and it is my prayer that it will not  be.  Still, whatever comes next in these uncertain times, I praise God that, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, we will not face it alone: as Jesus promised, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt 28:20, NRSVue).

Today, March 20, marks the Vernal Equinox: the official first day of Spring.  In our new home, situated near a pond, we have been hearing the chorus of spring peepers: a springtime song I haven’t heard since I was a boy.  I just saw three robins hopping through our front lawn, and in many yards and flowerbeds, the first blossoms of spring are determinedly breaking through the soil.

The significance of this day has been marked by our species from our beginnings. Ancient monuments such as Stonehenge in England

and the Serpent Mound in North America

demonstrate the heroic lengths to which our ancestors were willing to go to calculate and celebrate this day.  Indeed, on the equinox the sun sets directly in the west, producing along Chicago’s east-west streets (although they weren’t designed for this purpose) a phenomenon called #chicagohenge.

The reason for our ancient obsession with the Vernal Equinox is not hard to understand.  After the cold and scarcity of winter, the promise of Spring on its way means that soon the air will be warm again, crops will grow again, lambs and calves will be born again.  The message of the Vernal Equinox has always been hope.

Please note, friends, a vital (and often forgotten) distinction here.  Hope is not optimism–and I say that as an optimist!  Optimism means looking on the bright side, and believing that in the end, everything will turn out right–that things are not as bad as they seem.

Hope, on the other hand, recognizes that things may indeed be as bad as they seem–if not worse.  However, to have hope means to  believe in something larger than the present moment: to have confidence that ultimately, the One in whom we place our trust will prevail.

Jeremiah 29:11 is much reproduced, on posters and in memes:

 I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope.

Often, the prophet’s words are read optimistically: God intends nothing but good for believers, who can therefore rest in the confidence that they will be well and successful and happy.  But the context of this passage is vital to grasping its meaning.  It comes from a letter Jeremiah is writing to the exiles in Babylon, specifically to quash any optimistic expectations they might have had that their exile would be short; that the crisis would pass and they would soon be home again.  The prophet’s advice?

Build houses and settle down; cultivate gardens and eat what they produce.  Get married and have children; then help your sons find wives and your daughters find husbands in order that they too may have children. Increase in number there so that you don’t dwindle away.  Promote the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because your future depends on its welfare (Jer 29:5-7).

In short: settle down and make a life for yourselves in Babylon,  because you will never come home again.  For those prophets who promise otherwise, Jeremiah says, the LORD has a grim word:

The LORD of heavenly forces, the God of Israel, proclaims: Don’t let the prophets and diviners in your midst mislead you. Don’t pay attention to your dreams.  They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I didn’t send them, declares the LORD (Jer 29:8-9).

So–what in the world does that famous passage in verse 11 mean?  What are those “plans” God has?  If the exiles are indeed doomed to die in exile, how can Jeremiah say that they have “a future filled with hope”?

Here is the immediate context of those words:

The LORD proclaims: When Babylon’s seventy years are up, I will come and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope. When you call me and come and pray to me, I will listen to you. When you search for me, yes, search for me with all your heart, you will find me. I will be present for you, declares the LORD, and I will end your captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have scattered you, and I will bring you home after your long exile, declares the LORD (Jer 29:10-14).

Seventy years is a long time–and biblically significant.  A generation is about forty years.  So usually, when Scripture wants to indicate a long time, the number is forty: forty days and forty nights for the Great Flood, forty years in the wilderness after the exodus–and of course, Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness,  which our forty days (less Sundays) of Lent now recall.

Seventy years ups the ante considerably!  Seventy is, biblically, about as long as a person can expect to live (see Psalm 90:10)–so the point is that none of those addressed by this letter should expect to see God’s plans realized.  Deliverance will come, someday, but for your children or grandchildren–not for you.

Jeremiah performs a sign act underlining this message, involving a field in his hometown of Anathoth (Jer 32).  When word comes from his cousin that the field is for sale, Jeremiah–at the LORD’s direction–buys it: even though Jerusalem is surrounded by the Babylonian army and on the point of collapse, even though Jeremiah himself is in prison!  The prophet directs his friend, the scribe Baruch ben Neriah, to see to it that all is done legally and properly–and then instructs him to place the deeds of sale in a sealed pottery jar “so they will last a long time” (Jer 32:14).  The purchase isn’t for Jeremiah, who will never see the land he has bought–or indeed for any in his family right now!  But someday, the prophet says,

 Fields will be bought, and deeds will be signed, sealed, and witnessed in the land of Benjamin and in the outlying areas of Jerusalem, in the towns of Judah and in the highlands, in the towns of the western foothills and the arid southern plain; for I will bring them back from their captivity, declares the LORD (Jer 32:44).

Someday, Jeremiah realizes, someone in  his family–his great nieces or nephews–will return, and they will need a place to live, and land to farm.  They will find the jar, and know that their long-dead uncle had hope for their future.

I must confess, friends, that I am having a hard time writing right now.  Every day it seems brings another outrage from the powers that be, against the poor, against immigrants, against racial minorities, against transgender persons–often purportedly justified by Christian faith, and by the Bible that I love.  I confess that, optimist that I am, I am not at all optimistic about our immediate future as a nation.  We were amply warned.  In an important article last November, conservative commentator David Brooks wrote,

[W]e are entering a period of white water. . . .  Over the next few years, a plague of disorder will descend upon America, and maybe the world, shaking everything loose. If you hate polarization, just wait until we experience global disorder. But in chaos there’s opportunity for a new society and a new response to the Trumpian political, economic and psychological assault. These are the times that try people’s souls, and we’ll see what we are made of.

I am not at all optimistic–but I do have hope.  My hope is grounded, not in politics or patriotism, but in my faith that God is at work, even when all seems lost.  I am remembering the words of abolitionist Theodore Parker, famously quoted by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and by Archbishop Desmond Tutu:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice (Theodore Parker, “Of Justice and the Conscience,” in The Collected Works of Theodore Parker 2, 37-57 [London: Trubner, 1879], 48).

Lent, after all, is leading us on the road to Calvary, where even Jesus will give voice to anguish, despair, and doubt: “’Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matt 27:46 NRSVue).  Yet that Friday was not the end; Jesus had not been forsaken!  Sunday would see the power of Christ’s resurrection and victory over death itself.  But let us never allow ourselves to forget that the way to Easter leads through Good Friday–or that our crucified Lord has said, 

All who want to come after me must say no to themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.  All who want to save their lives will lose them. But all who lose their lives because of me and because of the good news will save them (Mark 8:34-35).

Most of the people we meet in the Bible are grownups.  Adam and Eve may be brand new when we are introduced, but they are born full grown! Likewise, we meet Abraham as an adult, and Paul, and Peter. In the Gospels of John and Mark, that is how we meet Jesus, too.

But there are significant exceptions.  We meet the twins Jacob and Esau in the womb–already at it, hammer and tongs–and watch as their sibling rivalry descends into deception and violence before finally resolving in reconciliation.  We meet Moses as a baby, threatened by Pharaoh, set adrift in his little ark by his desperate mother—only to be found and adopted by Pharaoh’s own daughter, and raised in Pharaoh’s palace, with his own mother as nurse.

Then there is Samuel, who would grow up to become a prophet-priest, anointing both Saul and David, Israel’s first kings.  But first, little Samuel was God’s answer to the heartfelt prayers of his (previously barren) mother Hannah. In gratitude, his parents dedicated their son to the LORD, and he grew up in the temple, raised by the priest Eli–with annual visits from his mother, who made his robes.  The text succinctly summarizes Samuel’s growing-up years: “Now the boy Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the LORD and with the people” (1 Sam 2:26, NRSVue).

Unlike Mark and John, both Matthew and Luke begin Jesus’ story with an account of his birth.  But after an account of the Holy Family fleeing as refugees from Herod and his son Archelaus, Matthew jumps to where John and Mark begin their Gospels, with the adult Jesus’ baptism.

I am sure you have seen this print of Jesus as a toddler, playing in the sawdust in Joseph’s carpenter shop. In his chubby hand he holds a nail, and his shadow stretching on the floor behind him has the shape of a cross. The point is clear: Jesus was “born to die.”  Certainly, some gospel accounts can be read in that way. In fact, New Testament scholar Martin Kähler famously called the gospel of Mark a “passion narrative with an extended introduction.”

But Luke tells the story differently. Rather than jumping immediately to grownup Jesus, he gives us a bit of Jesus’ childhood, including a story of every parent’s nightmare.

On their way back home from their annual Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph suddenly realize that they don’t know where Jesus is!  They search for him frantically, retracing their steps to Jerusalem.

After three days (three days!) Mary and Joseph find their son in the temple, in an intense conversation with the religious leaders. We learn that even as a boy, Jesus has attained a terrifying sense of his identity and calling: “I must be in my Father’s house” (Luke 2:48).

Luke concludes this account with a summary statement, echoing (although not quite quoting from) Samuel’s story: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor” (Luke 2:52). This is typical of the way that Luke uses Scripture.  Unlike Matthew, who quotes biblical passages, Luke alludes to texts, writing in the style of the Greek translation of Jewish Scripture, the Septuagint.

Luke’s account does have ample foreshadowing of Jesus’ death (remember Simeon’s words to Mary when Jesus, only forty days old, was first brought to the temple: “a sword will pierce your own soul, too” (Luke 2:35). Still the way that Luke tells the story—with his echo of the account of Samuel’s growth and maturing—suggests that Jesus’ life, not just his death, matters.

Focusing so intently on Jesus’ death has had sad consequences for American Christianity.  In an interview with NPR journalist Scott Detrow, Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today magazine, described

having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — “turn the other cheek” — [and] to have someone come up after to say, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, “I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the response would not be, “I apologize.” The response would be, “Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.” And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.

Jumping straight from Christmas to Good Friday, we can conveniently ignore Jesus’ teaching and his lived example.  Jesus shows us what being human–created in God’s image (Gen 1:27)–really means.  The International Theological Commission of the Vatican (2004) put it very well:

In him, we find the total receptivity to the Father which should characterize our own existence, the openness to the other in an attitude of service which should characterize our relations with our brothers and sisters in Christ, and the mercy and love for others which Christ, as the image of the Father, displays for us.

If we focus solely on the cross, our faith becomes more about death than life: more about going to heaven when we die than living here and now; more about escaping the world in the Rapture than caring for the world and its people.

Did Jesus die for us? Of course he did.  From the first, Christians have understood Jesus’ death as bridging the gap between God and people, conveying the depth of God’s love and the bottomless reach of God’s forgiveness and grace.  But Jesus was not “born to die.” If all that matters to us about Jesus is his death on the cross, we can (as Russell Moore sorrowfully observes) conveniently ignore the humble servant Jesus of the Gospels, and substitute a macho warrior Christ, largely of our own making.

Did Jesus die for us? Of course he did. But Jesus also lived for us, and indeed lives for us, as Immanuel: God with us.  Friends, the incarnation is a big idea: far too big be restricted to the Atonement alone. As theologian Edwin van Driel writes, “the category of redemption is not rich enough to explain the wonder of his presence” (Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology [Oxford: Oxford University, 2008], 165).

God’s act of creation already presupposed that God would consequently enter time and space as a creature, in order to enter fully into relationship with us. Rather than our relationship with Christ being merely, or at least primarily, functional (our sin is the problem; Christ’s death is the solution), van Driel proposes that “the intimate presence of God in Christ is the goal of all things,” so that “all aspects of our lives are related to him” (van Driel 2008, 165).

Friends, Jesus lived for us. Empowered by his invincible life, let us resolve to live for him, too–to do those things that Jesus did among us: feeding people, healing people, freeing people, proclaiming the good news of God’s salvation and the completion of God’s creation.