Biblical Jazz

The scene in Exodus 33 of Moses and God up on the mountain is extraordinary.  Moses has ask for God to reveal His glory to him and what does God do?  He places Moses in the cleft of the mountain and reveals only his backside as not to completely destroy Moses’ frail human body with the supremecy of the being of God.  What a gentil and vulnerable moment.  God gives Moses a glimpse, a taste of His magnificent glory.   The view of God’s butt leaves Moses glowing as he heads back down the mountain.  He didn’t even get to see the best view of God and yet Moses was blown away.  Just imagine what it would have been for Moses to see God’s face or even all of God’s glory. 

I am a chaplain at a hospital in Dallas and this morning I saw glimpse of God’s glory.  I found myself in Moses’ shoes,  being discouraged with God and where He has placed me in minstry for the time being.  I needed some affirmation that God was still with me and working through me.  A nurse came into my office and shared with me a very vulnerable part of his life.  He has been in a terrible situation where a gang of men shot up his car.  He was left with a bullet in his head.  After the x-rays came back, the bullet appeared to have stopped and did not go through his skull.  He continued sharing with me the anger and hatred he felt towards these men.  He said he drank for a straight three days until one night he found himself on his knees praying to a God he has never known.  Twenty-four hours he woke up still on his knees in the prayer position.  He said all anger and hatred had left him and only love filled his heart.  He ended the conversationwith this, “Chaplain, I knew that was the power of God in my life and I just felt led to share that with you.” 

I know that God’s form up on the mountain with Moses was mostly not a human form but for me nakedness is a vulnerability where God is most glorified.  God was glorified in the naked of Adam and Eve before the fall, God’s was glorified with Christ vulnerability and nakedness on the cross and God was glorified in the conversation I had with a grown man sharing itimate details of his life.  Today, I got to see God’s butt.

My name is Erica Evans and I am a new blogger. This is basically my test blog. I am actually kind of excited about trying this new form of communication with the world. Currently, I am a second year student at Truett Seminary and a Chaplain Resident with Methodist Health in Dallas, TX. With this in mind, I for warn anyone who reads my blogs that they will most likely revolve around my experiences in the hospital setting. I hope you enjoy the thoughts of a young pastor whose daily life is constantly filled with surprises.

May God be glorified

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Below are my reflections on the insight session on Persecution of Christians led by Robert Johansen professor of peace studies at Notre Dame. Jim Hardenbrook began the session with a passage in Hebrews 13:3 Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.
Johansen told us according to the UN religious persecution and religious discrimination exists in half the countries of the world. Johansen argues that the reason Christians (Church of the Brethren) should be concerned about the persecution of Christians because they are human beings. Christians value compassion. This means that Christians should oppose any form of religious persecution and discrimination.
Religious persecution and discrimination is not only bad theology it is illegal Johansen stated. International law outlaws religious persecution. However, religious persecution and the discrimination persist. Religious liberty flourishes in the context where the rule of law is the norm. Here the rule of law means the free exercise of religion and non-faith. Religious tradition is an identity marker. Persecution for identity markers are another way to purge a nation of minorities whether racial, religious, ethnic or otherwise.
An idea that requires more attention is the religious intolerance gap. The pre-occupation with religious liberty is a necessary element because of the need for reciprocity. Many churches with origins in the radical reformation (Anabaptist and Baptist) know firsthand religious persecution. However, when those roots move from firsthand memory then the solidarity with the persecuted exhorted in Hebrews becomes more difficult to nurture.
A crass solution of force or violence often instigates counter-violence. One sees a a cycle of violence and counter-violence, or violence and vengeance.
Johansen told us that “genocide” is a technical term in international law which explains the reticence of U.S. officials to use the term.
The long range prevention of religious persecution and discrimination is peace building. This includes economic development, democracy and education. Johansen told us that recent research proves that increased contact across boundaries proportionally reduces violence ahead of time. This would re-frame the ecumenical and inter-faith dialogue task. It is now a matter of peace building. This becomes an organic ecumenism. The pro-active work is building an infra-structure of trust that becomes the peace-building work of ecumenism.
Mike Hostetter told us that in the nineteenth and twentieth century certainty of faith became the gold standard of faith and subverted the peace building work of faith. Further it misses the provocative work of the Cross as a metaphor of contingency not a certainty that masks social and political powers.
A key question is how we can nurture a passion for this view of ecumenism and pro-active peace-building. It is good for us to return to Hebrew 13:3.

As we began our investigation of the five scrolls we first looked at the liturgical dates and texts in our lives. Below you will see a glimpse of how non-liturgical Baptist still marks time and texts. (Unless otherwise noted each proposal for the ritual event and the song depends on your assessment. Next we need to read the five scrolls
Church liturgy
Christmas (five students) Matthew (the gift of the three travelers) and Luke 2. The texts take a background to behavior traditions such as waking up early for fellowship with the family.
Ash Wednesday – The text is Psalm 51. The church as near.
Easter (four students) the day the world was reconciled to God (John 3:16-17) This is a time to go to church and eat with family.
Secular liturgy
National Pirate day the pirate stuff website
Wedding anniversary (one student described this as his anniversary another student described her parent’s anniversary) – pictures and the wedding notebook. The text gives witness to the legacy of the family; it is a passionate legacy
Juneteenth (two students) – the story of Juneteenth
MLK Day (three students) – the “I have a dream” and the” I have been to the mountain top” speeches
My birthday (three students) – The day my personal journey began. Frank Sinatra “My Way” Another student celebrates her birth month. Each week she celebrates in a different way. She registered some surprised how easily friends were convinced that she needed an entire month to celebrate her birthday. Another student described the celebration of his father’s birthday every year.
4th of July (two students) The text the constitution and the declaration of independence re the focus documents for this holiday. One student declared, I come from a very patriotic family. Both remarked that this is a time of fellowship and food. The other student reminisced about 4th of July celebration where he saw Neil Diamond and heard him sing “Sweet Caroline.”
Spring break – there is no text but rather family travel ski trips and the like.
Halloween – The text once again falls into the background and the costume behavior comes to the fore as the key element of this time. However, one should not forget the ritual of asking for and giving candy.
Thanksgiving – the songs of thanksgiving in the Psalter

We took time to ask what the family aphorisms that we grew up with are. Then we compared them to those in the Book of Proverbs. Here is the list, what would you add?

A family that prays together stays together

Never go back the same way you came. Adventures are found on the detours. Enjoy the journey.

Skinny people can’t cook

Do what you want because you are going to anyway

The Bible before book and books before (foot, basket, base, volley)ball

Don’t cry over anything that can’t cry over you.

Nobody knows a fool until he/she opens his/her mouth.

Nobody said life was fair.

You better give your soul to Jesus because your butt belongs to me.

When momma ain’t happy nobody’s happy. So keep momma happy.

We all have a crazy uncle, and we have to love them.

You get what you get and don’t throw a fit.

Dad is always right.

Dad says, “I brought you into this world and I can take you out.

Marc Ellis in his book Reading the Torah Out Loud provides a number of provocative observations. The story richly ruminates on the process of reading aloud. J.L. Austin in his William James lectures at Harvard How to Do Things with Words. His notion of performative nature of words gives one a way to think about how words form human and bounding between humans. Reading the Ellis’ book prompts me to think about two contexts for reading aloud. On the one hand Ellis reminds us of the intimate, family situation. On the other, there is the reading in the public square.
When the seventh month came –the people of Israel being settled in their towns—all the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate. They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the Law of Moses, which the LORD has given to Israel. (NRSV Neh 7:73b-8:1) The reading out loud as reading in public in Nehemiah indicates that this performative speech/reading functions as part of a covenantal renewal process. We might see reading out loud as a form of testimony.
At the side of the child’s bed we read the Bible together as more like a Lectio Divina than as a public testimony of covenantal renewal.

I had just come back from the gym and was getting a little breakfast when the first airplane crashed into the towers on September 11, 2001. The metaphor that grabs me most about that day is fire; imagine the temperature that it took to melt the infrastructure of those buildings. I vividly remember thinking to myself “how does one forgive a person for committing such a heinous and hateful act.
I taught courses at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies hosted by Xavier University in New Orleans for several years. On the one hand I listened intently as various news agencies described the event around hurricane Katrina. On the other hand, I tried to distance myself lest I be overcome with grief. Like many post-moderns in this “global village” the access to news in this “flat world” means one must carefully negotiate between empathy and distance. The hurricane brought the flood. Like the biblical account of the flood there were winners and losers. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blame the hurricane on the New Orleans lifestyle. They relented when mainstream America mouth agape and stunned by the callous use of biblical historiography retaliated with denunciations. The reaction to Katrina and the subsequent aid dramatized issues of race and class in ways that many Americans found quite disturbing.
This week the earthquake in Haiti once again reminds us of natural disasters and human frailty and courage.
The fire and the flood, the human caused trauma and the natural disaster shape the lives of women and men living in North America but does that change biblical studies? Kathleen M. O’Connor (Lamentations & the Tears of the World) and Tod Linafelt (Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book) have done this for the book of Lamentations. I wonder what other books in the area of biblical studies examine hermeneutics after these sorts of disasters.

Some books continue to hold up even after a span of years. Walter Brueggemann wrote the book Israel’s Praise: Doxology against Idolatry and Ideology in 1988. However, more than twenty years hence the argument remains compelling. Brueggemann built on the work of Sigmund Mowinckel, Psalmenstudien 1921-1924. In these as of yet un-translated volumes Mowinckel explores the creative and formative function of the ancient Israelite cult as evidenced in the biblical Psalms.
What Brueggemann does so effectively is put this in a post-modern context bringing to bear the work of literary critics/biblical scholars, sociologists, psychologists, and theologians in order to analyze the constructive work of praise. Brueggemann claims that praise constructs a life world.
At the same time praise as constitutive of a life world also functions as a boundary. This boundary provides a hard edge to the soft idolatries and ideologies of post-modernity.
So even after over twenty years Brueggemann’s observation of the constitutive and discerning role of praise continues to challenge the reader of the Bible.

The air was frosty in North Manchester Indiana as the spring term began. T. Wayne Reiman nearing retirement offered a course called the Philosophy of Education. I enrolled in the course as one of my last requirements for graduation. The class read as book by Carl Rogers, who I knew of from psychology classes. The name of the book was Freedom to Learn. Rogers among other things commended the idea of learning contracts. Paulo Freire was another reading in this class. Freire described an implicit philosophy of education metaphor that dominated higher education in the twentieth century, the banking idea. The student comes to the bank. The professor makes a deposit in the brain, or we might say the database of the student. The student pays tuition in exchange for this increased database. Freire challenged his readers to hold out for a different educational metaphor one with a more librerative outlook. Years of graduate school and teaching put me pretty far back into the banking model.

However, increasingly I decided to go back to the future. Over the semester break I read The Adult Learner by Malcolm Knowles fifth edition revised by Elwood F. Holton III and Richard A. Swanson. I have decided to go back learning contracts and a more self consciously student centered approach in my classes.
This semester I want to see what happens when the adult learner encounters a Web 2.0 world. I wonder where it will lead.