Rivers Move Me

Congaree River looking north from the Blossom Street Bridge, Columbia, SC.  We live at the east end of the Gervais Street Bridge seen in the distance.

Rivers have always had an emotional hold on me. Maybe it started when I was a kid in an old wooden boat on river shoals during the night with my granddaddy or uncle checking a trotline for catfish surrounded by the dark and the sounds of the river moving over rocks and rubbing against the boat. It’s enough to get a kid’s adrenalin flowing.

With their constant movement and varying depths and currents, rivers are like the passing of time and like life experiences. I can throw out an anchor and stay in one spot, but the river, or life, will still keep delivering new challenges from upstream. I can cut loose and just flow with the river and try to be prepared to deal with the surprises around each new bend. Or I can manage and navigate the river, adding speed in the slow spots and steering to the safer, or the most dangerous, passages through rapids, keeping the boat properly aligned. I can burn a lot of gas or calories moving upstream to enjoy the float back down later. Or I can just sit on the bank and watch everything go by though, even then, there is the danger of flood waters.

There is a cleansing aspect to rivers. They can become filthy with human or industrial waste, but, leave them alone for a time, and they clean themselves. Maybe that is why the preference in the early church was for baptism in “living” or moving waters and why Jesus was baptized in the River Jordan.

A lot of stuff is readily visible on the surface of a river, but underneath are dark mysteries, things from the past and living creatures of various types and sizes. Do I stay on the bank or float enclosed in the safety of the boat, or do I take a swim or do some wading? I can spend my time speculating about such things as how long it will take for a single molecule of water passing by to come this way again. Or I can catch a catfish and have it for breakfast the next morning. The possibilities are limitless.

I live overlooking the Congaree River in Columbia, SC. I can put a boat in and go a few miles south and see the same view that Catawba Indians floating the river five hundred years ago would have seen, the only man-made items in sight being the boat I am sitting in and its contents. And right in the city, I can walk our dog by the river and listen to its calming gurgling whisper.

The incredible timelessness and infinity and variability of a good river are insignificant compared to the attributes of God, but, perhaps observing and experiencing rivers can give us a glimpse of The Creator.

Comment on Psalm 29

In the fall of 2003, I took Dr. Monte Luker's course in Old Testament Theology at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary.  The notebook full of my notes and work from the course is lined up with about twenty similar compilations on a shelf above my desk.  I have found it useful once in a while to take down one of those notebooks and look through it for a brief refresher on some of the things I used to know. 

In Dr. Luker's course, we learned (temporarily in my case) some basic Hebrew and did some simple translations.  One assigned task was to translate Psalm 29 to English and write a brief (single page) comment on it's genre, literary form, structure, possible use, and meaning.  We had learned, for example, that most Psalms can be classified as Laments, Hymns of Praise, or Songs of Thanksgiving, and it doesn't take long to decide that Psalm 29 is a Hymn of Praise.   

I learned to enjoy playing around with structure of Bible passages by formatting and highlighting of similar or common words and phrases because it helps ferret out the focal point. That kind of treatment of Psalm 29 can result in something like this:

And here is what I wrote about the Psalm in November, 2003:

The 29th Psalm is a hymn of praise consisting of a summons of imperatives (“give” or “ascribe” and “bow down” or “worship”) followed by a proclamation about the majesty and power of the voice of the LORD. The hymn is concluded in verse 11 with a prayer that the LORD will give strength to His people and bless them with peace. “Strength may be seen as an inclusio, ascribed to the LORD in verse 1 and then given by him to his people in verse 11. Just inside that inclusio are ‘waters” in verse 2 and “flood” in verse 10. The phrase “voice of the LORD” is used seven times, interrupted by proclamations of what the LORD does. This Psalm could have been used as a responsive reading in liturgical worship.

The proclamation uses the dramatic and destructive wonders of nature to show the power of God in this Psalm. Thunder is used frequently in scripture, particularly in Exodus and Revelation, as an indicator of the presence of God. The breaking of the cedars may imply strong wind, flames of fire may imply lightening or wilderness fires, and shaking of the wilderness may be due to earthquakes. Either wind or fire could strip the forest bare. Within the proclamation, there is strong identity of the LORD with the voice of the LORD. The proclamation easily shifts from one to the other as subjects of similar verbs as in verse 5 where the voice breaks the cedars and then the LORD breaks the cedars.

Broyles (Craig C. Broyles, New International Biblical Commentary: Psalms (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999), 151-153.) points out that the Caananite worshipers of Baal would have been very familiar with the idea of associating these natural wonders with God and suggests that the Israelites may have modified an existing Canaanite hymn to Baal. But in the Psalm, there is no worship of nature or of the wonders of nature. God is in control and is over even the flood, forever. It is interesting that the summons is addressed to “heavenly beings” or sons of God and not to the people, and that also may be explained by having borrowed from the Canaanite religion. However, the heavenly beings are not gods, as the Canaanites might have thought, but are ones who bow down to and worship the LORD.

There is a striking contrast in the Prayer with the details of the proclamation. In spite of the mighty power and wonder of God, the prayer is that he bless his people with peace.

Laugh As You Are Able!

A few months ago I attended a funeral at a suburban Presbyterian Church and noticed something in their printed order of worship which I found to be very funny and thought provoking. In their bulletin, the instruction, “Stand,” is always followed by, “as you are able.” Now, I am completely used to seeing those same four words after the instruction to kneel at my own Lutheran church but was taken aback to realize that we have not given any consideration at all to worshippers who are, for one reason or another, unable to stand.  Actually, the words, "if you are able to get back up," might be a more appropriate concession during parts of the service where kneeling is suggested.

Of course Presbyterians are not kneelers, I guess because Calvin was a lawyer before he was a pastor.  Lawyers are not accustomed to kneeling.  Luther, on the other hand, had become well accustomed to kneeling as a Catholic priest and made that submissive position a regular part of Lutheran worship. I suspect that, if Presbyterians were kneelers, both kneeling and standing would be considered optional based on ability. Only sitting would be required of Presbyterian worshippers although Lutherans will probably continue to require both sitting and standing. It is interesting that neither group requires singing, leaving that entirely up to the discretion of the individual worshippers.

It seems that there are two or three things we could do to either eliminate these differences and move slightly in the direction of church unity or to present more rational and defensible instructions. We could add the phrase, “…as you are able,” to instructions to sit and to stand. This would accord wheelchair bound individuals and hemorrhoid sufferers the same accommodation we now accord those who are unable to kneel. I have no idea whether the Presbyterians would be willing to go along with making sitting optional.

Or, we could, in a blow to the political correctness movement, eliminate all such qualifying phrases and just print the simple instructions: Sit, Stand, Kneel, Pray, Sing, etc., and just leave it all up to the individual worshippers. After all, if someone who is unable to kneel, were to kneel, or if someone who is unable to stand were to stand, that would be a miracle worthy of celebration and thanksgiving and not at all something to regret or criticize. (People who are unable to sing, me included, frequently sing, but such instances are not normally considered miracles.)

Finally, we could truly celebrate our Christian freedom and print after each such instruction the phrase, “…if you want to.”

Of course there are environmental considerations which probably rule out any expansion of these qualifying phrases since printing of “as you are able” twice in each bulletin times 250 or so bulletins per week times 52 weeks per year (104,000 words) has a carbon footprint approximately equal to the difference between one 60 watt incandescent light bulb and one of those squiggley little fluorescent bulbs Al Gore wants us to use.

And, if the subject is brought up in a Lutheran congregation, someone is bound to play the “change” card.

____________________________________________________________
Here's a note added April, 2011.  Fifteen months after writing the above I saw this in the bulletin at a big Methodist church:

*Congregation standing. If standing is uncomfortable, please remain seated and continue your participation.

As I implied in Big Methodists, it is tough to out-accommodate Methodists, though there is still little consideration for those who are uncomfortable sitting...or prefer not to participate.  This is closer to allowing the worshippers to do whatever suits them...which seems quite reasonable to me.  Anyway, I still like those big Methodist churches and am increasingly uncomfortable with the PC movement.

Proclaiming The Gospel

Quite a bit has been written, pro and con, about Brit Hume’s public recommendation to Tiger Woods that he take advantage of the forgiveness and redemption available through faith in Jesus Christ as a route to starting over. Some have objected to his use of the airwaves to make such a personal statement, to the advice itself, or to the implication that any one religious faith has an advantage over others. Mr. Hume is not backing off or apologizing. Some say the uproar and objections are not fair because people often get away with publicly mocking Christianity while freely advocating or openly respecting other faiths while Christians sometimes cannot talk freely in public about their faith without being criticized or ridiculed.

Of course the United States was founded on religious freedom as one of its pillars, but the focus was on freedom of the various Christian groups from being dominated by whatever Christian group was in the majority and might possibly be established as an official state religion. Such freedom was not a sure thing. Before the English took over in 1664 and adopted a policy of toleration of other churches, the Dutch Reformed majority along the Hudson River prohibited Lutherans from bringing ordained pastors from the Netherlands to the new country and from free practice of their religion. We have Roger Williams, libertarian in spirit, to thank for founding Providence, the first colony based on the principle of religious freedom, in the mid 1600’s. It had nothing to do with Islam or mysterious Indian or Eastern religions. Catholics, Protestants, Lutherans, and Baptists had all fought and died and killed and suffered persecution in an environment not too different from that in the Middle East today, and many coming to the new world wanted to be free of that and free to worship as they pleased without any laws establishing one faith over another. They wanted to be free to worship, not free from worship.

So, with fundamentalist radical Islam having no interest at all in separation of Church and State, we have to leave them out of this discussion. But among the other faiths, perhaps the reason Christianity is singled out for restraint and abuse and disgust is because, for Christianity, the final bottom line is not, “Well, whatever.” Christianity makes claims of truth that cannot be denied if one is to remain true to the faith.

Maybe this problem is aggravated by the fact that we Christians sometimes present the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a threat or as a self improvement program of some kind. “Believe in Jesus or you are going to Hell!” Or perhaps, “Believe in Jesus Christ and you will be healthy and wealthy and wise the rest of your days.” Well aside from the fact that believing in Jesus with the very selfish intent of avoiding Hell seems to be an un-Christian thing to do, it does not represent a true and full presentation of the Gospel. Nor does the Gospel promise a life of prosperity and good health and happiness. It seems to me that the true presentation of the Christian Gospel, or good news, is that Jesus is God among us, come to show His love for us and to show us the way to have abundant life now. And there is no promise that the descriptor “abundant” rules out suffering and sacrifice. I don’t believe Jesus came saying, “Man, these people are going to Hell if I don’t do something,” or “These folks are poor. We need to show them how to make some money.” I prefer to think he came saying that, rich or poor, we are living selfish lives, wrapped up in meaningless selfish activities and worrying about ourselves primarily and mistreating each other and always trying to pile up wealth and accumulate more toys and looking for satisfaction in all the wrong places and wrong ways etc.

I believe he came saying, “I will show them what I intended life to be. I will show them that if they want to be first, they have to be last and be a servant to all. I will show them that they serve me by serving the least among them. I will show them what it means to have abundant life.”

If we Christians show a little evidence that we have heard that message and realize our shortcomings and are asking forgiveness for them, we will have a much warmer reception from hearers of The Gospel than we will ever get with a self righteous “I found it!” approach. ("I Found It" was the poorly chosen name, in my opinion, of an interdenominational Christian evangelistic campaign in the 1970's.)  Proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus should not include the pronoun “I” except one time followed by the verb “believe.”

After all, that is the pattern established by the original proclaimers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, who wrote in the third person about what Jesus said and did and not in the first person about what it meant to them. The only first person quote I found in a quick search of those Gospels was this: Luke 1:3-4 "I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed." So, we 21st century believers should investigate carefully as well so that we can give orderly accounts of the Gospel. I personally have done a good bit of the investigating but am woefully short in the giving of orderly accounts and will be found standing in line asking forgiveness for not having faithfully done so.

Here are links to what some have written sympathetically about Mr. Hume’s statement. 

Ross Douthat

Bill O’Reilly

Matt Barber

Brent Bozell

Michael Gerson

Tim Graham

Church Statements on Homosexual Behavior

Many Christians are upset over endorsement of homosexual behavior in some Churches. Some of us argue that the problem is that endorsement is a positive judgment that goes beyond (violates) Jesus’ warning against judging, but I suspect it is often just a case of seeing specks in the eyes of neighbors while ignoring the logs in our own eyes. (Matthew 7:1-3)

In the summer of 2009 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, for example, voted to allow ordination of practicing homosexuals in monogamous relationships and to allow the blessing of such unions. Some see that decision as indecisive since it does not endorse but allows endorsing. Whatever one’s positions on these issues, it is difficult to deny that many churches and church people have, with an unjustified attitude of self righteousness, brought focus and pressure on homosexual behavior, and sometimes even on homosexuality itself, while paying scant attention to explicit teachings of Jesus himself who said nothing at all about either.

For example, Jesus commands us to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, follow His commandments, feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty, eat His Body and Blood, follow the two greatest commandments (love God and neighbor), follow the Great Commission (go, make disciples, baptize, and teach), be last of all and be a servant to all. He tells us not to cast stones unless we are without sin, to avoid anger and swearing and to trust in our Heavenly Father and not worry about tomorrow. He teaches us to avoid adultery and lust and divorce and greed. He even tells us we have to die to ourselves and give up everything to follow him and that it is not going to be easy.

Well, when is the last time the Church came down hard on somebody for being greedy or selfish or for getting caught up in adultery or for failing to show up for Holy Communion or for never telling anyone about Jesus or for criticizing and judging others or for not dying to themselves and giving up everything for Jesus.

In Matthew, Jesus tells us that we are made unclean by evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander but doesn’t seem to say that any one of these is any worse than the others and says nothing specifically about homosexual behavior.

And it’s not just Jesus. We find in Leviticus that anyone who curses his mother or father or commits adultery is to be put to death, exactly the same punishment some like to point out was prescribed for two men who lie together. Exodus 35:2 tells us that anybody who does any work on the Sabbath must be put to death! In the past century or so the Church has not been too tough on cursing of parents, working on the Sabbath, or even committing adultery. In spite of the fact that we don’t normally take these prohibitions in Leviticus very seriously, parts of the church have tended to get very stirred up and begin quoting Leviticus in cases involving two men found lying together.

In the first chapter of Romans, St. Paul gives a little overview of human history with a pretty impressive list of sins including failure to glorify God and give thanks to him, sexual impurity, worship of created things rather than the Creator, shameful homosexual lusts, wickedness, evil, greed, depravity, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slander, insolence, arrogance, boastfulness, disobedience of parents, faithlessness, heartlessness, and ruthlessness. Why do we read this and just see the phrase, “shameful homosexual lusts?” Paul didn’t rank these sins but wrote that everybody knows that all who do such things deserve death but they just keep on doing them and approving of others doing them. Has anything changed?

So, to those of us who would rather not see the churches adopting more liberal stances on homosexual behavior, or anything else for that matter, because we think the job of the Church is forgiveness more than granting of permission, it shouldn’t be difficult to see why homosexual Christians might feel justified in saying, “Hey, we know you think we are wrong, but how about cutting us a little slack. You’ve been cutting yourselves and everybody else but us plenty of slack for centuries.”

Not To Worry

In the volunteer work I do with Home Works of America, we involve teens and adults in the repair of homes for low-income elderly homeowners. We close our repair sessions in prayer with the home owner and the volunteers together. We call it a House Blessing, and part of it is the reading of the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:25-34.

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Sometimes as we read this aloud in the presence of a mix of prosperous middle class teens and adults and one or more individuals living in poverty, I think, “This is crazy.” I have that thought because the home owner is very often in a bad situation because somebody didn’t give any thought to tomorrow, even about something so simple as fixing a water leak that over time has rotted a bathroom floor, and that many of the volunteers are in very comfortable positions because somebody did give thought to tomorrow with respect to education and savings and investment and other worldly things or even about an other-worldly thing such as Christian education.


In one particular case I was having such thoughts when the reader got to verse 33 which begins with “but” and which seems to be the key point Jesus makes. I thought, “OK, the point is not to completely drop all thinking about and planning for the future. It is to seek God first and be sure that serves as the context for the planning. It’s a matter of priorities.” I’m not saying that is the definitive word of truth here. I’m just saying that is the thought I had.


Later at home I looked at this passage and decided that we err in starting with verse 25 because the first word is “therefore,” which is a clear signal that what follows can be understood only if we know what the “therefore” refers to. In this case, the previous verse is:

No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.

Then we get the “therefore…do not worry” followed by the “but seek first…his righteousness.” I guess Jesus’ point was that if we get our priorities right, the things we seek will be different and we will live lives of peace and joy free from worry about tomorrow. OK, all who have their priorities correctly established according to the words of Jesus, whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow, please stand! The rest of us can then join humbly in the closing prayer we use at the house blessing, the “Our Father,” in which we say: “Forgive us our trespasses.”

Not To Worry

In the volunteer work I do with Home Works of America, we involve teens and adults in the repair of homes for low-income elderly homeowners. We close our repair sessions in prayer with the home owner and the volunteers together. We call it a House Blessing, and part of it is the reading of the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:25-34.

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Sometimes as we read this aloud in the presence of a mix of prosperous middle class teens and adults and one or more individuals living in poverty, I think, “This is crazy.” I have that thought because the home owner is very often in a bad situation because somebody didn’t give any thought to tomorrow, even about something so simple as fixing a water leak that over time has rotted a bathroom floor, and that many of the volunteers are in very comfortable positions because somebody did give thought to tomorrow with respect to education and savings and investment and other worldly things or even about an other-worldly thing such as Christian education.


In one particular case I was having such thoughts when the reader got to verse 33 which begins with “but” and which seems to be the key point Jesus makes. I thought, “OK, the point is not to completely drop all thinking about and planning for the future. It is to seek God first and be sure that serves as the context for the planning. It’s a matter of priorities.” I’m not saying that is the definitive word of truth here. I’m just saying that is the thought I had.


Later at home I looked at this passage and decided that we err in starting with verse 25 because the first word is “therefore,” which is a clear signal that what follows can be understood only if we know what the “therefore” refers to. In this case, the previous verse is:

No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.

Then we get the “therefore…do not worry” followed by the “but seek first…his righteousness.” I guess Jesus’ point was that if we get our priorities right, the things we seek will be different and we will live lives of peace and joy free from worry about tomorrow. OK, all who have their priorities correctly established according to the words of Jesus, whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow, please stand! The rest of us can then join humbly in the closing prayer we use at the house blessing, the “Our Father,” in which we say: “Forgive us our trespasses.”