Psalm 34

Posted on January 24, 2015 by ehurst

It can seem at times that David’s songs are awfully repetitious. Consider that virtually every one of them represents some adventure David went through or something that left a major impression on him. In this case, we are told that David celebrates delivery from a sticky political situation (1 Samuel 21:10-22:1). Saul was trying to hunt him down and David hardly knew where to run. He ended up carrying the sword of Goliath back to the giant’s home town. Don’t get hung up on the names for the king of Gath. Abimelech seems a hereditary title while Achish is more likely a royal family name. David’s escape was to feign madness in accordance with popular imagination of such things. We suspect Achish was hoping for such an excuse since David was a family friend or sorts.

This is an acrostic psalm as with Psalm 9. The first half is clearly a call to worship with him. A significant number of contemporary worship songs echo the words here because more than one English translation is rather exhilarating. Starting in verse 11, David takes on the role of teacher, pointing out that what humans really need and generally want can be found in conforming to God’s moral character. He notes that it’s not always possible to distinguish between the sinners and the righteous in terms of the risks we all take in our fallen world, but that God delivers His own in the midst of trouble.

We also note that David offers a common figure of speech of not worrying about broken bones. John’s Gospel (19:33) quotes it as oddly fulfilled in the literal with Jesus on the Cross. In the context of John’s writing we realize he isn’t a silly literalist, but simply notes that Jesus is the real fulfillment of Israeli ideals. We note a great many scholars miss the subtlety.

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Vision Statement

Posted on January 24, 2015 by ehurst

I’ve composed what should serve as the vision statement for the anticipated meat space branch of this parish. You can read it here. It’s too long to post here on the blog and other items take priority. Steal my ideas, please.

Update: I’ve closed that site and the mission has changed.

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Prayer Request: Car Parts

Posted on January 23, 2015 by ehurst

Update: A donor has covered the cost of the part. God bless you all. We should be up and running again sometime tomorrow (i.e., Saturday).

Original post:

Our delightful Volvo is in trouble. The alternator died. We’ve got about half enough to get one right now, so pray with us that we can come up with a solution. Otherwise, we wait a week until I get paid. Perhaps you know that the issue is complicated by this thing called a “core charge” — they want the old one in exchange for reducing the price. So if I take the old one to the parts house in town that has one in stock, it’s around $230 (US).

The nice part is that our insurance company covered towing it home. The not-so-nice part was that the sheriff’s deputy wanted to impound it right away since it was sitting part way on a busy road when it died. We managed to stall until our tow arrived.

No, I’m not sad or in a panic. God is good and He does these things so He can show off how His people handle it with aplomb. But some of you have said you wanted to know when stuff like this happens, so now you know.

Meanwhile, we are getting stuff on this thing fixed as quickly as possible. When it’s all done, we still will have paid far less than market value, parts included. Again, the Lord is good.

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Pastoral Note on Mission and Tribulation

Posted on January 23, 2015 by ehurst

For those of you who regard yourselves as members of this virtual parish: There will be — must be — a meat space component to this ministry sooner or later. It is the one career for which I am best and most completely trained. It’s also the one I’ve spent the least amount of time doing in meat space up to now.

However, if you consider the radical departure my teaching has taken from the mainstream, it won’t surprise you that the real-world branch of my ministry can’t take off until there are some big changes in our social and political context. In purely human terms, no one has any reason to leave what they have and seek something different. Our “something different” will hardly call out to anyone unless the situation changes and makes it the answer.

Carrying this a little further, you would have to expect the social and political changes to be rather painful. This is what I see coming, and it’s the part that draws me to write this today. I might have a tough time making it seem real to you as individuals, but I carry a burden of care for all of you. That’s what the pastor’s calling means. Not that I regard you as helpless sheep too stupid to avoid getting eaten, but the emphasis is on my seeing your welfare as my welfare. I can’t afford to lose a single one of you in that sense; such is the Ancient Hebrew ethics of shepherding.

My greatest concern right now is that you prepare your minds for what your hearts might tell you. We are in tribulation and it’s going to get painful. I have no way to predict how it will affect each of you, nor even what my own story will be later on. All I know is that it will be painful enough to make a significant portion of the people turn away from the current religious environment, so try to imagine what comes with that. If nothing else, it will be painful to watch, but unless you have some of that otherworldly religion I teach here, I suspect it will cause your human side to panic.

Only you can stop that for yourself. Only you can resolve and commit yourself to exploiting this life for the glory of God. Only you can decide that is what matters most in this life. I’ll do everything I can to help you get there. Don’t be afraid to contact me personally for anything a pastor can handle, to include specific prayer requests.

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StT: 1 Corinthians 9:9

Posted on January 22, 2015 by ehurst

(Continuing with selections from Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text.)

Is it not amusing how quickly evangelical clergymen seize on something that lines their pockets? This is one place where they don’t seem to mind spiritualizing the text. Paul quotes Deuteronomy 25:4 where Moses forbids muzzling an ox from eating the grain it threshes. On purely behavioral grounds alone we could guess that if an ox knew it was allowed to eat some of the grain on the threshing floor, it would never resist the task. However, other points of Law note that animals warrant mercy, particularly when they do our hard work.

Paul is not contradicting the call for a merciful spirit. Do oxen go to Heaven? The point is not saving the animals, but learning to be generous. It’s not about the ox, but about our moral connection to God’s Creation. If you know that divine justice requires you to be kind to animals, how does that not apply to your fellow humans? The divine moral principle of kindness is what matters here. Sacrificial love is global, sweeping in all of God’s Creation. You cannot connect to God if you don’t embrace His moral character. While we are here on this plane of existence, we are part of it, and so is His moral character. Conform yourself to His character in all things. That means you don’t balk at contributing to the proper care of your church staff. If their ministry helps you grab hold of God’s promises in this world, you owe it to God to share with others or you don’t understand in the first place. The preacher shouldn’t have to pass his own hat.

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Android Review

Posted on January 22, 2015 by ehurst

Android devices are not real computers. I’ve been using a Dell Venue 7 for a few weeks now, and it sucks.

Granted, it does what it was designed to do. That is, Google intentionally crippled it because it caters to folks who consume computer activity, but don’t use it to produce anything. It’s just fine for light weight communication and surfing, and might be pretty useful for land navigation if you can wade through a hundred apps claiming the same thing but precious few that actually do you any good. About the only thing you can do on Android that requires a significant attention span is read ebooks.

But you could never write a book on one. Most serious writers would find Android intolerable. Even when you find tools from your actual computer ported over the Android, the defaults have all been altered. By that I mean that nothing works as you would expect from using it everywhere else. Android suffers from very poor support for a mouse and dicey support for keyboards. It keeps trying to drop my Bluetooth mouse, even when they are within inches.

So if you are a writer or like to twiddle with graphics, forget Android. From what I’ve read, Chromebook is even worse, with a horribly sparse collection of apps that are far less useful than the ones on Android. If you can find something you like online, you might be okay, but if it doesn’t run in a browser, you can’t have it on Chromebook. If it were an emergency, I could write some short stuff on the Android tablet, but not when I’m working on a longer project and need all the extra tools. They just aren’t there, and given the design of Android, they never will be there. Google is supporting the trend to dumb-down users and make them consumers, not creators.

Again, Android is for folks who don’t really need a computer.

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Morality and Privacy

Posted on January 21, 2015 by ehurst

There is no mind so strong against manipulation as the mind which does not stand in its own strength, but is a second-class faculty that serves the heart.

One of the things I pray for daily is a better moral awareness. If all you have are the standard human faculties for perception and analysis, you don’t have much. Those will not help you see with God’s eyes. You’ll be stuck in the shadows, unable to discern between substance and mere ghosts. Moral awareness shines the light of truth on things, so that you can act according to what God is actually doing in this world.

It serves no purpose to fear something that cannot harm you. More to the point, it does no good to fear something that will not affect your mission for God’s glory. What enhances His glory does you no harm. You will have to learn for yourself how to hear from your own heart whether something afflicts your mission for His glory, enhances it or simply makes no difference.

In general, surveillance is a fact of life. For now, there are steps we can take to minimize our loss of privacy in some portions of our existence. We should expect that private space to diminish. The Nanny State is here and she insists on sticking her nose into everything. She’s not alone. Big business is even worse, though the latter is more willing to play manipulation games to get what they want. Their big thing is targeted advertising.

It’s creepy, but to the honest, there are actually very few humans paying much attention. Almost all of that snooping is automated, to include the part that serves up the creepy personalized advertising. It’s almost funny how all these agencies demand the right to snoop in such full detail, then do so little with the data. There is precious little personal human interest in our individual details.

By no means do I defend this snooping, automated or not. Rather, I seek here to provide a moral context for how we should react. Fighting it will become increasingly difficult and expensive. At some point, your risk your mission for God’s glory by virtue of becoming obsessive about incidentals. It’s no so different from noticing the decreasing rate of return on the investment of resources in privacy.

While persecution can also be automated, that’s not the point here. The question is political for the most part, and we are forbidden by God to mess with that. The powers that be will have their snooping until God crushes it and/or them. Did it never occur to you that He can control how computers process that data, and protect His mission in you? Nothing escapes His sovereign hand. That sort of privacy is not a matter of decency and morality, but a question of political activism, so we are obliged to find ways to convince our minds to let go of something we cannot change in the first place

I don’t think you will incur serious threats to your mission if you compromise with the likes of Google. That is, using and Android device or a Chromebook requires that you use Google’s services, just as using any Mac device means compromising with Apple’s snooping. By no means do I suggest Google or Apple are harmless, any more than I would say Microsoft is a good moral ally. Rather, these companies are our Roman Roads for today. If we are going to use the Internet to communicate, having absolute control over every detail of our privacy is simply not possible. By accepting the annoyance of their automated snooping and creepy targeted advertising, along with their willingness to compromise with various governments with our data, we can make better use of time and resources for the Lord’s glory.

The age of personal computers with all those barriers to invasion of privacy is passing away. God is still on the throne and not up pacing back and forth, wringing His hands in consternation. When it’s in His interest, our privacy will be protected as much as He likes. Otherwise, we are fighting Him by fighting a battle we cannot win.

Don’t rely on your head to get this right; trust your heart.

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StT: Acts 8:32-33

Posted on January 21, 2015 by ehurst

(Another sample from Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text.)

In the prophetic literature of the Old Testament, Israel was characterized in many different ways. Sometimes as the land she occupied, or some of the fruit-bearing trees there, perhaps as a vineyard, various kinds of beasts based on alleged temperaments, and often as a daughter or wife of the Lord. The prophets also repeatedly used the image of Israel as God’s own son, as noted previously in this series (Matthew 2:15).

Starting around chapter 49 of his prophecy, Isaiah paints a stirring image of Israel as the servant of God. We refer to these passages as the Suffering Servant image. The prophet confuses things intentionally. At times he is himself the Suffering Servant striving to bring Israel back, but it was Israel that was meant to be this loyal servant. That these passages became viewed as Messianic in character was due largely to Israel refusing to be that servant. The nature of parable is that the symbol is bigger than any specific application, because the image bears a strong moral importance. In this case, the Suffering Servant is the divine mission. Thus, it could be Israel the Nation if the nation was willing to become Israel the Mission. She was unwilling, so the fulfillment of God’s will awaited someone who was so willing. There had to be a Messiah person because Israel refused to be the Messiah Nation. (Luke raises the issue more specifically in the later half of his chapter 13.)

One of the elders chosen to give family structure to the Diaspora Jews who had joined the church in Jerusalem was Philip. The Lord called him off to this special mission of meeting up with a high official from another country who had converted to Judaism. The man was riding in a carriage or large chariot and Philip hiked down some back roads to intersect this fellow as his vehicle went the long way around on nicer roads down from Jerusalem toward his home country on the northern coast of Africa. The man was reading from Isaiah in that Suffering Servant section, and Luke quotes a few verses to give us the context. As usual, this is a case of reverse spiritualization. Isaiah the prophet intended nothing literal from this quotation, but was pressing a moral vision of obedience to God, a willingness to suffer human oppression and just plain bad luck, in order to cling to God’s revealed moral character.

That the passage was so close to literal in describing what happened to Jesus was the whole point of this part of Luke’s account. Jesus fulfilled the mission of Israel, which mission Israel rejected. Thus, Jesus took the crown as God’s Suffering Servant. For Philip to teach this official the meaning of this passage meant explaining how it was fulfilled in Jesus the man.

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The Mission before Us

Posted on January 20, 2015 by ehurst

Some thoughts…

As always, I support DIY religion. Nothing binds you to my teaching and certainly none of my calling. When I write, I assume you at least have an interest in what I have to say, if not some limited commitment to the message.

Aside from using threads of historical Christian scholarship and some of the language for talking about faith, we take almost nothing from the mainstream Christian religion. It’s not as if we have no overlap at all with what they teach, but we start from an entirely different place. They say they start with Christ on the Cross, but they first wade through the Enlightenment assumptions before they get there. Existing organizations that were born before the Enlightenment still reflect entirely too much that philosophical influence. We pointedly reject the Enlightenment and try to find a much earlier starting place from which to approach the Cross. Our message is really very different from theirs.

So my blog posts assume an acquaintance with all of that stuff, and with the resulting teachings that I offer here and in my books. When I talk about the mission, I’m talking about my mission. If you embrace anything at all here, I assume some of this will apply to you.

It’s beyond comprehension at times. Mainstream Christians talk about how they haven’t quite gotten the gospel message to every corner of the world just yet. So they keep pushing, sending missionaries, etc. Some have gotten seriously sidetracked, but you probably recognize at least the verbiage of taking the gospel to all the world. Here we come behind them trying to take this more ancient gospel to all the world, too, but we have to reach the Christians, as well. Our job is much larger.

Nothing about this pretends to correct Christianity, as if what I offer is a better, purer version. Instead, my focus is on how rich is this faith that drives me, and how all those folks out there don’t have their share. I walk around here during hours of darkness praying about this mission, and my heart reaches out to the trees and beyond them to the stars. I am at one with all Creation. I hear all of nature singing of Our Father’s glory. This isn’t literary; it’s about as literal as can be. My sensory heart has been awakened to the song of Creation. My mind struggles to capture even a single note of that song.

While I do encounter a few folks who can talk or write like that, I have not met more than a precious handful who actually live it. After I post this I’m going out in the woods near here and work on yet another trail loop in the northern woods section. While I’m there cutting, the plants I remove talk to me. The stuff I should cut to make a path will remind me, “Don’t forget me!” They know that I operate according to the Father’s purpose, so they volunteer for whatever it takes to make Him glorious. Do you think this is silly? In something so pitifully unimportant in the scale of things as humans view it, God still has a moral standard.

I wander around in the woods because I can’t think of anything else to do right now. I cut a path so I can be out there in prayerful solitude, whether others use it or not. Yes, I see a proliferation of deer tracks afterward wherever I clear a path, so it’s obvious I’m not the only creature using the trails. I do this waiting for Him to say, “Come; it is time.” I keep saying how I have been for some years now an arrow in the quiver. Having tried several times according to the traditions of my Protestant Christian elders, the ministry kept falling on its face. It wasn’t time yet.

We cannot simply ape the methods and structures of the past. We cannot do what the other religious groups have done. Somehow our different message must speak through different ways of doing religion. There has to be a fundamental difference in our mission conduct just as there is a fundamental difference in the message and underlying faith itself. Some overlap, yes, but still fundamentally different. The delay is that God has warned me He won’t launch this arrow until the battle comes. It ain’t here yet. The battle comes when He moves to crush the sin of rebellion. I can’t tell you much about that, but I have no doubt I’ll know it when I see it. I suspect some of you will, too.

There’s a tension building in that song of Creation. I can hear it. Do you?

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StT: Acts 2:25-28

Posted on January 20, 2015 by ehurst

(Another sample from Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text.)

Acts 2:25-28

Peter continues his Pentecostal defense of the ecstatic behavior of the Christians in Jerusalem, this time quoting David from Psalm 16:8-11. Once again, it is the Old Testament writer who spiritualizes. Not only does it leave the door wide open for Peter to do the same, but it rather requires he take liberties to apply it more widely than the mere literal meaning.

The core of David’s poetry here is the unspeakable joy of moral purity, the sheer ecstasy of close communion with God and His entire Creation. This is the real deal that mere emotion counterfeits. True serenity in heart will produce emotion, but the emotional thrill is merely a symptom. David’s choice of words is more of that old Hebrew hyperbole. He doesn’t fear that his adventures will get him killed, or that he will experience a sad existence akin to living death. For such a man, death is a friend who liberates, not some awful master eventually collecting the final payment. David has the joy of living during the calling of His God, and the even greater joy of seeing His face after he retires from that calling and this life. Peter spiritualizes this into a prophecy of the Messiah.

Our Western bias blinds us to the rich meaning in Hebrew culture of the term “sheol.” We have good reason to believe the Hebrew people used it as a literary term, in which only the most poorly educated would actually take the implied meaning literally. Suffice to say the better educated Hebrews of the Old Testament knew that death was passage into the afterlife, and that one could go to be with God or could end up in eternal punishment. When Jesus refers to “Gehenna” as a derivative of “Hinnom Valley” where Jerusalem dumped their trash and then burned it, the idea of afterlife was not a rabbinical novelty. What was new was how specific the more recent rabbinical talk had become. Jesus had no quarrel with some of that. Our biggest problem is that the earlier Hebrew scholarship simply avoided pretending they knew enough about the afterlife to say much about it. So any terminology is loose and flexible. Jesus frequently mocked the Hellenized rabbis by using their own assertions against them.

So it’s not a question of Jesus going to “Hell” as we Westerners think of it, but that He was dead for a time, whereas Peter notes that David was very much still dead at that moment. Chasing the rabbits of literalism will get you lost. The whole discourse is supposed to be a spiritualizing of poetic imagery. Peter carefully chose Old Testament passages familiar to his audience, which happened to include some of those Pharisaical rabbis scolding them for their un-Talmudic behavior. Answering them in terms they would understand, he comes very close to using some legalistic literalism to shoot down their legalism. However, the net effect is spiritualizing the text of the Old Testament.

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