Simpsons - Star Wars Crossover

I know that I need to get back to the Simpson's movie like I promised. In the interim, please enjoy this!

Link to Milk and Cookies!

The Force Be With You - D'oh!

John

Thanks to John at Locusts and Honey for finding this parody.

Methoblog Summary - 2007.29.127

Allan Bevere has posted the week's Methoblog summary. Tiffany Steinwert's post on the Luke lectionary reading for this week is particularly interesting. View Her Post

Visit Summary

Have a great Labor Day weekend!

Grace and Peace,

John

There is a season...and it starts Monday night!

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. Ecclesiastes 3 (1-8)

I don’t want to sound sacrilegious, but being an FSU fan is a bit like waiting for the Kingdom. We all know that the Seminoles are #1. It just takes faith in the face of what seems like competing evidence. But, to everything there comes a season…Maybe this year in Tallahassee!

The Seminole’s season begins with the annual Bowden Bowl this coming Monday night pitting Bobby Bowden and his son, Tommy from Clemson in FSU’s season opener. The Noles come off of a disappointing year.

Jimbo Fisher joins the coaching staff – he was the offensive coordinator for LSU 2003 National Championship team. He will be working with the quarterbacks.

Of course, the hot competition is between Drew Weatherford and Xavier Lee. Coming off of two years and 23 starts, Weatherford has the advantage, but Xavier has passion. QB Drew Weatherford enters his junior season having thrown for more yards (5362 yards) than any other ACC quarterback at this stage of his career other than former NC State All-America Philip Rivers...

Florida State returns 14 starters including 6 on offense and 8 on defense...The Seminoles suffered through an injury-plagued season in 2006 but return no fewer than 36 players who started at least one game in 2006...

"I'm being coached by a legend every day," Florida State nose tackle Andre Fluellen said not long ago. Bowden will begin his 42nd season as a head coach. It says something about his longevity that his 2007 opener will come against a Clemson team coached by his son, Tommy. The FSU "legend" will be seeking his 367th career victory against the Tigers. At the rate he's going, who knows how long Bowden will continue to coach - long enough for 400 wins?

"That's in range, but I'm not losing any sleep over it," the 77-year-old coach said last month at the ACC Football Kickoff. "I'd rather coach than retire. But I also understand that I have an obligation to win." Bowden has won at a spectacular level during his 31-year tenure at FSU, especially in the years since the Seminoles joined the ACC as the league's ninth member in 1992. His first 14 ACC seasons produced 10 outright ACC titles, two shared titles and two second-place finishes.

That's what made last season so hard to take for the FSU faithful. The 'Noles lost five times in ACC play and finished fifth in the Atlantic Division. "You never see anybody reach the top and stay there forever," Bowden said. "We stayed 14 years. Has anybody else lasted that long?"

No one was more disappointed by last season's performance than Bowden himself. He responded by shaking up his coaching staff. He added five new assistant coaches, including new "Executive Head Coach" Chuck Amato, who returns to Tallahassee after seven seasons as head coach at NC State. Amato helped build the Bowden dynasty as an FSU assistant from 1982 to 1999.

I don’t want to sound sacrilegious, but being an FSU fan is a bit like waiting for the Kingdom. We all know that the Seminoles are #1. It just takes faith in the face of what seems like competing evidence. But, to everything there comes a season…Maybe this year in Tallahassee!

Go Noles!

Taking a Second Look at Paul

Three years ago, we had a group meeting at our church, mainly men – not that the women were uninterested in Paul, but apparently they were not interested in us! We called the group “Raw Paul” reflecting our method of reading and trusting our intuitions for clues as to how to interpret these texts. At the same time, we looked at some of the new work being done by the next generation of critical scholars and found that we were well advised to be careful as we repeat some of the bigger generalizations that have emerged over the years. Presently, I am focusing my attention on Mark (see link below). I have decided that my next study following Mark, which will probably take another six months at the rate I am going, will be Hebrews particularly because folks are so ready to proof-text from it. Perhaps at that point, I might revisit Paul.

Today, I just wanted to share a couple of comments that I made to a colleague recently as he began to engage in his own study of Paul's letters. I hope this helps you as well. It is popular to speak of Paul as the first Christian missionary. I find that more and more problematic. Instead, I think Paul might be more appropriately called the last Jewish apostle. There really wasn’t a Christian church (gathering) at the time Paul is working with his cadres. Paul’s discussion of Gentiles being grafted to Judaism seems to make this point. While some writers talk of Jewish Christians, it seems to me more correct to speak of Christian Jews.

You will not be surprised that I am hesitant to draw generalizations about “the Law,” especially when it is used to mark a contrast with a Christianity that supersedes traditional Judaism. As you get into seminary, I would suggest that you look up Krister Stendahl’s study of these matters found in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. Most contemporary scholars trace the new questions about Paul that they are seeking to answer back to Stendahl’s work.

Recently, I attended a public lecture by Julie Galambush, The Reluctant Separation, where she points out that in the Judaism (Judaisms) of the day, most folks found the claim by this new apocalyptic group about Jesus as messiah problematic, especially as they venerated Jesus, who was executed - more accurately lynched as a political subversive. Such a proclamation did not meet the expectations of what the messiah would be (and they were right) but also speaking of such revolutionary matters was dangerous. It is the proclamation that Jesus was the messiah that was a stumbling block to Jews, not the Law.

Galambush pointed out that the sect that I have designated as Christian Jews had two factions – both believed that the time had arrived for Gentiles to gather around Israel as many prophets had longed for, but whether these folks needed to become Jewish split the group. We know this, but don’t spend a lot of time dissecting the implications. Obviously, Paul is in the faction that argued that Gentiles need not (or perhaps could not?) become Jews and therefore they should not be circumcised. Timothy, who indeed was a Jew by birth, was circumcised. The New Testament was written by this anti-circumcising faction. We get hints of the presence of their opponents, but there are no remaining writings. Perhaps, we meet these folks later in the so-called Ebionite movement. Of course, this stand by Paul and others put his Gentile followers in a difficult position. Paul seems to have taken good pagans and turned them into bad pagans. They must turn away from their Gods and their associated civic duty, but since they were not Jews (and according to Paul can not become Jews), they did not have the protections that Jews had won for themselves in relation to Roman worship responsibilities. Paul clearly thought that everything was going to end very soon; I don’t think his counsel to endure could have been sustained without this assumption.

Certainly some folks who want to tell women to shut up in church (most likely translated today as don’t pursue ordination), or tell homosexuals to go away, find some of their justification in texts and writings attributed to Paul. As a “progressive,” I find in Paul a willingness to re-image theological notions in light of current experience. For example, Paul was willing to develop a much broader notion of righteousness that certainly included Jewish participation in the law, but also included a kind of analogous faithfulness for Gentiles and that could also be defined as righteousness. It seems clear to me that this was grounded for Paul in the personal experience that he could not finally deny of genuine hope and love among Gentiles. In that light, orthodoxy can be rethought.

As I read Paul, he thinks that any expression of sex beyond the missionary position is an act of pagan decadence. Not withstanding Paul’s first century viewpoint, I believe that today he might find in the gifts and graces for ministry regularly demonstrated by our GLBT colleagues evidence that some more limited past notions about who should be ordained need to be re-imaged.

I take it that if Paul came back today and saw how a few of his letters had been elevated to Holy Scriptural glory, he would have been absolutely speechless. If he showed up in a seminary library and discovered shelf after shelf of commentary on those same pieces of correspondence…well, I don’t know.

Grace and Peace!

John

Visit my most recent post on 7 Villages about Mark: Bible Study

---------------------------------------------

Photo Used with Permission: TexasMary

Headlines Tell the Story

Now I'm not one to obsess about news coverage. In this political season, I am looking at the Washington Post more than the New York Times. Different news organizations have their own perspective. To deny this is foolish and to not take responsibility in the midst of this fact is to be irresponsible.

In another cyberspace discussion recently, I found the headline of the Christian Post about the HighPoint church that in the end denied a fellow member rights to celebrate the life and death of his brother because he was gay particularly telling. The article spoke of "Harrasment" of the congregation, although here was none reported in the text of the story. The Christian Post is a ultra-right wing rag associated with Pat Robinson's Regent University. We should not be surprised.

I would be interested to hear how writers at the Post might report on the story out of Columbus where members of the so-called Minutemen [sic] United are disrupting Sunday morning worship services in a couple of "open and affirming" churches!

As an Atlantan, I can not help but reflect on the reporting about the recent death of Richard Jewell. The NYT headline read about the death of the Olympic bombing hero. AP (now who owns that?) reported that the former suspect of the Olympic bombing had died. Finally, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who had been in a decade long litigation about their faulty reporting in 1996, simply reported that Richard Jewell had died. They reported the story on the internet only one time. Michael Vick made the headlines over and over again.

In the end, Jewell was finally lauded for professional police work that di save many lives. He was a hero, but he paid a terrible price.

As Christians, we must learn to hear the news behind the news, the sub-texts and indeed the distortions. Such caution must even be with taken with the Good News that we study and proclaim as well.

Hey, I didn't mention Fox News with its fair and balanced reporting once.....oops!