The Gospel According to Andrew

  It occurs to me the Bible never offers us a map of the valley of the shadow of death. The places where the Wisdom literature, or the Psalms of Lament, run right up against our grief, pain, and loss are long on candor and short on answers. The Psalmists alternate between confession, complaint, and trust. Sometimes they curse their enemies. Job wants to file charges against God. Some of the Prophets wish God would just get it over with already. Some of them die in Exile, receiving no more than visions of Jerusalem restored.   Of all the things the Bible is, it most emphatically is not a self-help manual. There's no plan for walking through grief, no promise that if you do x, y, and z, it will all be better in the morning. What we get instead is a promise God will not abandon us, given to people who had lost everything. The Assyrian and Babylonian conquests and the exiles which followed shattered the Hebrews' world. Into such cataclysm, God speaks. The servant songs in Isaiah s...

  There's a lot of dodgy theodicy in our folk theology. That's not hard to understand, because pain is hard to understand. We try to explain it to ourselves and often make things worse when we lean on explanations that seem to explain things, but don't really reflect Who God Is.   For example: "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger". This isn't Scriptural at all. In fact, it's Friedrich Nietzsche. The first rule of quoting Nietzsche is: Don't!   What we can say is God can desires our salvation and will, if we cooperate, work all things together for the good of those who love Him.   On that subject, be really careful about rolling Romans 8:28 out in the immediate shock of pain and loss. While I won't deny the truth of it, I do prefer Romans 12:15: "Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep." There's more compassion and grace in sitting with the grieving in their grief than in trying to explain it. Let the griev...

  I found an old essay on First Things the other day called "The Technicians of Learning," written in the year 2000 by Edward Tingley, a Canadian art historian and philosopher ( https://www.firstthings.com/.../08/technicians-of-learning ). The title caught my eye because it seemed to describe the role TSTC technical faculty have carved out for themselves. Most of us are not teachers by trade. On the contrary, we are tradesmen hired for a combination of technical skill and willingness to learn how to teach. I am one of these - a tradesman first and a teacher second. As I read on, however, I discovered Dr. Tingley has used this phrase to describe a wholesale failure in the way the academy has understood its purpose and even in how it has defined knowledge and learning. In short, he asserts the accumulation of knowledge displaced the pursuit of education. While that may seem like a distinction without a difference, Tingley understands education as an ongoing engagement with the ...

  (This was originally posted on FaceBook on August 15, 2024) I try to stay away from politics because in terms of acrimony, misunderstanding, and miscommunication, political discourse is a thermonuclear minefield around a sewage treatment plan circling the event horizon of a black hole.   However, I am going to take the risk today, if only tangentially, on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. This is still mostly about theology. I saw an item yesterday linking Tim Walz, who is an ELCA Lutheran, to a "Sparkle Creed" professed at an ELCA church in Minneapolis. By itself all this does is notice Tim Walz is part of a denomination which can be very liberal in places, without showing he has any personal connection to the congregation in question or any opinion on the theology in question. I have it on good authority - my sister, to be precise - the ELCA is "a hippie commune," so while the "sparkle creed" is more sad than surprising in this context, e...

  This morning for our "Bible time," as my wife calls morning devotions, I goofed a little and had us read the wrong passage. We were supposed to read 1 Corinthians 2:1-16. We actually read 2 Corinthians 2:1-16. As our previous pastor, Jeremy Wester, pointed out in a sermon about Philemon, reading the Epistles is reading other people's mail. We're hopping into the middle of a conversation, which can be more than a little baffling when it's also a difficult conversation. Paul's dialog with the church at Corinth tended to be that way. Hopping into the middle of the middle, as we did this morning, can be really baffling!   This is not the part where I tell the world I had some moment of clarity and revelation and now know exactly what Paul meant and how it applies to our circumstances today. Not even a little. I didn't know what to do with it this morning. I still don't.    This is where I say it's okay to start reading a passage of Scripture, not kno...

  It occurs to me How The Grinch Stole Christmas is deeply Christian. There isn't a church or a cross in Whoville, but the Whos are celebrating Christmas with a Feast, with the pealing of bells - which also happens at the height of the Mass - and with evergreen trees topped with stars. The evergreen tree is a Christian symbol, not a pagan one. The Germanic tribes Saint Boniface of Mainz was trying to convert dedicated deciduous trees to the Germanic gods. He cut one sacred to Thor down and encouraged them to celebrate with evergreen trees instead because God is eternal. That's a good way to get oneself martyred, but the Hessians forsook their gods and became Christian. We celebrate the Incarnation of God with trees that keep their leaves all year because Jesus christ overcame death. "Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him," to quote Romans chapter 6 (and the Pascha Nostrum). In Christ, we can be like evergreen ...