The Gospel According to Andrew

 Our Youthies are on their summer choir tour. Their devotional theme this year is Numbers in the Bible. The number for their first day is 40. (By a happy accident, we did day 1 on Sunday, so I have had  a little time to think about this.) Forty is an important number in the Bible. It usually involves a time of testing,  preparation, or purification. The rain fell and the waters rose for 40 days during the Great Flood. Moses lived as a shepherd with Jethro's family for 40 years after fleeing Egypt. He was up on Mount Sinai for 40 days receiving the Law. The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years after they refused to enter the promised land. Elijah spent 40 days traveling to the Mountain of God after his confrontation with the Prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel. Jesus fasted for 40 days in the wilderness. I always like it when a set of  readings provides context. Today's devo is a good example because it covers Deuteronomy 8:2-5, in which Moses addresses the Isr...

The Gospel Lesson this week was Matthew 9:18-26. You'll find parallels versions of these same events in Mark 5 and Luke 8. This incident is one of those strange cases, in fact, where Mark goes into more detail than Matthew. Usually Mark gives us the Cliff's Notes, so to speak, while Matthew and Luke dig into the detail. John does his own thing, so he records miracles no other Evangelist does, and ignores miracles the others record in detail. One thing I noticed as we heard the sermon yesterday is how Jesus' miracles in these two cases interrupt otherwise normal responses to grief and distress. The woman with the flow of blood was suffering from long-term bleeding which would have made her ritually impure. Going into the crowd was a risk, which was probably why she didn't speak to Jesus until he spoke to her. Most ritual impurity was temporary and could be addressed by washing and waiting. There is a whole section of Leviticus detailing how basic human processes impact ...

The connection between cybersecurity and theology might not seem all that obvious. I might not have thought of it myself, if I weren't teaching the first and studying the second. But, it is there. I discovered it thinking about social engineering and the ways threat actors try to manipulate their targets in order to make them victims. In short, a social engineer works on a target through a combination of fear, greed, and misplaced trust to abuse that trust and our compliant tendencies. Threat actors try to create fear in order to panic us and make us more reactive and less reflective. Threat actors play on our greed for the same reason, I suppose. They try to abuse our trust by sending emails which look mostly legitimate or by redirecting us to websites which might look real if we don't look at the edges too closely. User education is one of our basic defensive strategies because users who've been trained (or perhaps authorized and encouraged) to operate with a certain heal...

All four Advent candles are burning now - or glowing softly, if you go in for LED candles as we do. Three of them are purple; one is rose. There's a logic in that proportion. Purple is the liturgical color of preparation, repentance, and what we might call sorrow redeemed. Rose is the color of joy, lit for the first time on Gaudete Sunday. It is a faithful joy rooted in God's steadfast love and committed to hope, but which does not pretend everything is rainbows and sunshine. Holy Joy coexists with the pain of loved ones missing, of martyrs suffering and dying, and of a world which is not yet as God has promised it will be.  I think there's an important insight embedded in the fact that the first three Feast days after Christmas commemorate martyrs. December 26 is the Feast of Stephen - as in "Good King Wenceslas looked out on the Feast of Stephen" - deacon and protomartyr. December 27th is the Feast of John the Evangelist. He is considered a "white" mar...

The Embertides are quarterly periods of fasting and prayer within the western Christian calendar. There's an old rhyming mnemonic which helps me remember how they fall within the year: "Lenty, Penty, Crucy, Lucy." That's a bit terse, so it might help to know Lucy means St. Lucy's day, December 13th, while "Crucy" is Holy Cross Day, or September 14th. Penty is the Feast of Pentecost. Lenty is Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday. In each case, the Ember Days fall on the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday following. The Christian preference for fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays dates at least as far back as The Didache. These days remind me Jesus was betrayed on a Wednesday, crucified on a Friday, and "descended to the dead" on a Saturday. Seen in that light, they become echoes of Holy Week spread throughout the Christian Year. Two of these occasions, Advent and Lent, are already seasons of preparation. The other two fall, the ember days after "...

 Historically speaking, martyrdom is sometimes the express lane to canonization. And yes, Charlie Kirk is a martyr. The word in Greek means "witness." He was murdered, it is true, and more specifically, assassinated. These facts do not preclude martyrdom. If we think of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a martyr, or Janani Luwum (the Archbishop of Uganda who was murdered for opposing Idi Amin's dictatorship in Uganda), or Thomas a Becket (who was murdered at the Altar in Canterbury Cathedral when four Anglo-Norman knights took Henry II's outburst about "this meddlesome priest" rather too literally), then Charlie Kirk is a martyr as well. His public witness to his understanding of the Christian faith, including social doctrine, cost him his life.  There are some Christians, particularly mainline Protestants, who will find his conservative, Evangelical expression of the Christian message unrecognizable. It's important to note such an assessment cuts both ways. As...