The Gospel According to Andrew

  Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration. Jesus climbed a mountain with Peter, James, and John. At the top of the mountain, possibly Mount Tabor, He was transformed and became radiant. It seems fair to say His divinity shone through for a moment. Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus and talked about what was coming. Christian tradition understands them as representatives of the Law and the Prophets, respectively, though of course Moses was himself also a prophet. The disciples heard a voice from heaven saying, "This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him!" In Luke 9, this happens not long before Jesus "set his face to go to Jerusalem." The three synoptic gospels record this sign, though John leaves it out of his Gospel. Peter also references it in his second epistle. The Greek word which Matthew and Mark use is metamorphoo. It's the root of the word "metamorphosis." That Greek word appears four times in the New Testament, in the two Gospel accounts of t...

"Only wonder comprehends anything" - Gregory of Nyssa   I have spent the last three years, and part of the year before that, in seminary. I am about to dive back in, for the last academic year. This summer will be the only gap in my studies between the Fall of 22 and the Spring of 27. Even then, I have spent it pursuing research I started last spring and thinking about the internship I've got coming up next year. I've gotten a full dose of modern mainline Protestant theological education: old testament, new testament, systematic theology, and church history, all in a two semester format which allowed these subjects to breathe. I've had classes on preaching, worship, evangelism, pastoral care, and the sequence we call "UM boot camp" at Perkins. I leaned toward systematic theology and church history in my electives.    When I get through with this, I'll have the degree my denomination requires of her Elders. Frankly, I would recommend a full MDiv to an...

 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...

This week in Sunday Services, we heard readings from Psalm 77 and 2 Kings 2. As a general rule, the Psalm responds to the Old Testament reading. The first 14 verses of 2 Kings are the story of Elijah's assumption into heaven and Elisha's assumption of Elijah's role as God's prophet to Israel. Psalm 77 recalls the story of the Exodus and the parting of the Red Sea. How are these themes related to each other? I think that's a good question to ask any time we're reading two or more passages of Scripture in mutual context. The RCL reading from 2 Kings skips an important piece of the story, so we actually miss just how doggedly Elisha follows Elijah on their last couple of days together on earth, and the human dynamics of it. The story begins in Gilgal. Elijah tells Elisha, "Stay here. God has sent me to Bethel." Elisha refuses and follows Elijah to Bethel. When they get to Bethel, the company of prophets there tells Elisha God is going to take Elijah that ...

  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 ...

 A few months ago, one of our retired preachers remarked from the pulpit how my social media posts are like "the Gospel of Andrew," as part of a wider point about the way we all write a gospel with our lives and words every day. I've been thinking about the content of that Gospel for a while now, but have never taken the trouble to dig up and capture all those old FaceBook posts about Saints and Feast days and the like, or times I've shared or reflected on content by others adding my own theological point of view. I plan to start doing that, so I can see what it is I've been saying and assess it. Is it, in short, actually good news? Is it the "faith delivered once for all to the saints?" (Jude 3). I may also use it to host new things while I start the process of digging up my own history as a practicing lay theologian.