Judas and the Roots of Betrayal

Posted on March 2, 2024 by salooper57

People have wondered what motivated Judas to betray Jesus for almost two millennium. There has been much speculation, from scholars and lay people alike, but it has been just that: speculation. However, we do know of two things in Judas’s life that must have played a role in what he later became.

St. John wrote that Judas, who was the apostolic band’s chief financial officer, used to help himself to what was in the treasury. I doubt that Judas thought of himself as stealing. He probably told himself that it was just for a day or so but, somehow, he never managed to pay back the money.  Perhaps the first time he helped himself to the petty cash he was in a tight spot; he owed taxes, or something of the sort. He took a little money, meaning to pay it back in a day or two. He wasn’t trying to be secretive, at least that is what he told himself; it was just too small a thing to mention. 

But, of course, something happened, he wasn’t able to pay back the money, and he felt uncomfortable mentioning it to the Lord. The next time was a little easier. Still, he intended to pay it back—all of it.  He wasn’t stealing; it wasn’t like that.  But he never did get around to paying back the account and, after a while, it became clear that he never would.

He must have trembled when he heard Jesus tell a story, which St. Luke informs us he told his disciples rather than the crowds, about a manager who misused his Master’s money. One can almost see Judas turn pale as he listened to the story. Did Jesus know? Was he going to audit the funds and uncover Judas’ crime?

That was the first thing: taking money without asking. The second was the increasing ease with which Judas played the hypocrite. Surely, he had kissed Jesus – the customary greeting in that culture – and called him “Rabbi” many times prior to the night of his betrayal. How long ago, one must wonder, had his love for Jesus grown cold?

A short time before the betrayal, a woman spent an entire and very expensive bottle of ointment in anointing Jesus. The gospels tell us that a number of the disciples complained that it was wasteful. The ointment should have been sold and the money spent on the poor, they argued. St. John tells us that it was Judas who started that kind of talk, and not because he cared about the poor, but because he had been taking money out of the treasury. It was after Jesus rebuked him that he made the choice to betray Jesus.

The combination of a wrong hidden and repeated, and a hypocrisy growing ever larger, placed Judas on the evil path that brought him to betray his friend and leader. His sin – it needn’t have been stealing; it could have been adultery or lying or any one of a thousand other wrongs – and especially his dishonesty, prepared him to do the unthinkable.

Should we feel sorry for Judas?  Perhaps, but there are other lessons for us here. Bury a sin in your heart, hide it from the sight of others, add rationalizations to fertilize it, then irrigate it with the sweet water of blaming others, and it will sprout up like Jack’s beanstalk; only rather than growing up to the heavens it will grow down into hell.

Among the long list of traitors the world has seen, Judas ranks first. The acts of treachery by Alcibiades, Brutus, Cassius, Benedict Arnold, Alger Hiss, the Rosenburgs, and Aldrich Ames all pale in comparison to what Judas did. Yet God took this most monstrous act of betrayal and used it to bring about the greatest good humanity has ever known.

People sometimes say that Judas had to betray Jesus; it was predestined. That is the wrong way to look at it. What Judas did was Judas’s doing, not God’s. But what God did turned history’s most appalling betrayal on its head, transforming it into humanity’s most glorious blessing. That is how good he is at being God.

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Faith, Politics, and the Problem of Selective Sight

Posted on February 24, 2024 by salooper57

Another election year, and it’s going to get ugly. As the citizen of a liberal democracy, I know we must have elections, but as the pastor of a church I came to dread them. People I have known to be kind and polite undergo a metamorphosis. They criticize, rant, and make snide remarks about politicians and all those foolish enough to vote for them.

During general election years, it seems as if people develop vision problems: one eye goes blind and the other develops X-ray vision. With their X-ray vision eye, they can see right through people, especially those who hold political views that differ from their own. They see right down to their opponent’s evil motives.

At the same time, they are blind to the failures of their political favorites. Does this candidate lie? Well, everyone lies; that’s just politics. Are their morals suspect? Well, no one is perfect. Do they use foul language, level threats, and act out of anger? Well, we need someone who is strong to fight for us.

Perhaps it is going too far to call them blind. It is not exactly that they cannot see these things; they choose not to look at them. They remove the things that make them uncomfortable from sight. They know they are there, but as long as they do not have to see them, they can ignore them.

I write as if this condition were true of other people but that I have somehow transcended it. I have not, and I doubt that anyone else has either. For me, this intellectual double vision does not manifest itself in the political realm as much as in other areas. For example, someone else’s character flaws might be crystal clear to me. My own, which are so clear to others, can escape my notice.

This troubling condition extends beyond politics and character flaws. It also affects people in their religious and spiritual lives. I’ve seen this in people who call themselves Buddhist. They have an image of the Buddha somewhere in their home and practice a couple of minutes of meditation when it is convenient. But the disciplines and attitudes that characterize serious Buddhists – the practices of the eight-fold path – are missing.

I am sure this kind of thing is true in all religions, but because I am a Christian, I have seen it most often among my own people and most troublingly in my own life. Jesus was aware of this all too human tendency and addressed it on numerous occasions.

In the Gospel of Mark, some religious leaders initiate a conflict with Jesus by caviling about his disciples’ behavior. He responds by pointing out something they were blind to: their habit of setting aside biblical instruction when it proved inconvenient. He said to them, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!”

Setting aside what is inconvenient. Not exactly denying it, but putting it on the shelf, removing it from sight. If it is on the shelf, we can say that we own it, have benefitted from it and value it, but we do not need to be bothered by it.

Jesus went even further when he spoke to the crowds at one of Judaism’s greatest religious festivals: the Passover. In this context, he did not speak of setting aside God’s commands but of setting aside God’s own Son. He warned, “There is a judge for the one who rejects me.”

That is the way the majority of modern Bible versions translate it, but the verb is identical to the one Jesus used when he accused the religious leaders of “setting aside” the commands of God. Most people, even those who have rejected institutional Christianity, would not say they have rejected Jesus. But what about setting him aside, putting him on the shelf, where he is not in the way?

Putting Jesus on the shelf manifests itself in many ways, including political hysteria, moral failure, and ordinary fears. It is the opposite of what it means to “confess Jesus Lord,” and it always leads to trouble in the lives of those who claim to be his followers.

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How to Tell People That a Friend Has Died

Posted on February 17, 2024 by salooper57
Photo by SHVETS production on Pexels.com

What is the appropriate way of letting people know that an acquaintance or friend has died? This can be a real problem. As a pastor for many years, it was too often my duty to announce to the congregation the death of one of our members and friends. It seemed abrupt and unmannerly to say to worshipers, “Our friend John died last night.”

Some people use metaphors to avoid being indecorous or indelicate. They think that “passed away,” “gone to her reward,” and “shuffled off this mortal coil” – whatever that means – softens the blow.

I understand the desire to spare people pain. When I was in sixth grade, my brother died, and I carried his death inside of me, a sword that had pierced my own soul. Life went on, but the sword remained. I never wanted to think about my brother’s death, and I hated to hear other people speak about it. When my best friend’s younger brother said to me, “Your brother died!” it felt as if he had twisted the blade that was lodged in my soul.

Because of that experience, I have tried to be tactful, delicate even, when speaking of someone’s death. But I have also been dissatisfied with euphemisms like, “he passed away,” or workarounds like, “he’s gone to heaven.”

What is wrong with saying that someone “passed away,” or as some people say, with even greater economy, “he passed”? There is nothing wrong with it, but it is imprecise. They passed? Passed what? Were they driving a car? Passed where? I would understand, “They passed this way,” but not “they passed away” – away to where?

“Passed away” is not only imprecise; it has negative overtones in the Bible. St. Paul, for example, says that the world in its present form is passing away. The Apostle John claims that the darkness is passing away, as well as the “world and its lusts.” Their future is inconsequential. They are passing away never to return. Should we really use the same term to speak of friends and family members we hope to see again?

The biblical understanding of the fate of those who die in Christ is entirely in the other direction. They do not pass away, as if they slowly receded from sight and from importance. They do not become phantoms or shadows, the mere echoes of a life once possessed. That idea belongs to paganism, to Homer and the ancient Greeks, not to Jews and Christians in the biblical tradition.

The Bible teaches that God’s people, those who have received the life of the age to come through faith in Jesus, become more consequential – one could almost say, “more real.” They are said to “appear” when Christ appears. It is their “coming out” party, their debut, when they are finally revealed for who they really are.  

There are biblically appropriate ways for saying that someone has died. We can say that they have “gone to be with Jesus.” This has the advantage of reflecting biblical usage, for “to depart and be with Christ… is better by far.” We can also say that “they are with the Lord,” and so echo the Apostle Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 5.

What underlies our fear of indelicacy and tactlessness is a profound fear of death. We would prefer not to talk about it at all. Our culture hides death behind hospital and nursing home doors. More and more people are foregoing funeral services, choosing instead to have a “gathering of remembrance” – or no gathering at all. We, like the people of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke, “have entered a covenant with death.” We’ll avoid it and hope it avoids us. We won’t even mention it. We’ll use euphemisms instead.

It is better, at least when speaking of someone who died with faith in God, to say forthrightly, “He died.” We can skip the euphemisms. We need not fear being indelicate because we need not fear death, which was “abolished” when Christ brought “life and immortality to light.”

In the biblical view, it is death that passes away; it is not the people who belong to God. They “go from strength to strength, till each appears before God.”

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Should This Story Be in the Bible?

Posted on February 10, 2024 by salooper57

Why is it that some Bibles, including most modern translations, leave out John 7:53-8:11, the story of the woman caught in the act of adultery? If the events in this story did not actually take place, why did the King James Version, the Douay-Rheims, and other older translations include it? But if the story is true, if the events it narrates really happened, why do newer versions exclude it?

The explanation is that newer translations of the Bible make use of older – closer to the time of Christ – manuscripts than previous translators had available to them. The earlier manuscripts had not yet been discovered when St. Jerome translated the New Testament into Latin, or when the so-called “Received Text” was published in 1633.

The story of Jesus’s forgiveness of the adulterous woman does not appear in many of those earliest texts. We do not find a Greek manuscript that includes it until the 5th century. The story does not appear in the earliest Papyri or in other important early texts.

In later texts that do include it, one sometimes finds asterisks or other indicators that denote a section of text was missing from earlier manuscripts. These marks suggest that even the ancient scholars who included the text knew there was a lack of manuscript evidence for it.

Besides this, there is evidence in the story itself that it comes from a different author. There are many words used in this short text that John never uses elsewhere. One out of every thirteen words in this text is never otherwise used by John, which makes it extraordinarily unlikely that he would have written it.  

Furthermore, the story itself seems out of place. It interrupts the flow of the narrative between John 7:52 and 8:12. It looks as if it were inserted after the fact by some well-meaning scribe, who thought the story too important to pass up.

It seems impossible to me that John could have written this story, but that does not mean that the events in it did not take place. There are good reasons to believe that they did. For one thing, even before this story shows up in biblical manuscripts, church fathers like Jerome, Ambrose, and Ambrosiaster refer to it.

Another reason to accept the authenticity of the story, though not its authorship, can be found within the story itself. As C. S. Lewis pointed out, either the story of Jesus “doodling with his finger in the dust … is reportage … or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative.”

Ancient writers simply did not include seemingly irrelevant details in a story without explaining them. That style of writing would not be popularized for more than a millennium. It is far more likely that someone saw Jesus using his finger to write on the ground and reported what he saw.

Nerds like me can get so caught up in the arguments for and against the authenticity of the text that we miss the truth it contains. This picture of Jesus is consistent with the other Gospels’ portrayals of him as the “friend of sinners.” He did not, according to his own statement, come “into the world to condemn the world but to save it.”

The Jesus who says, “Neither do I condemn you,” reveals the character of the God “who is not willing that any should perish.” This theme is so much a part of John’s Gospel, it is easy to see how a scribe might attribute it to that apostle. Later in this same Gospel, John records Jesus as saying, “I did not come to judge the world, but to save it.”

Not only is the Jesus of this story consistent with his portrayals in other Gospels, but he also models the kind of response that he required from his own followers. He taught them not to judge. He also taught them to forgive. He further taught them that sin – adultery is one example – is a terrible thing that should be avoided at all costs. Each of these elements of Jesus’s instruction finds expression in this gem of a story.

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The Roots of Christian Differences on Moral Issues

Posted on February 4, 2024 by salooper57

A wide variety of stances exists among self-professed Christians regarding the ethical and moral issues of our time, even though most of them Christians would agree that the Bible is an authoritative source for instruction on the virtuous life. How people who claim to base their beliefs and behaviors on the same source can differ so dramatically is part of a long and complicated story.

That story may go back to the first centuries after Christ, but for brevity’s sake, we will pick it up with the early 19th century biblical critic, philosopher, and theologian F.C. Baur. Immersed in the philosophical thought of G.W.F. Hegel, he looked at the Bible through a dialectical lens which sharply divided the theology of the Apostle Paul from the teaching of Jesus.

Fast-forward to another German theologian who was born almost a century later: Martin Dibelius. While Baur believed that Jesus’s views differed radically from the Apostle Paul’s and later Christianity’s, Dibelius believed that Jesus’s views cannot even be ascertained with any certainty.

This idea that a breach occurred between Jesus and the next generation of Christians, particularly in Pauline churches, has gripped biblical interpretation for generations. Jesus, as seen by Protestants who followed Baur and Dibelius, was a revolutionary who never intended to instruct his followers on how to live in society. Why bother? He thought society was about to be overthrown by the establishment of God’s kingdom.

Furthermore, this radical Jesus taught his followers to expect his return within their own lifetimes. So, the kinds of ethical instruction he gave – turn the other cheek, love your enemy, give sacrificially – were only intended for use within the Christian community, and that for a brief time. When Jesus did not return as expected, the church was forced to turn to other sources for ethical instruction for living in the wider world.

To support this view, Dibelius points to the various “household codes” in the New Testament, found in Ephesians, Colossians, 1st Peter and elsewhere. These bear a resemblance to household codes that were part of the Greco-Roman world of the time, and particularly to those of the Stoics. According to Dibelius, Jesus’s “Christianity was unprepared for meeting [the needs] of Family and Fatherland” and was forced to borrow ethical instruction from non-Christian sources.

If he was right, if as early as the Apostle Paul, Christians were looking to secular society for their ethical instruction, then Christians are free to do the same today. They can, for example, look to the American Academy of Pediatrics for ethical instruction relating to children with gender dysphoria. Similar sources might be sought for instruction regarding same-sex relationships, abortion, immigration, and all the other hot-button topics of the day.

F. C. Baur’s views have largely been discarded, shipwrecked on the shores of later biblical scholarship. Dibelius’ contention that the Bible’s household codes were borrowed from the Stoics has been effectively challenged by John Howard Yoder, J.N. Sevenster, Rachel Held Evans, and many others. The content of the biblical household codes differs significantly from Greco-Roman codes and has its roots in Judaism and Jesus rather than in Stoicism.

This brief, historical survey of Christian ethical thought is obviously incomplete, but it makes an important point and raises a serious question. The point is that ideas are powerful and make a difference in the real world. How many people, even in the contemporary church, know who F. C. Baur and Martin Dibelius were? But their ideas have had lasting impact on how Christians approach today’s most vexing moral issues.

The question that is raised is this: If Baur and Dibelius were wrong to posit the existence of a theological chasm between Jesus and the Apostle Paul, if the apostolic writings are faithful to Jesus’s position on real world issues, does it not seem unwise to give contemporary moralists more weight than we afford the Bible?

We are at sea, sailing through the rocky shoals of contemporary morality, always in danger of shipwreck. Because the needle on the compass of today’s moralists never stops spinning, I choose to be guided by the wisdom of Jesus and his apostles.

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From Caricatures to Hope: The Doctrine of Judgment

Posted on January 27, 2024 by salooper57

Judgment is the missing doctrine of the twenty-first century church. In the 1960s, TV shows and comedy skits would sometimes portray a deranged man with a long beard and a white robe declaring “The End Is Near,” or some other threat of judgment. It was not uncommon in those days to see road signs and billboards warning people: “Prepare to meet your God.”

On Saturday morning cartoons, Elmer Fudd or Bugs Bunny or Wiley Coyote would die from a misfired gun, exploding bomb, or a fall from a cliff, then ascend to heaven to be judged. Religious tracts – one thinks of the ubiquitous Chick pamphlets from the 1960s – warned the unrepentant sinner of a sulfur and brimstone future.

But things have changed. We might be glad that these theological caricatures are not so common anymore, but it is not only the caricatures that have disappeared. So has nearly all mention of the doctrine of judgment. This is not a good thing, for one cannot discard the doctrine of judgment and remain a biblically faithful believer.

The noun “judgment” and its verbal cognate “to judge” appear over 150 times in the New Testament, and more than 500 times in the Old. The testimony of the Scriptures is that God will judge the world. The proclamation of the church, recited weekly by millions of Christians in the creed, is that Christ “will come again to judge the living and the dead.”

One cannot ignore the doctrine of judgment, but how can one live with it? For isn’t the doctrine of judgment about an angry God who exacts revenge on people just because they don’t believe in him? How can the infinite punishment of those who have committed finite sins possibly be fair?

That raises a second issue about judgment. It is not only the missing doctrine of our time; it is the misunderstood doctrine of our time. What we think we know about judgment is more firmly rooted in cultural sources than biblical ones. Dante’s Inferno and Michaelangelo’s The Last Judgment play a bigger rolethan the psalms and the prophets. For that matter, many people’s understanding of judgment has more to do with Elmer Fudd than with the apostles. Ours is a generation of Looney Tunes theologians.

These cultural tropes have led us to think of judgment as a fearful, one might say, “God-awful,” thing. No biblically informed reader would deny that Judgment Day bodes poorly for those who reject God, but a careful student of the Bible would emphasize that is only part – and not even the most important part – of the picture.

The doctrine of judgment is only secondarily about what happens to those who reject God. At its heart, the doctrine of judgment is about God making right everything that has gone wrong, including people. The doctrine of judgment abounds with hope. The earth, long tortured by abuse and misuse, will be restored to its Edenic origins. And people, tortured by injustice and their own sins and failures, will be made new.

Because we have so badly misunderstood judgment, the psalmist’s euphoria at the thought of it is baffling: “…shout for joy before the Lord, the King. Let the sea resound, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy; let them sing before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth.”

In the incredibly rich eighth chapter of Romans, St. Paul envision humans and all creation groaning in eager expectation of God making everything right. In Jewish thought, this meant that creation is longing for judgment. No wonder Paul included the doctrine of the judgment in his “gospel,” his announcement of good news.

N. T. Wright has written that “in a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance and oppression, the thought that there might be a coming day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be … a good God must be a God of judgment.”

It is time to recover – or, perhaps, to uncover – the hope-filled doctrine of judgment.

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The Love of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Love

Posted on January 13, 2024 by salooper57

In one of his best known passages, the Apostle Paul wrote, “For now we know in part.” Human knowledge is always partial. The greatest theologian has only partial knowledge, as does the greatest scientist and the greatest philosopher. Of course, the great theologians, scientists and philosophers understand that. It is the lesser theologians and scientists who don’t know that they don’t know.

Earlier in that same passage, Paul, himself a great theologian, says, “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror.” His choice of metaphors comes directly out of the setting in which he writes. He is sending this letter to a church congregation in first century Corinth, a large city and one of the ancient world’s leading centers of commerce. Corinth was famous for, among other things, its quality bronze mirrors.

Silvered glass mirrors, such as are used today, had not yet been invented. Though Corinth made some of the world’s finest mirrors, polished bronze produced a very imperfect reflection. Like the knowledge gained by looking into a bronze mirror, our current knowledge is always incomplete.

I suspect that in heaven, everyone will walk around with a red mark on his or her forehead. This has nothing to do with the mysterious “mark of the beast” mentioned seven times in the biblical Book of Revelation. No, this mark will come from flabbergasted saints hitting their own foreheads with the palms of their hands and saying, “Duh! How could I have missed that?”

In that day, all those arguments in which we were certain we were right – theological, political, social – will seem silly to us. When we were most right, there was still something wrong. We never did more than see, to borrow King James English, “through a glass darkly.”

Though we know only in part now, the apostle states plainly that “then I shall know fully.” Why will we know so much more then than we do now? Will we be smarter? Probably. Will we have access to more information? I expect so. Will we know more because we are no longer exposed to deception? Certainly. But there is another, more fundamental reason. We will know more because we will love more.

This passage, 1 Corinthians 13, is sometimes called a “Paeon to Love.” In it, St. Paul emphasizes the supreme importance of love in human life. Among the many ways that love transforms a human life is this: it brings with it knowledge.

People say that love is blind, but nothing could be further from the truth. Infatuation is short-sighted. Lust is blind. But love has 20/20 vision. Love knows. Aldous Huxley said we can only love what we know, but I think the opposite is true: We can only know – really know – what we love.

For example, people will only know God to the degree that they love Him. They can study the Bible, go to seminary, and earn a Master of Divinity degree, but unless they love God, they will never really know Him. Factual knowledge is important, but it is not a replacement for the knowledge of love. Without love, knowledge produces a dead and bloated dogmatism that drives people away from the faith rather than drawing them to it.

Not only can we not know God apart from love, neither can we know our kids, our parents, or our friends apart from love. The ancient Chinese sage Sun Tzu said, “Know your enemy.” But, ironically, the only way to know your enemy is to love him, at which time it is possible he will cease to be your enemy. When Jesus directed us to love our enemies, he opened the door for us to understand them. Love enables knowledge.

In the age to come we will know even as we are known because we will love even as we are loved. And isn’t that what the Teacher told us: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Love, which is how God’s life in us relates to others and to everything, is the catalyst for true knowledge. Love is a way – it is the way – of knowing.

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Live Meaningfully in the Present by Learning from the Past

Posted on January 6, 2024 by salooper57

The biblical stories of saints and sinners are endlessly instructive for people wanting to live meaningful lives in the present, but there is a risk that we will miss what they have to teach us.

The danger is that we will approach these biblical characters with the assumption that they were not like us.  For one thing, they lived thousands of years ago, and weren’t people different then?  And for another, God actually talked to people back then, but he doesn’t talk to us now – at least, not in the same way. 

Very subtly, and without intending to do so, we can remove these people from the sphere of real life. They weren’t like us so, of course, we cannot be like them. It was a different world then, people were different, and God acted differently with them. 

St. James refutes this way of thinking when he says that Elijah, a towering figure among biblical characters, was “a human being like us.” Or, as an older version put it, he “was subject to like passions as we are.” He had feelings, cares, and worries, just like we do.  He had doubts.  He shared our strengths but also our weaknesses and frailties. 

At the height of his career, Elijah experienced a breathtaking victory, like a football player winning the Superbowl and being named MVP, or a diplomat brokering a comprehensive Middle East peace deal, or a candidate winning the presidential election. But within a short time, his world was turned upside down.

Elijah’s success had placed him in the crosshairs of one of the country’s most powerful leaders. He had wrongly assumed that his long struggle against oppression, injustice, and religious abuse was finally over. When he saw that it was not, he entered into the darkest period of his life. The man who was the epitome of faith and faithfulness suffered serious depression and was obsessed with negative thoughts.

The biblical text says that “Elijah ran.” He is not faulted for doing so; under the circumstances, it seems to have been his only choice. But thus began an alienation from the people who might have supported him and, as time went on, from all human society.

This kind of self-imposed isolation is common among those suffering depression. After he pushed away his last ally, Elijah lost hope. He reproached himself for not being a better person and wished that he might die. He began rehearsing all the things that were wrong in the world and in his life. His words may even betray a resentment the great man felt toward God himself.

The saint had feet of clay. In other words, to quote St. James again, he was “a human being like us.” Because of that, we can learn from him and especially from the way God interacted with him.

We can learn, for example, that self-imposed isolation is unhealthy, and this is especially true for those dealing with depression. People flourish in community. It is with others that one’s beliefs about oneself and even about God are refined, falsehoods discarded, and truth embraced.

It is helpful to see how God dealt with his discouraged servant. Rather than rebuking him, or even correcting him, God rested him. God understands that the connection between body and soul is complex and inviolable. An ill-used body and an unhealthy soul are often found together.

Besides giving Elijah time to rest, God gave him the opportunity to reflect on and articulate his hurts and fears. God did not rush to correct the wrong thoughts that Elijah expressed; he let him vent. Then he gently corrected the parts that Elijah got wrong, and he did this without any condemnation.

God also gave Elijah work to do, for God understands that humans need good things to do and to accomplish to be happy. Our first parents were given work to do in the Garden of Eden, and work will be a blessing for people in the age to come. It is an essential part of a flourishing life.

The biblical stories of God’s interactions with people are an instructional goldmine for leading a satisfying life. They merit careful reading and thoughtful reflection.

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A Biblical Model for Handling Church Conflicts

Posted on December 30, 2023 by salooper57

Anyone who has been around the church for any length of time has heard about church fights and church splits. Christians, it seems, are not much better than anyone else when it comes to handling conflict. They might even be worse.

The history of church conflicts is a very old one. It begins only a few short years after the birth of the church. The Evangelist St. Luke tells the fascinating story in his history of the early church, which we know as the Book of Acts.

At the time of the events in Acts 6, the church was headquartered in Jerusalem and comprised of Jewish people who had recognized Jesus as the Messiah. The church had not yet gone out to the world, but the world had come to the church. The growing and vibrant congregation in Jerusalem was comprised of both Aramaic and Greek-speaking Jewish believers.

One of the things that characterized the early church and made it attractive to outsiders was the way it cared for its poor, especially its widows. From the earliest time, the church kept a list of widows who qualified for financial and food assistance.

Being a widow in the first century Middle East was very different from being a widow in America in the era of Social Security. There was no safety net for widows, nor were there any jobs. Work options for women were extremely limited: doing wealthy people’s laundry or prostitution. Because the husband was usually the only bread winner, when he died there might be no more bread.

But in the church, widows were supported. If they lacked financial resources, they were placed on the widow’s list, which qualified them to receive food on a daily basis.

That is the backstory to the conflict in Acts 6. The Aramaic-speaking widows, the locals who were from Jerusalem, were receiving a daily allotment of food while the Hellenistic widows, who were Greek-speaking transplants to Jerusalem, were being overlooked. This caused the Hellenistic church members to complain that they were being treated unfairly.

Most of the church conflicts I have heard about over the years were like this one. They were not theological in nature. They didn’t begin because someone denied the truths of the Athanasian Creed but because a church member was slighted, or at least felt that way. Conflicts happen because people’s feelings are hurt, their views disregarded, their needs unmet.

These things happen in every group of people, including the church. It is naïve to think otherwise. Jesus as much as promised that this would be the case. He once said, “It is impossible that no offenses should come…” When they do come, as is inevitable, what we do next is what is important.

It is worth noting that in the early church, when the Hellenistic Jews were offended and lodged a complaint, the church’s leaders listened to the complaint and acknowledged its validity. They did not call what had happened a misunderstanding nor hire a lawyer to write a wordy apology that meant nothing.

Instead, the apostles brought the entire church together and said, in effect: “We have a problem. It is more than we alone can handle. So, let’s put together a team who will be able to make this right.”

The conflict became the starting point for an entirely new set of leaders in the church, people we refer to today as “deacons.” The apostles did not dictate how these new leaders should handle the problem; they merely set the standards for what kind of leaders were needed, let the church choose them, and then let them go to work.

One moral to this story is that church conflicts need not diminish the church. They can be the source of innovations and growth. We see this in Acts 6. After the church, with its new set of enthusiastic and spirited leaders, dealt with the conflict, the church was united, “the word of God spread,” and “the number of disciples increased rapidly.”

As a pastor, church conflicts always worried and disheartened me. Yet, conflicts can provide an opportunity for positive change, fresh insight, and growth if they are handled with faith in God and love for others.

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Magnificent Obsession or Academic Religion: The Wise Men’s Story

Posted on December 23, 2023 by salooper57

The Feast of Epiphany, held on January 6th, celebrates the revelation of Christ to the world. It commemorates the visit of the Magi, traditionally known as the “wise men,” to the Child Christ.

The origin of the Magi has been debated, but the earliest occurrence of the word is found in an inscription from the time of Darius the Great, the Persian King who plays a role in the biblical Book of Daniel. They are thought to have originated among the Median peoples in what is modern-day Iran.

The Magi were a tribal people, like, for example, the Pashtun people in Afghanistan. They were not merely wise men (as the King James suggests); they were a society of scholars who studied the stars and religious texts. They prepared sacrifices for worshipers.  They acted as priests.  Their role was not unlike that of the Levites in Israel.

At one time the Medes, of whom the Magi were a part, revolted against the Persian government and were promptly crushed. The Magians gave up their political aspirations and, from that time on, dedicated themselves to the pursuit of knowledge and religious truth. 

There are references to Magi visiting the tomb of Plato and accompanying the king of Armenia to pay homage to the Roman Emperor. Magi appear as court counselors and priests. Though the word later became associated with sorcerers and magicians (our word “magician” is derived from it), and still later with charlatans and swindlers, the Magi who visited Christ seem to be astronomers and seekers of truth.

In the Gospel of Matthew, the Magi are juxtaposed against Israel’s chief priests, and the pagan astronomers come out looking better than the priests. In the biblical account, the chief priests have answers the Magi seek, but fail to act on what they know. For them, the matter is academic. For the Magi, it is a magnificent obsession.

The Magi traveled something like 800 hundred miles to honor the one “born king of the Jews.” Most people in the first century hated travel. The weather was oppressive, the terrain was rugged, and the roads were dangerous. That did not stop these seekers from crossing mountains and borders to find Israel’s king.

Contrast that with the effort made by the chief priests. They knew where the king was to be born. They knew the Magi believed he had already been born and had traveled great distances to welcome him. They would need only travel about five miles. Yet, from what we can tell, none of them made any effort to see their king.

Are we more like the Magi with their magnificent obsession or the priests with their academic religion? The question is worth pondering. My wife and I are spending a couple of months in Waco, Texas, to be near our oldest son and his family. Waco has sometimes been called the “Baptist Vatican.” It is reputed to have the most churches per capita of any city in the U.S.

Yet many of those churches are nearly empty on Sunday mornings. Though Texas has a much higher church attendance rate than Michigan, where I pastored for 35 years, well over half of all Texans will skip church this week. In Michigan, that percentage is closer to two-thirds.

According to Lifeway Research, the average American owns 3.6 Bibles. That means the U.S. has about a billion Bibles. The Barna Group reports that 54 percent of Americans say the Bible contains everything a person needs for a meaningful life. Yet only one in three of us reads the Bible at least once a week.

It seems we fit better with the apathetic priests than we do with the inspired Magi. If our professed beliefs are not enough to take us to church on Sunday to worship the King or to our bookshelf to open a Bible, what good is our profession? Jesus, seeing the empty religion of his day, reminded people of God’s word from the prophet: “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

If the Christian story is true, then it calls for more than empty professions. It calls for devotion expressed in intelligent, consistent action.

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