Bible Study on May 29 - Paul/corinthians

Men's Tuesday morning Bible study, May 29, 2012

<> The marvel of transmission of books, letters, gospels, etc. from the time of 1^st century A.D. until NT (and OT?) canon formed at Council of Nicaea. Some was on paper/papyrus/velum, but other via oral tradition among house-churches. Somehow the Word spread, was wrestled with, was recited, was interpreted for meanings that applied to people of the particular place and time, and comprised part of the personalized relationship to one's brothers/sisters in Christ and to one's maker.

<> Doing right by peers (audience/point of reference: what will people say or think of me; at least I'm a little better relative to so-and-so; wanting to meet so-and-so's expectations of me/make merit in their eyes) versus doing right by The Creator. Your integrity should strengthen your relationship (mutual respect and aid; concern and effort made on the other's behalf; getting to know the other) to God. And so when there appears to be a conflict, think first of doing right by God and in so doing things will eventually be right with peers: ask, "Who is my audience; who am I trying to impress and find favor with."

<> "The Way" of Jesus as 'a promotable brand' in the marketing language of today: one can often be most effective as God's hands and feet in the world by standing up for integrity and righteousness (but not self-righteousness or lording one's feeling of moral superiority over someone else). In other words it may be that the greatest influence is one on one, rather than publication or public speaking opportunities. By being true to one's relationship to God, actions and words will follow. It is a personal struggle (one's Jihad in the basic sense) to stick to the relationship to one's maker. It is not a political plank of one's promised platform. It can be declared or come out as the answer to questions being thrown in one's path. But one does not lead with this badge of identity. One is first of all a child of God (looking there for direction and comfort) and then also a brother/sister in Christ. To be spokesman for God is a rare thing, indeed, not an everyday position.

<>Paul's letters perform a spiritual audit among the several churches that he knew and nurtured. He diagnoses or addresses specific wrongs in each congregation. Today, too, there are hierarchies among some denominations that have a similar functionary to point out the shortcomings and to help to restore the right way. Surely this pastoral role of the flock continued from Paul's time to our own time. But the writings we study are limited to the decades around the time of Jesus the mortal Christ. This spiritual audit is something needed then as it is now, but when we study the Bible, it is as if those Biblical Days were different to now and only in those decades would such assessment and guidance be possible.

schizophrenia of worship vs. work week

Men’s Tuesday morning Bible study, May 22, 2012

<>Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: These are the answers, but what were the questions he was responding to? Since his words appear in the Bible we give special weight to them, but unlike the prophets and other Wisdom Books, The Laws, The Histories and so forth in the OT; and unlike the words attributed to Jesus, these writings of Paul are less directly part of God the creator. Instead his words are closer to our own: we strive and proclaim, we praise and give thanks, we fellowship and guide one another. In this sense these epistles and other elements of the Bible are more like a workbook than a holy object of veneration and instruction. In other words, rather than to take the attitude that the Bible is composed of sacred pages of uniform truth value and origins, instead we should adopt a position in which we are free to wrestle with the meanings and actively interrogate the messages. The uses of the Bible are living and suited to each generation, as well as fitting to each person’s chapter of life. While the word does not change, what each person and each historical moment brings to the text will affect the meanings understood. So we should not put the Bible on a pedestal. Rather, we should wear it out by repeated use. It is not meant to be honored only. Instead it is meant to be consulted and questioned; it is meant to live in our daily relationships with believers and with strangers. We are Paul in the sense that we, too, have the interests of our fellow Christians in mind. We, too, should declare and pronounce the message. It is not enough that we quote or refer to it. Moreover we must own it and author our own meanings from its unchanging message.

<>Segregating spiritual and worldly lives. Perhaps there never was a seamless oneness of secular and sacred habits and awareness. Before science and technology gave mass consumers a feeling of mastery and omniscience, the line between worldly and supernatural divinity was blurred and not confined to moments of life crisis or the cycle of holy days. But in our time the lines seem rigid and impermeable. And within one’s own biographical lifecourse, not everyone has opportunity or motivation to walk a spiritual path. Among those who do, will the majority or the few break down this wall that separates the dominion of God from the dominion of Caesar? Surely there seems to be a set of parallel splits: (1) one’s heart vs. one’s external responsibilities and ambitions, (2) one’s private concerns vs. one’s public persona, (3) Sabbath/Sunday vs. the other days.

machine for living... machine for praising?

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was quoted as calling his house design "a machine for living;" that is, the physical facts of location and line of sight, conveniences or barriers to flow, gathering, communication and so on will cumulatively allow its residents to live well or to live at a disadvantage. So there is bound to be a consequence between physical conditions, environment; social ecosystem and one's interior, mental and spiritual life. In the same way, perhaps one can speak of the physical and programmatic structures and rhythms in a church of believers are helping or hindering the strong development and expression of one's spiritual heart; of one's opportunities for mutual dependence (fellowship), praise and giving thanks. Where does your community of belief fit along this spectrum: more of a supporting framework, or a series of active distractions? Indeed, is your worship life a "machine for praising"?

men's bible study 15 May 2012

<>God's power… wisdom… discernment. How do these things differ? Discernment is an ability to receive and perceive the core of a matter and to know its significance, including consequences that follow. That is probably a prerequisite to Wisdom since the distillation of knowledge and circumstances depends on perceptiveness and then the courage and decisiveness to take action, ideally proactively rather than after the thing occurs. Knowledge is to anatomy as wisdom is to physiology and  ontogeny. In other words, building up a picture of a subject in one's mind is knowledge. But then understanding the developmental phases and crucial timing (and rhythm and harmony) of matters is an active, living, personal and context-filled matter; not something abstract and frozen in time.

<>Epistles: general message vs. personal response (or the first in a series of correspondence for which we have only this part of that chain). Philemon is a personal letter all about the matters concerning the writer and reader. But the circulating, general epistles like those to the church/eklesia at Corinth, Thessalonica, Ephesus and so forth were written as an open letter with messages in general, not limited to specifically named persons and gatherings. So it is fair today to seek deeper or wider meanings that just the layers between immediate writer and reader(s).

<>Writing to the Greeks at Corinth, Thessalonica, Ephesus and so on. Paul was fluent and learned in Greek so he could use their own medicine (worldliness, guru model of philosophy, search for esoteric  knowledge as key to higher consciousness or eternity) against them. But what about letters to non-Greeks: Persians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Egyptians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, etc? Would those (general, circulating/open) letters also speak in the terms that preoccupied those readers/hearers? Example?

<>Gutenberg's crutch: we depend on printed Word of God instead of memory/learning by-heart. Does this externalize the Word from our hearts? In time of crisis, do we have a few verses to call on by heart, or must we reach for a (printed) Bible? By deliberating passages and looking of word usage/roots, are we brought closer or deeper to God's heart, or on the contrary do we insert more and more minutia that introduces distance from God's will and His creation.

early May 2012: wisdom, social justice, God got out of the box

<>Caution – this God is alive and untamed and won't stay in the box where we keep him

What if the entrance to the worship space contained the following sort of consumer warning: This God is alive and wild. You may be subject to awe or terrible glory. Flights of rapture have been reported. The music is not just music of beauty or pleasure. It could reveal unexpected insight, joy or disorientation of routine habits of thinking and living. Enter at your own risk. Your relationship to God is serious and could change your life forever.

   Such an odd framework to a weekly routine and taken-for-granted habit could put the people on guard and change the expectations looked for and hoped for. In this way the minds and hearts are (pre)disposed to hearing the message and seeing the worship: not as an act of honor that one feels obliged to continue indefinitely in exchange for the fellowship and respect of one’s peers and the possibility that the whole promise corresponds to some reality. Instead one shifts from passive honor the virtuous status of Religion to an emphasis on”paying worth” (worth+ship =worship). So the motion changes from spectator to participant. The perception changes from invoking God to come to our place of worship to the reverse: inviting ourselves to focus and still ourselves and be on the lookout for God among us, as ever He abides, but which we are insensible of.

<>Intersection of The World and Thy Kingdom Come on Earth & Heaven: vote for God

We read “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” and “following God’s way is foolishness in the eyes of The World.” So is one meant to retire from The Game of Life where all the rats are racing? Or is one meant to be in the World but be not of the World (God’s witness here and now). The message of Social Justice, “helping the least of these” and “speak Truth to Power,” has a long history. The record of intentional communities (Shakers but also the Anabaptists: followers of Menno, Hutter, Amos and so on) testifies to various ways of applying God’s Word to the small and big cares of daily social relations and livelihoods.

     The OT gives a formal structure by which God and his people are obligated to each other. The NT is not a formal, external scaffolding, but instead begins in each person’s heart. The object is to give oneself to God (his Word, his actions, his nature of being) and by not straying from that dedicated focus all sorts of things become possible and within one’s reach as authorized by God. So there is probably no specific way that the relationship each person develops year by year can be transposed into a formal, organizational set of guidance or rules. There could be an OT “app” (smartphone software application) to help one to judge a situation and its best responses. But the NT convenant is a living, individual thing that expresses itself from the inside out: by the things in one’s heart come the words, thoughts, attitudes and actions that are external and touch The World. But the influences go in both directions: the external habits and environment affects what is inside, too (birds of a feather flock together).

     In sum, things like “Christian Democrats” or “Catholic Socialists” appear to apply the Word to governance, rule-making and judgments, but owning to the “inside à out” basis of NT, it is unlikely that any organized group could adequately give form to the Spirit of the Law. Politics and Religion occupy the same public spaces and enter discussions (explicitly or implicitly), but they are not extensions of each other: God’s love does not have a political party, despite the concept of “socially conservative voters” acting as a voting block (moral majority or minority). However, it surely makes sense for voters to search their hearts individually and cast a ballot according to conscience. And if a pattern emerges whereby a sizeable group of people from diverse walks of life all choose one candidate, then so be it. But any sort of party platform built of planks from the Top Down is by definition a betrayal of the personal and individual relationship to one’s God. To be cued by party and not by one’s own searching heart is wrong.

<>IQ, EQ, CQ but also Spiritual Quotient?

In recent years the idea of ranking a person’s intelligence has become more specialized to show a person’s quotient is not only Intelligence, but Emotional and Cultural. So perhaps we can also speak of the cycle of maturation spiritually; a “Spirituality Quotient” or S.Q. Observers of human development have pointed out the idea that “Ignorance is Bliss” (one’s reach and grasp is very small, so it takes very little to gain the feeling of mastery and confidence), and the idea of “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” and “Knowledge is power” (but also that “Power Corrupts” so perhaps then knowledge, by extension of power, also is corrupting or at least a source of vain pridefulness). Finally there is the observation that “the more one knows, the more one knows how much more is out there to know” and thus comes the realization that the further one travels the path of learning the wider grows the awareness of one’s relative ignorance.

     According to these observations one begins as a baby with very little information, knowledge and wisdom. The first few steps give a false sense of Know-it-all because the scale of the field of knowledge is small. But sustained growth expands the size of the field of knowledge, revealing how very little one actually does know. Even as the pool of information, knowledge and wisdom deepens and widens the trajectory only results in a much bigger universe of possibilities. Taken to the logical extreme, the wisest person will be the most certain of their humility and ignorance. To put this into Bible study terms: one begins with the heart of a child (trusting, ignorant, with little judgment or prejudice), then sets out to cross the ocean of learning and understanding and comes to realize how vast things are (infinity is pretty big), and finally nearing the opposite shore the person may hope to regain the heart of the child –ignorant and trusting once more, but this time through voluntary hard work instead of involuntarily by reason of inexperience and youth.

     In conclusion: there is value in Bible study, analysis, interpretation and splitting of hairs –not for its own sake or to set one apart from peers, but for sustaining a relationship with the Word (cling to the vine and then bear fruit). And by learning enough, one can achieve a realization of one’s true ignorance and humble standing (still authorized to do God’s righteous work, but without a shred of self-righteousness). Probably a direct, unspoken, incoherent and unarticulate grip on God is the most pure form of relationship of God. But most people tend to rely on words to think, express, respond and  communicate to others. So the only way to overcome the false sense of containment/comprehension of God is to learn enough through verbal means to that one’s ignorance rises into mind.

too much knowledge; the Joneses; leading early house churches

Tuesday Bible Study May 1, 2012

<>How much knowledge of Bible [Torah, Qu'ran, sutra or other holy book] is enough? Perhaps the value is not so much the command of detail and the heights that one climbs to gain an overview of deeper patterns and relationships. Instead the value comes in time and repetition: by going to the Book with a question or curiosity, the simple fact of active engagement (imagery of clinging to the vine to sustain growth) is what matters, not whether one gets to the bottom of the matter in any final sense. And yet the question remains: by deferring actions because one needs first to know more Bible, then nothing is accomplished outside of the garden of one's mind. The opposite extreme is to put all effort into deeds, without periodically going back to the Word. Best of all, perhaps, is to discover a productive cycle between incomplete knowledge and imperfect actions in the World. In other words, one should intend and hunger for better comprehension of the Word, and one should intend and hunger for tangible results in the World. But one should also accept the unending and imperfect condition under which the cycle rolls along during one's lifecourse, and then across one generation to the next, and over the course of one historical era to the next.

<>Status preoccupations. The urge to "keep up with the Jones" and to benchmark oneself to those taken to be peers, either measuring oneself as a little worse or better than those reference points. Although each follower is on a different road and has different burdens and vehicles to travel the road, in God's eyes we all are equivalent; none can claim absolute moral superiority. Sin big or small (by Worldly measures) is no different in separating a person from God and from the habit of seeking to be holy; whole; healing. By sheer repetition we tend to judge how well we are doing not in reference to God's will, but in reference to family or friends.

<>Early (primitive) church [eklesia: those called out from the others; saints in the World]. How would traditions be reproduced from site to site and from one generation to the next? Would there be squabbles over who is an authority; who is authorized to dictate a course of action, or who could perform wedding, funeral, baptism, communion, laying on of hands, exorcism, etc? With no written text (unless copied by hand of the OT set of Wisdom Books, Laws, Histories, Pentateuch/Septuagint), all scripture would be oral tradition. Certain itinerant experts of one or more books would reside for a time to tell all about these; sometimes also writing it all down. But with little institutional momentum to carry the small grouping forward, and some degree of external persecution connected to the rumor mill/grapevine of the day, it seems like the likelihood of small house churches rising and falling would be common. And yet those first 300 years it all did persist somehow.

<>Distractions and dissipation of modern times. Where once information was scarce and imagination filled in the vast spaces where information was unavailable or in a form unusable, now there is "more information than there is shit to know about." [quoted from movie, Apocalypse Now]. Where once hunger to learn more prevailed, now there is resistance to spend one's attention on the myriad versions of Bible and proliferation of titles and authors. The essential message and the teachings it comes from remains unchanged, but perhaps it is harder than ever to keep a firm grip on it. There are as many paths to that message as there are different kinds of people; a sort of modern day Tower of Babel. And yet paradoxically, this superabundance may drown rather raise us. What to do? The analogy of the Internet rate of information doubling may suggest an answer: algorithms that track the information that actually is accessed and used is one kind of filter. Word of mouth (social tagging and 'buzz' about certain content) is another filter.