When you pray.... just think how it would be if...

After a few decades the weekly Men's Bible Study still opens and closes with shared prayer, whether 2 or 3 show up or a full table of 9 or 10 are present. Thinking about the range of topics that some of the men voiced during the preamble, "well, what should we pray about today," and reflecting on the words spoken in the course of bowed heads for the praying itself, there seemed to be a recurring intention or purpose that emerged sometimes. Underneath the petitions, praise, and thanks on matters of healing/health for bodies and for spirits, including specific persons and specific struggles, there was an overarching or underlying urgency that God please draw each person closer in stronger relationship and sweeter harmony; that hard hearts remain soft and open to being touched by events in one's own life, as well as in responding with feeling to the events in others lives, whether personally or professionally known or ones farther away whom we do not know closely.

In sum, the bottom line for all of these prayers and all of these decades might be a request to seek God's Will and do his bidding; to listen with care to the direction for one's decisions; to rely on one's heart when looking across the world and when weighing decisions that affect self or one's neighbor. In short, the prayers keep coming back to God is Love; we aspire to be more like God/Jesus and thus overflow in expressing (agape) love of others; and in achieving this posture and outlook in our engagement of the places we find ourselves, thereby to grow deeper connection and stronger feeling with God's Will.

Suppose for a moment that these recurring, ultimate intentions are carried out; that more and more people successfully navigate their lives and relationships by leading with their hearts, not greed, fear, (self) loathing, or some other strong force. How would household life differ; congregational aspirations change; wider community habits and responses to crisis or stress by altered; indeed, how would state and (inter)national decisions proceed differently to different purposes/outcomes to the way things run now with reference to GNP, quarterly profits for shareholders, and externalized costs that a company leaves for future generations to clean up.

Being foreign to this World - book of 1 Peter

screenshot from BibleGateway.com

Lots of wondering points came up in the weekly Bible reading of 1 Peter’s 2nd chapter. The list of bad behavior springing from who you are deep down reads like the reverse of “fruits of the spirit” that grow from seeking God’s Way. The NIV lists these terrible things as …” rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.” And the Hawai’ian Pidgin verse gives …”No do no bad kine stuffs. No bulai nobody. No say one ting an do anodda. No get jealous. No talk stink notting.” Still another voice (E. Peterson’s The Message), …”Make a clean sweep of malice and pretense, envy and hurtful talk..” here is the link to those comparative verses at BibleGateway dotcom.

Since Peter’s letter is addressing house-churches far from Jerusalem with mixed congregations of Jews and Gentiles, perhaps some of those attending were in the habit of sorting their peers into who is more holy or righteous or closer to God than the others; for example, would it not be natural to project onto the Jews a bit more affinity to the legacies of Rabbi Jesus? How is this human habit addressed in the followers of The Way?

In languages spoken and written today, often there is a distinction between spoken and written version of the language, since the voice, face, and context all contribute to conversational interchange, but only punctuation marks and word order can speak on the written page. So the many iterations of Bible verses and also the letters circulated to early churches would have been the stiff style of written, not spoken teachings, right? And when the Greek source texts later went into Latin or all the vernacular languages, then this formal style was conserved, right? But to have lived in the presence and preaching, teaching, healing and blessing of Jesus or his nearest contemporaries and companions would have been all in the spoken voice; not the thundering cadences of KJV, for instance - beauteous though it was frames in the early 1600s. How ever could one go about reconstituting the conversational style of the teachings, parables, etc?