Into the Mist: Going Deeper Spiritually

By Eugene C. Scott

Some of my favorite times in the woods are when things are not quite clear. Clouds, like heaven reaching down, filter through the trees. Ghostly trunks stand out of the mist like distant soldiers on guard. Suddenly your senses are alive, alert.  You know there is something beautiful out  there just beyond sight, just beyond sound, just beyond yourself. And–nerves jangling–you wait.

That same mystery and anticipation I’ve found is part of trying to see the God-given soul in life. Or as we have named it here: living spiritually. But as I’ve ventured into the fog, I’ve glanced back now and then. Ironically that is when what this adventure is all about has become more clear. Today’s blog–and the next to follow–will feature reflections on a few of the things that I now see have helped me go deeper in my spiritual life.

I Woke Up:

Someone once joked, “Statistics show most car accidents happen within a mile of home; so I decided to move.” There’s a twisted kind of truth in that jest. Ruts and routines can be dangerous.

I’ve called 2012 “The Year of Living Spiritually.” I could also call it “The Year I woke Up.”

Not paying close attention to God, people, and the life around me was much like being in one of those half-sleep, half-waking dreams. You see it–and maybe remember it–but it makes little sense.

I’ve found that paying attention has been a simple way to see and better understand the spiritual all around me. A friend of mine has this quote at the bottom of all his emails. It never fails to stun me. “Today I woke up. Some didn’t. I think it’s gonna be a great day. I’ll take advantage of it.” Baron Batch

I Tried Something New:

A few months ago a friend, Cliff Hutchison, asked me to write a few more lyrics for a song called Love Like You he had started. The idea scared the Sam Hill out of me. Why me? I thought. I’m a story-teller. I am not, I repeat, am not musical. I took poetry writing classes in college and found rhyme and lyric constraining.

Against my better judgement I gave it a shot. I think it turned out pretty well. But more than that, it opened my eyes and heart to so many new things. The song is about our mothers and I now appreciate my late mother better. And the song writing process itself, with such a talented man, was amazing and humbling. Sitting in my study, Cliff played his guitar while we puzzled over just the right words and images until something beyond both of us was born. It was a profoundly spiritual moment. One I never would have experienced had fear reigned.

A professor of mine once said, “God is often in the green edges of new opportunities in you life.” This has been true for me this year.

Both of the above ideas were things I more or less stumbled upon, as if trees in the mist. What have you discovered that helps you live spiritually?

Eugene C Scott believes that life–especially spiritual life–is much more complex and rich than can be described in a blog. But he hopes these thoughts help. He is also co-pastor at The Neighborhood Church.

Are You Broken?

God made me into a masterpiece.  And yet, like the broken volcanic rock I’m standing on in this picture, I’m a broken masterpiece.

I’m a broken masterpiece who’s enamored with a kids movie.  When Hugo came out before Christmas I was blown away by its beauty, but as I’ve watched it again and again, I’ve seen the true elements of God’s grace and redemption weave their way through the story.

In the movie, Hugo Cabret, the main character, loves fixing things.  As the story progresses he realizes that everyone around him is broken. Just as Hugo realized that the people around him were inventions who needed fixed, I realized that fact is true to life.  We are all creations who have been broken.

I’ve been writing a lot about my recent mission trip to Guatemala.  During the first part of March 2012 I led a small team down to Xela (Quetzaltenango), Guatemala to help out with a vacation Bible school program and a high school and middle school retreat.

Now, if you have been following my blog you know that the week was quite an adventure.  You also know that you are God’s masterpiece.  You know that God created you for a reason.

But what happens when you mess up.  When you feel broken. Does God just toss us away?  Can we mess up so bad that even God wont take us back?

During the retreat, once we’d made it down to hotter than hell Reu, Guatemala, I asked my students if they knew what the word redemption meant.  We were packed into a small dining hall for games, worship, and a message.  Going along with the theme of creation I asked three boys to create something with Hot Tamales.  First they had to chew them up and then build something artistic.

The game failed.  I’m pretty sure all of the students were bored during the game, which wasn’t how I pictured it.  I’m glad it was just a game.  But then, somehow the games failure fit into my talk.  How often do our lives not go as planned.  If we are inventions we sure tend to break down a lot, and sometimes it’s our own fault.

In my last blog I talked about how God chose a little shepherd to be king of Israel.  David was the smallest in his family, but he had something God desired.  An open heart.  But let me tell you the rest of David’s story.  If he was a man after God’s own heart, he was also horribly broken.  Once David becomes king he stops following God’s plan for him.

If I think I’ve messed up, well at least I haven’t skipped out on God’s job for me so that I could commit adultery.  David did that.  But wait, there’s more.  David finds out he knocked up the woman he slept with, and wait, she’s married.  So, after he tries to pin the baby on her husband, which fails miserably, (as is what happens most of the time when we try to hide our mistakes) David has the man killed.  So, David has gone from a man after God’s own heart, to an adulterer, to a murderer.  I am sure when he woke up the morning before all this happened, he didn’t write on his to do list, sleep with a married woman and then kill her husband.

No.  We never plan on making mistakes.  As I shared this story of David with my students, I wanted them to realize that even great biblical figures mess up. If someone in the Bible screws up royally, then what does that mean for us normal folk?

And so I opened my Bible and shared with them how David responded to  God.  Yes, at first David hid from God, tried to cover up all his wrong doing, but then he does something us normal folk should do.  He admits his wrongs and asks God to redeem him.  In Psalm 51 verse 1-12 David writes:

¹ Have mercy on me, O God,

according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.
² Wash away all my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin.

³ For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is always before me.
⁴ Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight;
so you are right in your verdict
and justified when you judge.
⁵ Surely I was sinful at birth,
sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
⁶ Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb;
you taught me wisdom in that secret place.

⁷ Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean;
wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
⁸ Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones you have crushed rejoice.
⁹ Hide your face from my sins
and blot out all my iniquity.

¹⁰ Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
¹¹ Do not cast me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me.
¹² Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.

David was a broken invention.  God set him on a path to be king of Israel and David messes things up.  We are God’s masterpieces, but if you are like me you have messed up.  The first step to redemption is admitting to God how you messed up.

I have found that when I am open with my faults God tends to redeem them. Redemption doesn’t mean erasing all that we did wrong, but fixing what is broken.  Like David said, create in me a pure heart and renew a steadfast spirit within me.  He didn’t say take this all away as if it never happened, he asked for God to fix him.

That is exactly what God did on Easter through Jesus.  He sent Jesus to fix us.  But that can only happen if we admit that we’re broken and need someone to repair us.  If we do, our story will be as meaningful as Hugo’s, probably even more so.  Because when we are living out God’s plan for us our stories turn into grand adventures.

As I finished giving my message I prayed that each of the students would keep their heart open to God and know that, no matter what they’d done or will do, they could never separate themselves from God.

I hope you know that too.  I urge you to join me, and my dad, Eugene Scott, in Living Spiritually.  We have set this year and hopefully our lives to keeping our eyes and our hearts open to God.  It has been an adventure so far and it would be amazing if you joined us.

2012: The Year of Living Spiritually

By Eugene C. Scott

I’ve spent many brilliant mornings fly fishing. Why I remember that early summer morning on the Blue River, I’m not sure. I don’t remember catching any fish. But I can still see the rising sun clipping the tops of the Gore Range. The water was cold. Soon the river glittered where the sun touched it. I wore only a shirt, shorts, and old tennis shoes. I missed a couple of Brown trout, then climbed out of the river, my legs and feet frozen.

The sun had clawed its way up into the bare blue sky and I lay in the grass and let it warm me. Though silent, the air seemed filled with words. The very molecules popped. “Look. Over here. And behind you. See. God spoke all this into being. Like poetry.”

It was a transformational moment. I was in my 20s and still had much transforming to do. I had seen God in creation before but this was different. God seemed active not passive, pushing, aware of me and wanting me to be aware of him. Maybe that was the day I woke–at least partially–to the idea that life is as much spiritual as material.

Some people would call that day on the river a spiritual moment. And so it was. But isn’t there more to being spiritual than watching captivating sunsets and mountain vistas? Otherwise being spiritual depends more on mood and circumstance than something we cultivate. As much as I would want to fly fish everyday–hoping to hook another God sighting–it’s not realistic or practical. And spirituality has to be realistic and practical.

And there’s the rub. Most of us struggle even defining what it means to be spiritual much less daily living it. What does it mean to be spiritual?

I think it means to connect with the God-created soul of things. A spiritual reading of Scripture means you hear God’s voice in the story rather than just gather God-information. When taking a walk in your neighborhood do you see homes in which people laugh, cry, hurt, are born and die or just houses? So too with sunsets, music, parties, people. They become spiritual when we see or hear that fourth God-dimension. Being aware of God sightings.

But even if that is a good starting definition, how does one connect with the soul of things? Harder yet, how do we do it daily?

For Christmas this year my son, Brendan, gave each of us six adults in our family a journal and asked that we daily write down one or more things: a blessing, something we are thankful for, or how we have experienced the Presence of God that day. As I wrote in my journal the first day, an interview I had read with A.J. Jacobs kept coming to mind. Jacobs wrote “The Year of Living Biblically,” where he chronicles his attempt to spend a year following “every single rule in the Bible–as literally as possible.”

It occurred to me that what Brendan was asking us to do was spend a year living spiritually. To look at life as if the spiritual is just as real and important as the physical. To see a relationship with God and the world he created as more than obeying rules. To try to peer beyond the obvious and see–as often as possible–that fourth dimension.

If imitation, then, is the sincerest form of flattery, I intend to flatter Jacobs and launch my own experiment: The Year of Living Spiritually: My attempt to live as if there is more to this world than we see.

Each week in 2012 I will record my quest in my blog: the stumblings, successes, questions, and answers (I hope) I discover as I put on my 4D Glasses and venture out into the world.

But I don’t like to travel alone. Here’s my question for you: would you join me? Will you not only read along, but will you go along? Share your insights? Invite friends? Will you too spend a year living spiritually?

Let me know.

Eugene C. Scott has pestered his friends about God sightings for years. He most recently spotted God in his 2–almost 3-year-old grand daughter who said, “Papa, Papa, watch me.” Then she drank a glass of water making a funny gurgling sound. When she finished, she looked at him as if she had just climbed Mount Everest. It dawned on Eugene that God gets delight out of us seeing him too in the mundane ordinary things. Eugene also co-pastors The Neighborhood Church and likes to write fiction.

A Tree Called Home

By Michael Gallup

I’m not sure why everytime I think of home, I feel compelled to describe the Spanish Moss-draped oak trees. I feel the need to become rather verbose and compare the moss to trapped spirits of the men and women damned to never leave the lowcountry (I could think of worse fates). But simply put, nothing speaks of the area like the oaks. These ancient giants with their gnarly knotted elbows meandering to and fro are the epitome of the grandeur and history that so defines the lowcountry of South Carolina. They belong to a rare group of items like the mountains of Colorado and the sea, that no matter how many times you see them they still inspire awe.

As a kid they held a certain mystery for me, that if they could talk, God himself would pull up a seat to listen. Yet they also had a laziness about them. The oaks have the appearance of the rivers they surround, a fluidty that can be rather mesmerizing. When they have reached the grandfather stage of life, their limbs will rest on the ground much like a cane. But most of all, I must speak of them because they are home, as much as mom is even.

Yet, I have been cut off from that land, somewhat by choice and somewhat by force. And this saddens me because my blood has a brown tint to it thanks to those muddy rivers that these oaks line. I know worthless tidbits of history about the plantations that inhabited the land before me, but it is not my home anymore and I wonder if it ever truly was.

Even though I was born on the banks of the black river in Georgetown much like my father before me, I always felt a stranger. My great-granddad wasn’t a rebel and I’d lie straight through my teeth about the fact the my Grandfather was from Pennslyvania. If anyone ever discovered that fact, I’d quickly remind them my mom was from Arkansas. Yet I lived in a place where my friends last names matched those of the plantations and even though this heritage wasn’t always flaunted, I was always on the outside looking in.

Home is a funny place. The cliché is that it is where the heart is, but that is too vague for my sensibilities. I need a place to call home and I think that I am not alone in this quest, that one way to describe our existence is that it is a search for place, for home. The religious thing to say is that God or heaven is our homes and that is not far from the truth as I can see it.

When I think of home, I think of mom and our gardens and a tree. Is it fair to guess that those things stick out because deep in all of us is a longing for a Father, a garden and a tree; a longing for a place that though we may stare into it for eternity it will never cease to inspire awe?

Michael is a student at Denver Seminary who’s greatest accomplishment in life was marrying way up to his beautiful wife Michala, the Director of Children’s Ministry at The Neighborhood Church. Michael has a blog called a A Sprig of Hope where he shares devotional thoughts on life, short stories, poetry, prayers, and anything that grabs his short attention span. 

Still Haven’t Found What You’re Looking For?

by Eugene C. Scott

Have you ever found something you weren’t looking for? It happened to me a few years ago when I accompanied a nine year-old boy on a search for his lost glasses, despite that he couldn’t remember exactly where he lost them. I went only to quell my guilt for not searching when we would inevitably go purchase another pair. On the upside, this particular nine year-old was a delight to be with even when searching for a needle in a haystack.

We parked my truck near the last place he remembered having his glasses—a long, winding walking path decorated with large river rocks and landscaping bark. The boy had lost his glasses on the way to–or at–or in the universe near–the new skateboard park that was about a mile from our house. I knew the path well and was naively picturing the most likely places to search. But the path had only served the boy as a touch stone, a tether to which he loosely tied himself while looping, wending, and winding to the park. But I didn’t know that at the time so I clung to the path searching every inch of its pavement.

“I didn’t walk that way,” the boy told me shaking his head.

“Where then?” I shrugged.

He pointed off the path to the rocks he had climbed and vaulted from. I searched the bushes around those rocks. Next we left the path entirely and hunted around a statue of a flying horse he had investigated. Then cut diagonally through a parking lot. But even that was not direct. He showed me how he had climbed over the sidewalk railing and dipped behind the dumpster and sauntered through a restaurant (I asked them if they had seen his glasses) and out the back door that let us out on the path again.

I shook my head. His route was truly random!

Back on the path, we peered under every weed in the spot he claimed he had stopped to chase a garter snake.

“I bent over to look at it and I bet my glasses slid off without me knowing,” he said.

I agreed and engaged in the search earnestly. But we came up empty and continued by scouring every dink and dodge he took off the path until we finally reached the skate park.

All the while, we had a fun conversation about snakes and any other nine year-old stuff that came up. He had definitely not taken a mathematically precise power walk and our search therefore, was not systematic. I observed even now, trying to be serious, the boy didn’t so much walk as bounce, light and airy with his feet only touching the ground for the fun of it. He taught me the names of various skateboard moves and I saw the familiar walking path as if for the first time. We spooked another garter snake and marveled at how fast they are. We talked about likely fishing holes in the river. We wondered what fun things we could do with the $70 to $100 his new glasses would cost to replace, if we found his old ones.

Reversing the Apostle Paul’s meaning “I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child” and I enjoyed every moment of it. Being a nine year-old ain’t so bad.

Maybe that’s what Jesus tried to get us to see when he called the children onto his lap and told his adult followers to have a child-like faith. Maybe the “kingdom of heaven,” as Jesus talked about it and lived it, is more than a “straight and narrow path” defined by rules and systematic searches and time lines and well-defined adult perceptions and ideas. What if the freedom Jesus promised his followers is better illustrated (and lived!) by a young boy turning his search for his glasses into another adventure? What if our pursuit of meaning and Jesus himself became a fun and loopy path? What if we never find what we are looking for because we are looking in the wrong ways?

On the way back from the skate park, empty-handed, I had pretty much given up the search. I was not surprised. I had begun the search thinking I would not find what I was looking for (to paraphrase Bono) anyway. So, as I walked, I looked down at the ground only occasionally, just because I should.

Then, nearing the point our search had begun, I glanced down and spied my nine year-old companion’s glasses sitting in the landscaping bark folded neatly as if someone had purposefully placed them there.

The boy saw them too.

He squealed; his face beamed; we high-fived. We danced around as if we had found Jesus’ “pearl of great price.”

“I was just praying we’d find ‘em,” he said. “Jesus dropped ‘em right where you were lookin’.”

Immediately my adult mind found a more plausible explanation for how the glasses ended up neatly folded where we had already searched. I wish it hadn’t.

Eugene C. Scott writes the Wednesday Neighborhood Cafe blog.  If you’re reading this on Facebook and you’d like to join the conversation, click here. www.bibleconversation.com. Eugene co-pastors The Neighborhood Church in Littleton, CO.

Would The Apostle Paul Have Used Facebook?

What would the Apostle Paul have thought of Facebook?

The Apostle Paul Writing His Facebook Status by Rembrandt

Would he, like some, call Facebook the Devil in disguise? Or would he, like some 500 million others today, log in, change his status, and check in on his friends?

Some might say the ancient theologian was far too serious for such frivolity.

But I’m not sure.

Eugene C. Scott joins Mike in writing A Daily Bible Conversation twice a week.

TODAY’S READING (click here to view today’s reading online)

Jeremiah 51:54-52:34

Titus 3:1-15

Psalm 100:1-5

Proverbs 26:18-19

INSIGHTS AND EXPLANATIONS

Proverbs 26:18-19: Some might interpret this proverb as a slam against humor. Some see God, faith, the Bible, and life as so serious there is no place for joking. That kind of thinking is what made Mark Twain, the man with a fabulous sense of humor, think twice about going to heaven. He worried playing the same tune on a harp might be a tad boring.

We do our God no favors denying him a sense of humor. Thus, this proverb is not a prohibition against joking, but rather against using humor to cover up our true ideas or feelings.

If you’ve found A Daily Bible Conversation helpful, share it with your friends. Forward your daily email or send them a link to the website: www.bibleconversation.com.

THE WORD MADE FRESH

I believe the Apostle Paul would have embraced social media such as Facebook (though probably with a wise, critical eye) because he was an innovator, especially when it came to communicating the truth of Jesus Christ.

Not many people could read or write in Paul’s day, and letters were exchanged mainly between educated government officials, yet Paul wrote personal letters to his friends and common everyday folk (thirteen that we know of including Titus and Timothy). Some say that personal letter writing as we know it today (or used to before email and Facebook) did not really gain ground until about 1500AD. Paul was well before his time. Surely he would have seen this technology as a way to talk about Jesus.

Further, I believe Paul would have logged on because he valued relationships. Paul is famous for his theology. But above all he valued people and friendships.

Paul tells his friends in Thessolinica, “We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us.” And he greets, names as friends, affectionately mentions, and encourages over 80 people by name in his letters. There are many others he does not name. In Titus he mentions Artemus, Tychicus, Zenas, and Apollos. Not one New Testament letter of Paul’s does not contain a warm personal greeting to some person or group. Paul’s Facebook friend list would have been almost as long as any teenage girl’s.

Like his mentor and master, Jesus, Paul cared about people. He cared about their health, families, faith, relationships, beliefs, work, theology, ideas, politics, sex lives, kids, marriages, and, especially, their eternal destinies. And he loved them so deeply he suffered physical pain and persecution to be with them. He traveled miles, wrote difficult letters, prayed, argued, taught, wept, and was imprisoned for their sake and the gospel.

Despite our modern ability to connect, many people are lonely. A recent study reported 67% of Americans are spending less time with friends than ever. And for us within the church, whom Jesus commanded to love one another, we often value doctrine and structures and systems and budgets and buildings over relationships. This must break our relational God’s heart.

I have a new friend I met through email who wrote that, as important as doctrine is, he believes right doctrine follows right relationships. I agree. For that matter, Jesus seemed to believe that love was our first doctrinal calling. Paul certainly held fast to the cord of truth. But he seldom strangled strangers with it. Rather he laid it out within the loving friendships he developed.

As the modern saying goes, “Would you rather be right or be in relationship?”

My answer, “I’d rather be in right relationships.”

Would Paul have used Facebook? Though I asked the question, I’m not sure it really matters. I just asked it to focus on this fact: Paul never forgot how important relationships were. So, where Facebook would have fostered them, he would have logged on. And where Facebook hindered knowing and loving the people God placed in his life, he may have said, “Facebook is the devil in disguise.”

1. Which passage spoke most to you?

2. What did the four have in common?

3. What social networks do you use?

4. Do they deepen or distance you from relationships?

If you’re reading this blog on Facebook and you’d like to join the conversation, click here. www.bibleconversation.com.

Eugene co-pastors The Neighborhood Church in Littleton, CO and writes a blog eugenesgodsightings.blogspot.com

Connecting Your Story to God’s Story

Monday April 17, 1978 “was extremely windy and cold.” At work “the wind blew me off a ladder” and we were finally forced to quit and go home. In 1978 I was staying with my younger brother, sleeping on his couch. I was a twenty-one year-old depressed high school drop out and confused carpenter.

The economy was in shambles and getting worse. The Denver building boom was about to bust. Life looked and felt as bleak as the spring weather, except that I had started dating this young red-headed college girl who loved God with all her heart. I know this because Monday April 17 was the day I first began journaling, recording in a yellow notebook my thoughts and feelings and experiences.

“All in all this has been a good day,” I wrote at the end of my second day’s entry.  “Jesus has been on my mind quite a bit. I hope He is there more tomorrow.”

Looking back on those first entries, I can see Jesus was not only in my mind but always there with me tomorrow and the next day and next day for more than thirty years now. I now know Jesus was always ahead of me writing the next part of the story, the next chapter of my life. My challenge has been to faithfullyu live that story and then record it.

For me journaling is a spiritual discipline that helps me know myself and connect with God. David too practiced this spiritual discipline.

Eugene C. Scott joins Mike in writing A Daily Bible Conversation twice a week.

TODAY’S READING (click here to view today’s reading online)

Isaiah 60:1-62:5

Philippians 1:27-2:18

Psalm 72:1-20

Proverbs 24:11-12

INSIGHTS AND EXPLANATIONS

Philippians 1:27-2:18: This section of Paul’s letter holds one of the most beautiful lyrics and profound pieces of theology in all the New Testament. Chapter 2:6-11 is probably an ancient hymn or creed of the early church that proclaims the central truth of Christ’s incarnation, death, resurrection, and exaltation.

All four aspects of the truth of Christ’s life are woven together and one cannot exist without the other. Though many focus on the cross as God’s ultimate act of salvation, Christ’s death would not have been possible without his making himself nothing and coming to earth. Nor was his crucifixion extraordinary with out the resurrection. And his life overall was unremarkable without his death, resurrection and exaltation.

This means Christmas, Easter, and Ascension are equally holy, mysterious and powerful in God’s plan of salvation for each of us.

If you’ve found A Daily Bible Conversation helpful, share it with your friends. Forward your daily email or send them a link to the website: www.bibleconversation.com.

THE WORD MADE FRESH

David, King of Israel, journaled also, obviously more poetic, profound, and inspired than my efforts. Psalm 72 ends saying, “This concludes the prayers of David son of Jesse.” The first seventy-two psalms, almost half the book, therefore, are primarily David’s poems, songs, thoughts, questions, struggles, answers, and epiphanies.

I have often imagined David sitting under a purple sky caring for his sheep and pouring out his heart to God in poetry. Or pacing his throne room muttering his complaints against God. Then finally in his bed chamber refining his ancient journal entries and, with God’s hand on his quill, turning his life’s story into a poem that millions would read and be touched and encouraged by. In them we learn about his view of and love for God, his failing family, his leadership, his adultery, repentance, and through it all, his dependence on God. In these journal entries we see real life, lived with a real God. Before God touched us through David’s journal, I can imagine David, in a difficult day, rereading some of his entries and being given new strength, new insight, new courage through his own story.

I’m glad I recorded some of the raw and real things I did over the last thirty years. I’m not so sure I’m as brave as David to let anyone else read them. I wrote about my doubts, my lust, my faithfulness, my fears (lots of those), my friends, family, failures, my slow, sometimes painful, growth and my red-headed wife always showing me how better to love God.

My old journals carry my story and show how it connects to God’s: how God has walked beside me in it all. Just as God did with David.

Though the Psalms are beautiful, like my journal they are not sanitized. David’s psalms tell us we too can be real with God. And that when we are real with him we open ourselves up to his touch.

Journaling is not just a literary practice. It lets us tell our stories and lets us know our stories are connected to God’s story.

1. Which passage spoke most to you?
2. What did the four have in common?

If you’re reading this blog on Facebook and you’d like to join the conversation, click here. www.bibleconversation.com.

Eugene co-pastors The Neighborhood Church in Littleton, CO and writes a blog eugenesgodsightings.blogspot.com

Did Jesus Have Hair Like a Flock of Goats and Breasts Like Twin Fawns?

The Kiss an 1889 marble sculpture by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin.

No one knows what to do with this book. Why is it in the Bible? What’s Song of Songs about? Bible scholars have asked those questions since before Jesus’ time. Sex, romance, and love? Can’t be. Love, maybe, but a book in the Bible can’t be about sex and romance. Sex is base and romance frivolous. The Bible deals with life and death issues: heaven and hell, eternal salvation, sin, of which sex is usually considered one of the worst.

What is the Song of Solomon?

Eugene C. Scott joins Mike in writing A Daily Bible Conversation twice a week.

TODAY’S READING (click here to view today’s reading online)

Song of Songs 1:1-4:16

2 Corinthians 8:16-24

Psalm 50:1-23

Proverbs 22:22-23

INSIGHTS AND EXPLANATIONS

2 Corinthians 8:16-24: Paul seems to be taking care of some every day, ordinary business here. Titus is coming to visit with two other men. Treat them well, add to their financial collection for the poor, Paul tells them.

Thus heaven bends down and kisses earth. God enters the mundane and adds to it holiness, meaning and purpose. The Bible is the most far-reaching, powerful, mysterious book in existence. It is God’s word. But the Bible is also practical, earthy, real.

Yet our expectations of the Bible often put it in an untenable place. Each time we crack its covers we expect it to transform our lives, almost magically.

Bible reading, however, may be more like eating. Sometimes the meal is extraordinary, spicy, rare, a feast we remember and tell others about. Sometimes it’s a hamburger and fries. We eat, get up from the table, clean the dishes and go about our business. Both meals nourish, replenish, however.

If you’ve found A Daily Bible Conversation helpful, share it with your friends. Forward your daily email or send them a link to the website: www.bibleconversation.com.

THE WORD MADE FRESH

Origen, a Christian scholar who lived about 200 AD, believed the Song of Solomon was an allegory picturing Christ’s love for us. Like Jewish and Christian scholars before him, he largely ignored the sensual, sexual nature of the book. Unlike Hippolytus, however, he did not restrict its reading to the mature only. These godly, intelligent men could not fathom why God would canonize a provocative love poem from a Hebrew king to his dark, perfumed, busty princess. Nor could they, I imagine, if they were as easily aroused as most other males, read this book without facing their own humanity. Much more simple is it to skim the passionate parts and name the others allegory. But this says more about us than God or the Bible.

Elsewhere God communicates boundaries for our sex lives. We don’t like these restrictive sections–or often obey them–but are more comfortable reading them and tacitly accept them as coming from God. This coincides with our belief that, though we humans enjoy sex, God does not like it, except that it produces children, and probably closes his eyes while any one of us engages in it.

Therefore, this allegorical method of understanding the Song of Solomon provides a distance and safety from one of the more powerful and dangerous (there is no safe sex) drives stirring in the human heart. Reading this poem allegorically allows us to dig a divide between what we see as a very serious and sanitized God and our very earthy, sensual lives. It’s a literary version of safe sex.

The allegorical method has fallen out of favor in modern times, however. What are we moderns to do with the Song of Songs then? Ignore it. Yeah, that’s it! Oh and don’t let our teens read it and our preachers preach on it.

Or. . . .

We can face the truth that, though God recognizes and abhors our sinful mishandling of, and obsession with his beautiful gift of sex, God is not uncomfortable with our sexuality. He made us that way. God made sex fun!

This poem is not an allegory about Jesus, though Jesus’ love for us is every bit as passionate and earthy. Jesus did not have breasts like twin fawns. This poem is about the beauty of human love and passion and romance. It shows even our fallen state cannot completely tarnish God’s greatest gifts.

In our times sex, even between husband and wife, can be twisted, manipulative and ugly. This dirtiness results, in part, from how even Christians have relegated sex to a mere physical act, forgetting that it is one of the most beautiful, intimate spiritual acts a man and woman can engage in. God created sex so that a man and woman could participate in sharing their bodies and souls–and sometimes take part in the creation of a unique, complicated, wonderful new life that also contains the image of God.

God canonized the Song of Songs in order to paint for us a word picture of romance, love, and sex that soars beyond the physical and takes us into the realm of the soul. Seen that way, Solomon’s Song may not be a picture of Jesus on the cross, but it does deal with life and death issues.      

1. What do these for passages share in common?
2. How does the Song of Songs’ picture of sex differ from Hollywood’s?
3. What passage spoke most to you?

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Eugene co-pastors The Neighborhood Church in Littleton, CO and writes a blog eugenesgodsightings.blogspot.com

The Wisdom of Harry Harlow’s Monkeys

How many people can you name whom God has used in your life?

For thirty-some years my wife Dee Dee has modeled grace, honesty, hospitality, and loyalty for me. My children, Katie, Michael (son-in-law), Brendan, and Emmy have each shared with me important individual lessons. But as a group they have shown me the value of hope and trust and–at very important times–childlike faith. My hunting partner Jay has modeled for me balance, strength, and godly manhood.

These are only a few of the many people I could name whom God has used to change me. I am fortunate.

Eugene C. Scott joins Mike in writing A Daily Bible Conversation twice a week.

TODAY’S READING (click here to view today’s reading online)

Job 16:1-19:29

1 Corinthians 16:1-24

Psalm 40:1-10

Proverbs 22:1

INSIGHTS AND EXPLANATIONS

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THE WORD MADE FRESH

I find it interesting in the closing, as in the beginning, of his letter that Paul does not address a church by an institutional name: First Christian Church of Corinth for example. In his greeting he speaks to them as people but not an institution. In his closing Paul, waxes even more personal, mentioning six different people, friends, and co-workers.

Several of them we have read of elsewhere. Likely they have travelled many rugged miles and often suffered and triumphed together. We know Paul was instrumental in Timothy joining the family of Christ and Paul considered Timothy as a son. Paul speaks with respect for Apollos. Pricilla and Aquila were close friends. Paul probably often lived in their home. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called this expression of church “Life Together.”

Bonhoeffer was right. These people were not simply people who belonged to the same organization or club. They were Paul’s friends and coworkers, his essential spiritual community. Their hearts were strung together with a cord that ran directly through the heart of Christ and wove them into a community that worked, suffered, traveled, preached, served, and lived together.

Listen to his language: he is collecting funds for “God’s people.” He speaks of “the men” and the personal pronoun “you” is prominent. He talks of staying not just visiting. They greet one another with a “holy kiss.” Never does he refer to the church as an “it.”

How different is this from how we talk about and think about church today? We talk of going to such-and-such church, or learning from so-and-so pastor, or reading this-or-that Christian book. Ours is often an institutional, impersonal expression of faith that was foreign to Paul and his friends. Paul’s idea of the church was highly relational. Later, in what we call his pastoral letters, he sets out organizational principles for the people of the church: how we may best relate to one another. But he never speaks of the body of Christ as an organization alone. Yet that is our primary lens for viewing the Church.

Is this part of the reason so many modern followers of Christ are frustrated and departing the institutional church? I believe so. Organizations can only function as conduits for people to meet (or attempt to meet) one another’s real, flesh and blood needs. Soon the system clogs up and relationships break down or are no longer the primary purpose. Like psychologist Harry Harlow’s famous wire monkeys, a brick and mortar institution can never nurture real living, breathing faith. Many of us are jumping off and looking for softer connections.

Yet most of us, like Paul, can name several people God has used to nurture in us a living, loving faith. What if these people, the ones you work, love, and live with are your church?  Or even the people you sit next to in the pew? How would seeing them as the church make church different? Then what if those you and those people began to worship, fellowship, and serve in relationship together? That is what people in Paul’s time and for hundreds of years after did. And God used them, a people not an institution, to change the world.

Did seeing the church as a people and not a steeple solve all their problems? Hardly. Read the previous fourteen chapters of Paul’s letter. But it did give them a foundation from which to work out their problems. Ultimately it is more difficult to walk away from people–imperfect though they may be–than an impersonal entity.

Pollsters, such as George Gallup, ask people how often they attend church. Paul, if he were around today, might ask how often people were with their church and how those relationships with their church had made a difference.      

1. What do these for passages share in common?
2. If you were to give your institutional church a non institutional name, what would it be?

If you’re reading this blog on Facebook and you’d like to join the conversation, click here. www.bibleconversation.com.

Eugene co-pastors The Neighborhood Church in Littleton, CO and writes a blog eugenesgodsightings.blogspot.com

Turn Out the Lights, the Party’s Over

You may have heard of the young Catholic monk who was assigned to copying ancient manuscripts in the cellar of the monastery library. He worked tirelessly, straining his eyes and consulting lexicons and dictionaries to correctly transcribe and translate each parchment. He climbed the stars each evening exhausted and ink stained.  His brothers began to worry about him.

Then one day they heard a blood-curdling scream rise from the cellar. They rushed to the top of the stairs. The young monk raced up and dropped to his knees on the top stair. With a strength powered by anguish, he tore his robe and wailed, “The word is ‘celebrate,’ C-E-L-E-B-R-A-T-E.”

All the other monks dropped to their knees and wept with him.

A motto that can sometimes describe how many of us view and live the Christian life is the one sports announcer Don Meredith sang near the end of many Monday Night Football games, “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”

Yet, God spends a lot of time mandating his people to  celebrate feasts, festivals, celebrations, and–well–parties.

Are we guilty of thinking that the faith life amounts to turning out the lights and shutting down the party? I know at times I am.

Eugene C. Scott joins Mike in writing A Daily Bible Conversation twice a week.

TODAY’S READING (click here to view today’s reading online)

2 Chronicles 31:1-36:23

1 Corinthians 1:1-17

Psalm 27:1-6

Proverbs 20:20-21

INSIGHTS AND EXPLANATIONS

2 Chronicles 31:1-36:23: To a large extent Israel has ceased to follow and serve the Lord. And in consequence God allows other kings and nations to rule and subjugate them. This brings up an age-old question, why would anyone choose to serve lifeless objects and ideas rather than the living, loving Lord of all? The answer lies in the heart of each of us.

But Chronicles ends hinting that even when we give up on God, God does not give up us. If God’s people will not respond to him, Cyrus, the pagan king of Persia will. The story is is not over.

1 Corinthians 1:1-17: 1 Corinthians is a misunderstood and often misused book. It has become a modern proof text for and against–mostly for–belief in miraculous spiritual gifts. Not to mention 1 Corinthians 13 becoming the most common wedding reading. But that is only scratching the surface of this brilliant, painfully honest–sometimes brutal–letter to the church that had formed and was struggling to define itself in the ancient Roman city of Corinth.

If not filled with wedding poetry and descriptions of other worldly gifts, what is this letter all about? Paul lays it out in verse 13 of chapter 1. “Is Christ divided?” he asks the Corinthian Christians. Thus is the underlying message of this letter. Our sister and brotherhood in Christ unites, not divides.

Paul addresses several divisions the Corinthians boasted of. As we read through this letter, let’s ask what as the modern bride of Christ, we have learned or failed to learn about unity in Christ. What divides us today?

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THE WORD MADE FRESH

Christianity and Judaism have long been accused of being monkish, dour and dreadfully serious. And rightly so. Not only have both faiths fostered movements such as the ancient and desert-bound Essenes and the somber new-world Puritans, but we are dealing with real life and death issues, not to mention life after death issues. This is rather serious business.

Yet feasts, festivals, and parties comprise a large part of what God expects his people to do together. Old Testament worship is often prescribed and described as celebration. Can you imagine how bustling and noisy and alive was worship in the days of the Tabernacle and Temple? Kids, fathers, mothers, soldiers, shepherds, birds, goats, priests, smoke, bells, songs, laughter, shouting, and teachers mingled in the courts all seeking God and his forgiveness. Compare that with our often silent, meditative, somber approach to worship.

It’s as if we are saying, “Shhh, God may be napping.”

Jesus seems to advocate this party mentality too. He describes heaven and the kingdom as a party. And despite our erroneous portrait of him as some depressed British guy, Jesus used humor often and moved comfortably in noise and celebration. He even threw a party for his last meal with his disciples. They did not eat only bread, nor drink grape juice.

This last section of Chronicles highlights this party mentality as well. Josiah brings Israel back to God and throws a Passover party. And it is an elaborate one. The whole nation is involved.

Then something we have seen before and very sad happens. Josiah and Israel stop celebrating. He is killed and the people turn away from God. Turn out the lights, the party’s over.

As I read this section, I wondered if there is not a correlation between our inability to celebrate God and our slow movement away from obedience to God. Laughter and noise and celebration, especially together with loved ones, are healing and motivating. Yet we consider these things frivolous.

When I was a new follower of Christ, as a teenager, I struggled to break away from the drinking and drug party scene. I had heard that Jesus went everywhere with me and when I was partying, he was there and was probably not enjoying the party. That was all true. But his lack of joy came from my self-destructive behavior not my desire to enjoy life and celebrate. Interestingly enough, I truly began to grow and live in my faith when I found a group of friends who knew how to love and celebrate God. We throw a mean party.

Today let’s turn on the lights, the party’s just started!

1. What divides us today?
2. What’s the best party you’ve ever been to?

If you’re reading this blog on Facebook and you’d like to join the conversation, click here. www.bibleconversation.com.

Eugene co-pastors The Neighborhood Church in Littleton, CO and writes a blog eugenesgodsightings.blogspot.com