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meat and malbec in Seattle: the Buenos Aires Grill

December 13, 2008 by David Baer

Not for the faint of heart is the effort to discover a true Buenos Aires dining experience outside of that Argentine capital. The middle-aged men who wait on table there are not moonlighting on, say, their day job as a CPA. They are meseros. ‘Always been, always will be. Serving you your Argentine beef is what they do. They respect the meat, smile only as necessary, and never say, ‘Hi, my name is Trish, I’ll be taking care of you tonight.’

So it was with a little fear and trepidation that I turned a recent business trip to Seattle into an opportunity to take my Latin America-raised son (now a sophomore at Seattle Pacific University) to the Buenos Aires Grill, an establishment he’d scoped out during a city food tour with his mother. Continue Reading »

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the fear of man: Proverbs 29

December 13, 2008 by David Baer

Our predicament is on display from several angles. All that is productive, good, and joy-crafting in us is marred, dented, even chained. We are not what we could be and we cannot will ourselves out of this mess.

Nor are we doomed.

One of the angles of approach that provides a clear view on our damnable situation is the fear of other people that we suffer. It seems not to matter whether they possess the authority—moral or otherwise—that would make us subject to them or even eager to please. Nor does our own personal and professional coming of age solve our dilemma. We still live anxiously in the presence of other flesh, as the biblical dialect styles other human beings in order to bring out the limping, provisional, conditioned fragility of them. Continue Reading »

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PhDs in the pulpit: escaping the claustrophobia of academy-only expectations

December 12, 2008 by David Baer

We need thoughtful people in the pulpit.

Around the dinner table, a friend and his wife decry the insipid aridity of much that passes for Christian proclamation. These are not cultured despisers, these hosts of mine. They are decades-old friends who have been around the block and around the world, have celebrated life and been beaten up by it, have served and been served in proportions that overweight the first of the two.

They are veterans. All of their life together has been lived out under the sound of a voice from a pulpit. Whether in San José or Aberdeen or Wheaton or Cambridge, Christian preaching has been a contextual envelope for the grit of getting on with things. They have always lived within range of the pulpit’s voice.

Much of it has been very bad. Continue Reading »

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no choice: Amos 7

December 12, 2008 by David Baer

The prophet Amos found himself walking the turf of No Man’s Land in a way that seems almost characteristic of the biblical prophets. In the face of indignation and hatred, he delivered a message to the northern kingdom of Israel in which he himself found no pleasure.

His work, like that of the more famous Jeremiah, disgusted him. Continue Reading »

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self-restraint: Proverbs 29

December 10, 2008 by David Baer

It is almost impossible to overvalue self-restraint. This is particularly true of the spoken word. When in doubt, a quiet pause is almost always a good idea. To think rather than speak right now is rarely a mistake.

Proverbs 29.20 gets at the matter from the negative side:

Do you see someone who is hasty in speech?
There is more hope for a fool than for anyone like that.

Not often is ‘hope for a fool’ the more likely of two outcomes. So does the proverb-teller underscore the disastrous path of what Seinfeld might have called the ‘fast-talker’.

It’s odd that creatures with an organ of speech planted right in the middle of our faces should inhabit an environment where using it is more often than not a bad idea. The Proverbs bear a second burden, that of teaching us to speak well. But before we can accomplish that, we must be taught to say less.

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two I’s: Revelation 1

December 9, 2008 by David Baer

Rarely does the identity of a drama’s principal players come so clearly stated. At the beginning of the apocalyptic scroll that we call John’s Revelation, both the Lord God and the work’s human author declare themselves. It is a most pregnant juxtaposition:

‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.

The Lord God declares himself earlier and later than all reality that is knowable from our human perspective. He is its antecedent and its epilogue. There is no seeing beyond him, no shape or substance outside of him and his creative will. He has no shelf date, no competitor in the race of time.

This is conventional stuff, though hardly superficial. Faith in one God is capable of absorbing these statements without violence to its tissue, although the knowing of God in the flow of time will absorb all the energy, conviction, and life of those who determine to know him here. Continue Reading »

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Sammy the self-confident jostler: the Story of a Rescued Rhodesian Ridgeback

December 8, 2008 by David Baer

Now these many months on from the Saturday morning he came to us as a quivering shadow of himself, Sammy has become a jostling, tail-wagging mainstay of the family mix. Take stairs, for example.

Stairs are everywhere in this 1930s-vintage house of ours. Two sets of the things lie between the basement (where Dogs Sleep and Dad Works), one outside and one inside. Then there are the stairs that take us from the ground floor to the second, where People and the Cat Sleep and where Dogs Must Not Go. Continue Reading »

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refusing reduction: Jude

December 8, 2008 by David Baer

It is the nature of pragmatism to reduce the task to a single thing. Whether this be ‘to save souls’ or ‘to plant churches’ or to ‘show compassion’, the allure of reductionism is—like the poor—seemingly always with us.

It is perhaps most important for those who strive to be ‘biblical’ and who find an identity marker in the urgent purity of their faith to pause over the multifaceted nature of the task as the biblical materials themselves present. Continue Reading »

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pursuing the knowledge of YHWH: Hosea 6

December 7, 2008 by David Baer

Hosea is a torturous work, not chiefly for its unending textual complications but more immediately for the fearful conundrum in which its northern Israelite originator and its Judean stewards find themselves. We read time and again that YHWH has turned against Israel, has become its chief antagonist, has determined to wipe the slate clean of his troublesome, rebellious sons. Continue Reading »

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unmovable: Psalm 125

December 6, 2008 by David Baer

Often considered one of the soft qualities of personality and character, trust does not immediately associate itself with sturdiness. The iconic self-made man of the American psyche trusts no one but himself. By definition self-reliant, he does not attach his fortune to the reliability of anyone else.

Not so the life of YHWH’s people. Here a different logic holds sway. The very reliability of YHWH establishes a baseline of sturdiness for those who choose to entrust their lot to his character:

Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion,
which cannot be moved, but abides forever.
As the mountains surround Jerusalem,
so the LORD surrounds his people,
from this time on and forevermore. (Psalm 125:1-2 NRSV)

Geographical strongholds stand in as metaphor for YHWH’s existential bedrock. Those who anchor themselves to this most sturdy Protector will themselves be unshakable. A soft quality becomes, in paradox, the hardest.

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