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the quiet life: 1 Thessalonians 4

October 14, 2008 by David Baer

The apostle Paul is often taken for a fire-breathing apocalyptic with little time for this present world as it sulks and struts in its overwheening vanity. Such a view misses both his respect for our realia as the very texture of creation and his counsel to the Thessalonians to lead a respectably independent life:

Aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we directed you, so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and be dependent on no one.

Paul is concerned here with the believing community’s integrity. Having just concluded some choice words about what integrity looks like on the sexual interior of the people’s house, he turns to the painting and trimming of its outside walls. Here the topic is largely a matter of practicing a proper work ethic. A community that views itself as the first fruits of a new humanity can hardly get away with the life of a couch potato. Continue Reading »

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Love in the time of missiologists: why you can’t not hope (Paul and Eva Toms Lectureship in Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, October 9, 2008)

October 12, 2008 by David Baer

The incomparable Colombian novelist Gabriel García-Márquez is a master of the evocative book title. From Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) to El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (The Coronel Has No One Who Writes to Him) to Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold) to El amor en tiempos de cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera) García-Márquez tells stories whose titles dare you to read them.

The last of these is clearly my inspiration this evening: Love in the Time of Cholera. As its literary signature, that genre of fiction writing that has become known as ‘magical realism’ juxtaposes an ordinary concept to the fantastical, odd, magical, or extraordinary. So for García-Márquez does love—that most ordinary, common, everyday virtue of human coexistence—jostle awkwardly and suggestively against the time of cholera. The once-in-a-century affliction of cholera, in all its epidemic phantagasmoria, reframes love almost entirely. It renders it poignant, out-of-time, compelling. It makes it something different that it is ordinarily understood to be. Continue Reading »

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the ethics of new creation: Ephesians 4

September 30, 2008 by David Baer

The apostle Paul is seldom as brilliantly insightful as in his description of New Creation’s community in the fourth chapter of his letter to the Ephesians. The portrait of this new humanity as a body that responds to the direction of Christ as its head is redolent with ethical implications. It is a stirring picture, to say the least, but one that is at the same multi-layered in that way which both begs for and repays careful analysis. Continue Reading »

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a big secret: Ephesians 3

September 29, 2008 by David Baer

At the core of the apostle Paul’s self-understanding stands his calling to enlighten the nations regarding YHWH’s intention to bless them. Indeed Paul seems to evoke the language of the book of Isaiah’s enigmatic ‘servant of the Lord’ when he speaks of how he invests his own life in this almost startlingly non-Jewish mission.

Paul believes himself to be the custodian of a mystery hidden in the secret counsels of God until Paul’s own historical moment. At that time, his argument runs, what was hidden was made clear. Paul’s job is to illuminate the nations regarding the good news that YHWH’s redeeming obsession tracks itself out in their direction, intends to gather them into its embrace, and even sets its sight on renewing the whole creation until it cannot keep itself from bursting into praise. Continue Reading »

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eyes in the fridge: the story of a rescued Rhodesian Ridgeback

September 28, 2008 by David Baer

At times like this, the idea of wandering down to the kitchen for a midnight snack of olives becomes a very bad idea indeed.

Sammy’s eyes, you see, are in there. Tupperware never served a nobler purpose. Continue Reading »

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a most human temple: Ephesians 2

September 28, 2008 by David Baer

The apostle Paul has few compunctions about mixing metaphors, particularly when straining for descriptors of God and his redeemed people. In the second chapter of his letter to the Ephesians, he weaves together metaphors of citizenship and temple construction. When read against the background of the Hebrew Bible, this is not an unlikely amalgamation of images. Temple, after all, is shot through with communitarian and nationalistic overtones. Citizenship, in the same context, always means belonging in a community that worships this god or these gods and not some other. Continue Reading »

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continuities: Galatians 6

September 26, 2008 by David Baer

A strong theology of creation permits Paul—like the recorders of the Bible’s wisdom traditions—to trace the way of things by long, thoughtful observation. Even in a letter shot through with reflection upon the spirit-flesh dichotomy, Paul is simply to describe with organic language and as both promise and warning the way things work:

Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit. So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up.

Paul mines what are to him the evident continuities in life with pastoral intent. He does not want the Galatian Christians to forge with their attitudes and behaviors a future that turns out to look and smell not like blessing but rather like a curse. His desire for them is that they should invest life and energy in projects and a way of life that cultivates the soil that gives—eventually and enduringly—a sustaining harvest. Continue Reading »

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fear itself: Galatians 5

September 25, 2008 by David Baer

For a man as determined as he is to safeguard the Christian’s freedom from any moral and legal encumbrance that does not align itself with the logic of Jesus’ cross, the apostle Paul is shockingly severe with regard to those who breach moral boundaries:

I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

The apostle makes this fear-inspiring warning with regard to those who practice ‘the works of the flesh’. Paul bifurcates the existential energy available to humankind. For him, there are just two: spirit and flesh. Continue Reading »

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all in: Galatians 3

September 23, 2008 by David Baer

We have only scarce evidence regarding the shape of Paul’s personality, yet his temperament must have exuded a certain feistiness. It was doubtless an unpleasant thing to discover that one had crossed him. What looks from this distance like an irascible edginess must not be taken as a transparent defect but rather linked, at least in part, to his impassioned jealousy for ‘the nations’ or ‘the gentiles’. When he articulates his own vocation in the letter to the Galatians, he defines it in these very terms, sketching out the boundaries of an embassy ‘to the nations’ that stands over against, say, Cephas’ calling ‘to the circumcision’. Continue Reading »

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tiquicia and how it got that way: Steven Palmer and Iván Molina (eds), The Costa Rica Reader. History, culture, politics

September 22, 2008 by David Baer

Rarely does an anthology of original documents of historical value mingled with insightful interpretative essays come together as a coherent work. Steven Palmer and Iván Molina, against those odds, have put the ball in the back of the net with just such a book. Continue Reading »

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