We are being saved from what we were.
We come in from the muck and the cold and slowly, with muscles labor-sore, drop our clothing on the mudroom floor. It is foul, cold, unsheltering stuff, redolent with things we would forget, toils that damaged others and ruined ourselves. They fall, articles of clothing that once provided some modest protection, no longer needed in this new, warm, nourishing house. Continue Reading »
Posted in textures | Tagged biblical reflection, Colossians, textures | Leave a Comment »
The apostle Paul’s anguished struggle for reality in his relationship with the Corinthian believers probably explains the precision he seeks in this letter. Theirs may well have been one of those uneasy friendships where everything that can go wrong does. In a crazy-making ecosystem like this, the slightest ambiguity takes a direction that is the opposite of what is intended.
In ordinary life, the word ‘dysfunctional’ comes without effort to our lips. It probably applies here. Continue Reading »
Posted in textures | Tagged 2 Corinthians, biblical reflection, textures | Leave a Comment »
We are not pawns. Yet we are players in a Great Game in which everything is at stake and large powers move amid shadows and light.
We do not move alone, do not decide alone, do not—no matter our pretensions—create our own future, alone.
Theologians, as they should, make passable stabs at systematizing all this. They boil it down into its crystallized form. Some of us outliers memorize these schemata. It hardens into backbone, sometimes, allowing us to live, flex, thrust, chase with the kinds of agile coherence that a healthy body manifests.
But in reality, redemption’s story is a drama, not a code. Continue Reading »
Posted in textures | Tagged 2 Corinthians, biblical reflection, textures | Leave a Comment »
This business of Christian witness in a world gone mad is exquisitely complex. And beautiful.
Balance is required, a certain astute way with a dance.
Why did I once think things were simple, easy, and clear? Continue Reading »
Posted in textures | Tagged 2 Corinthians, biblical reflection, textures | Leave a Comment »
It matters very much whom we worship.
The otherwise diverse biblical witness finds unanimity around this point. We may wish for some wiggle room, some space for our personal preferences to be registered. Alas, Scripture allows none. Continue Reading »
Posted in textures | Tagged biblical reflection, Revelation, textures | Leave a Comment »
When the fifty-four chapter of the book called Isaiah addresses the exiled Jewish community as ‘Barren One’, it initiates one of the most stunning deployments of ironic negatives that Scripture and literature have known.
‘Sing, O barren one, who did not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not been in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of her who is married,’ says the Lord. ‘Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your offspring will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities. (Isaiah 54:1–3 ESV)
After a vocative address (‘O barren one’) that defines the little community of un-belongers in terms of the experience of a woman that they have not known, the next two negative clauses drive further rhetorical nails into this coffin of deprivation. You who did not bear…. you who have not been in labor. Continue Reading »
Posted in textures | Tagged biblical reflection, Isaiah, textures | Leave a Comment »
Truth be told, the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Micah throws in front of its reader some very grim reading.
Yet it ends with an inspiring flourish:
Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. You will show faithfulness to Jacob and steadfast love to Abraham, as you have sworn to our fathers from the days of old. (Micah 7:18–20 ESV)
A strong instinct in the biblical literature interprets Israel’s misfortune as the result of intergenerational rebellion. This is particularly true of that most intense crystallization of woe that we call the ‘Babylonian exile’, when all that Israel had been and felt herself entitled to become in future was lost, by all lights lost forever. Continue Reading »
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
The Book of Revelation is apocalyptic literature.
This scholarly term places the ‘Vision of John the Seer’ alongside other early Jewish literature that majors on the revelation of events and sequences that would otherwise be inaccessible to human minds. The Greek verb ἀποκαλύπτω means to reveal and lends its meaning and its name to this body of revelatory work. Continue Reading »
Posted in textures | Tagged biblical reflection, Revelation, textures | Leave a Comment »
The exclamation, the sensuous enthusiasm of the summons that comes to us in the 8th verse of this psalm of testimony and wisdom surprises. If such an invocation to sensation is just about imaginable in the context of witness, it is utterly defiant of the disciplined reflection of classical wisdom.
Yet here it is:
Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! (Psalm 34:8 ESV)
Perhaps the particular challenge that an acrostic psalm (alphabetically ordered) thrusts against the prowess of its composer explains this ranging wide of the customary field of play. We might imagine that the poor guy will say just about anything as long as it begins with the right letter. Or conversely, if we’ve sung or read this language of sanctified gustation one time too many, its impertinence might even escape our attention. Continue Reading »
Posted in textures | Tagged biblical reflection, Psalms, textures | Leave a Comment »
I have found cause to observe before in this space that the biblical vision of those things that matter most is stubbornly, relentlessly communitarian.
‘This is my story, this is my song’ is an anthem that finds its value not in narcissistic celebration of an individual’s experience, but rather in the foundationally communitarian phenomenon that we call testimony. Testimony begins and ends with community, in the first instance because the individual with a story to tell comes to us as an individual-in-context. In the second, testimony unfailingly appeals to a widening circle of shared life and shared live-ers.
It takes a village. Continue Reading »
Posted in textures | Tagged 1 Thessalonians, biblical reflection, textures | Leave a Comment »
Canter Bridge 