Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Psalms, textures on August 4, 2014| Leave a Comment »
We loathe the moment when our conversation partner looks distractedly over our shoulder. Or fidgets with his keys. Or gives the appearance of listening, but with her eyes empty as clouds, her thoughts elsewhere.
We long for eye contact. We were made for face-to-face. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Psalms, textures on August 3, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Convinced of his integrity, the writer of Psalm 26 pleads for vindication with a confidence that tender souls might find disturbing.
We must understand that the writer has done precisely what the ‘wisdom psalms’ instruct the novice in life to do if he wants to become both just and wise. The psalmist can speak transparently about his trajectory in life because he has followed the game plan. It is not that he has beat out his neighbors in some cheap contest of personal rectitude. Rather, YHWH’s plan for the development of a human life has proved reliable. Except, so far, for the part about vindication. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Psalms, textures on August 1, 2014| Leave a Comment »
What was I thinking …?
We ask ourself the impossible question when our idiocy has come under the irrefutable light of day.
I was a fool. I was deluded. Distracted. Or drunk. Or stupid.
It is every believer’s nightmare, to have been wrong about everything. Regardless of the ideology that has claimed heart, mind, or wallet—faithfully secular or conventionally religious—the wolf at the door is to have been simply wrong. Because faith goes to the root of things, to be proven wrong about our core conviction is to have been wrong about everything else as well. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Psalms, textures on July 29, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Out of sight, out of mind.
So do we forget people we ought always to remember. So do we lose contact. ‘We aren’t really in touch’, people say, the absence of communication speaking volumes.
That’s the thing about distance. It’s not so much the matter of being across the river or the next town over or a time zone away. It’s that there’s no seeing. No hearing.
‘I can’t be reached’, we say. Terrible things might happen and the one who could have done something finds out when it’s already too late. Just by being far away. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Psalms, textures on July 27, 2014| Leave a Comment »
In the Psalms, as in life, the enemy is often hidden and relentlessly scheming. Here as in so many other of its observations, the book of Psalms displays its characteristic realism.
We are more sentimental and romantic about our adversaries, at least in those moments when we can bring ourselves to admit their existence. We do alright with evil, comfortably abstract and remote. But we resist the notion of evil people. They’re a bit too concrete for our post-modern aesthetic, where everyone gads about on pretty much the same moral plain and almost any action can be tolerated if we can just find an angle from which to understand its causes. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged 1 Corinthians, biblical reflection, textures on August 20, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Noise is inarticulate sound. It expresses little or nothing. It does not mean.
I’m reminded of an elementary school memory. A music teacher, bent on helping us distinguish noise from music, asked us for examples of each. It was, at best, a naive errand, a tilting at windmills. We were, after all, nine years old and half of us were boys. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged 1 Corinthians, biblical reflection, textures on August 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Paul, anguished and ashamed about portions of his biography, is hardly timid about others.
Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.
Lest we take the familiar path of dismissing Paul as uncouth and reptilian, it’s a good thing to notice how closely he links his worthiness to Christ and the ‘traditions’ about Jesus that he stewards for the sake of the communities he loves. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Jeremiah, textures on October 26, 2012| Leave a Comment »
A prophet like Jeremiah—and so many others who bore with similar reluctance the mantle of YHWH’s spokesperson—needed to be dragged kicking and screaming to the duty. Rarely were those prophets whom the biblical canon endorses as true prophets, the genuine article, eager with careerist zeal for the task to which YHWH had summoned them.
They dragged their feet.
Declare among the nations and proclaim, set up a banner and proclaim, conceal it not, and say … (Jeremiah 50:2 ESV)
There is a reason for the insistent repetition in the order. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged 2 Timothy, biblical reflection, textures on October 22, 2012| Leave a Comment »
There are a million reasons to stay on the couch.
Passive resignation before the unyielding hardness of life and leadership can easily become a lifestyle. Passivity has a lot going for it, starting with the fact that it’s so much easier than getting up, walking out the door, and facing the music. You can even spin it in acceptable directions: living a ‘balanced life’ springs to mind and—apparently—to the pens and keyboards of a thousand suburban Christian writers, for whom balance and peace have become the twin goblet handles of the Holy Grail. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Jeremiah, textures on October 10, 2012| Leave a Comment »
To be a prophet is not simply to declare what’s coming.
Contrary to what is often assumed, the language of the biblical prophets is rarely deterministic. To the contrary, the lines of this literature are relationally rich. The emotion of love and embrace, as of love unrequited, is a frequent visitor to these pages.
The Lord is not only the subject of the famous words, ‘Thus says …’. He is also the one who woos his often recalcitrant Israel. He pleads with her, suffers with her, is stunned by her, returns to her. He both desolates and is desolated by his beloved people. (more…)
Canter Bridge 