Readings: Matthew 13; Luke 8-13

“The Gospel writers, in their wisdom, left most of the parables as open narratives in order to invite us into engagement with them. Each reader will hear a distinct message and may find that the same parable leaves multiple impressions over time. . . . Reducing parables to a single meaning destroys their aesthetic as well as ethical potential. This surplus of meaning is how poetry and storytelling work, and it is all to the good.”

–Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus

This week we launch into the Kingdom Parables–those brief narratives in which Jesus tries to eff the ineffable and give ordinary mortals some frame of reference for talking about the Kingdom of God. This is beyond a hard sell. The Kingdom that Jesus spent most of his ministry talking about is an earthly kingdom, but it is like no earthly kingdom that has ever existed, and its governing logic is absolutely foreign to natural humanity.

But we have to see it to be it, so Jesus tells us about the parts–much like the blind men describing the elephant in the famous poem by John Godfrey Saxe. Like a mustard seed, the Kingdom starts small and becomes a place of shelter; like a fishing net, it draws in everyone and throws back what it can’t keep; like a great treasure, a person who knows about it will be willing to sacrifice everything to get it. And so on. These are all imperfect and incomplete, but every one of them contributes something to the picture, and, if we add them all up, we might be able to imagine the whole elephant.

Carolyn Homer makes an exceptionally strong case that we have a religious duty, as Mormons and as Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and these are two different things), to mourn with our Muslim brothers and sisters, to comfort them, and to share their burdens. I agree wholeheartedly.

And I am willing to go further still. I believe that we have a responsibility as both Latter-day Saints, and as citizens of a pluralistic democracy, to get to know our Muslim neighbors better, to understand them as we want them to understand us, and to love them as we want to be loved.

We have this responsibility with all of our neighbors, of course. It is basically what “the Gospel” means. But I believe that this responsibility is greater when it comes to those who practice Islam. There are several reasons for this. Here are three:

Perhaps the most important single moment in my spiritual development was the moment that I realized that grown-ups aren’t supposed to be comfortable all, or even most of the time. We all need to be more comfortable being uncomfortable.
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The last temptation is the greatest treason
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
  –TS Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

We are now on week two of the Sermon on the Mount, and, like week one, there is no way that we could cover everything that needs to be covered in one blog post. But one blog post is all we (read: I) have time for this week, so we will have to make do. We must make choices–difficult choices–to make sure that all of the highlights get hit. So I am going to trace one theme and one rhetorical style through the two chapters, with an emphasis on Chapter 6, which I think is the more important.

Part Three: Rules, what are they good for?

There is a moment in one of the Terminator movies that perfectly encapsulates one of the key tensions in the Sermon on the Mount. In this scene, a young boy learns that his future self has sent back a killer robot (played by a pre-gubernatorial Arnold Schwarzenegger) to protect him and make sure that he grows up to save humanity and stuff. Naturally, the boy is nervous about hanging around with a killer robot, so he makes a rule: no killing. Being a robot and all, Arnold Schwarzenegger has to follow rules, so the kid makes him take an oath not to kill anyone.

About ten seconds later, they are stopped by a security guard who tries to prevent them from entering a compound. Without saying a word, Schwarzenegger pulls out his gun and shoots the guy twice. While the poor guard is writing and screaming on the ground, the boy shouts, “what the hell are you doing?”

“He’ll live,” says the Robot. And they go in.

Part Two: Salt and Light, huh. Well let me tell you….

Ye are the salt of the earth, huh? But let me tell you: if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world, huh? Well let me tell you: A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. (Matthew 5:13-14)

This is my translation of the text in Matthew 5: 13-14. After each opening declarative sentence (“You are the. . .”), I add a huh? and a let me tell you. . . . This translation is not based on knowing Greek or being a great theologian; I don’t, and I’m not. But this is how I represent what I am pretty sure Jesus was trying to convey when he told his listeners that they were the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

Part One: Blessedness and Happiness

Matthew 5; Luke 6

NB: Though this week’s reading is limited to Matthew 5, and the corresponding verses in Luke, it is still too much for one post. Or even two. So this will be the first of three posts this week on the first part of the Sermon on the Mount, covering verses 1-10: the Beatitudes.

Half a loaf is better than none. But half a baby is not. The secret to being Solomon is knowing the difference.

I have recently started dividing my work problems into loaves and babies based on whether or not half-solutions will work. Loaf problems are problems where a partial solution is better than no solution at all. Baby problems are problems where partial solutions are worse than no solution at all.

What did the Jews of Jesus’s time think about the Messiah? Who, exactly, were they expecting to show up? Why would anybody think that Jesus would fit the bill? These, I believe, are questions we need to try to answer before beginning to read the New Testament, and, especially, the Book of Matthew.

The Magnificat is the oldest Advent hymn. It is at once the most passionate, the wildest, and one might even say, the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. . . . . This song has none of the sweet, nostalgic, or even playful tones of some of our Christmas carols. It is, instead, a hard, strong, inexorable song about collapsing thrones and humbled lords of this world, about the power of God and the powerlessness of mankind. There are the tones of the women prophets of the Old Testament that now come to life in Mary’s mouth. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Mystery of Holy Night

Last week, the Washington Post ran a feature story on the Magnificat, the song that Mary sings in Luke 1: 46-55. It’s about time, really, the song is more than 2,000 years old and has been an important part of Christian liturgy for nearly all of those years.

The worst thing I ever did at Christmas was buy somebody a present. I am still ashamed of my actions on this occasion. I was a truly horrible human being, and my failure still haunts me every Christmas season.

Let me explain.

My son learned his first Christmas song when he was four years old–“Joy to the World,” but he sang it wrong. Instead of “Joy to the world, the Lord has come” he sang “Joy to the world, the world has come.”  

When he was six, I decided to try to correct him. “You’re missing the point of the song,” I told him. And he replied, as only a six-year-old can, “no daddy, YOU’RE missing the point of the song.” It has taken me 15 years to realize that he was right and I was wrong. Joy, in its most essential form, is precisely the profound comfort that we take in the goodness of the world. 

“Some disciples came to Jesus through the witness of others, while others found him independently. Some immediately recognized and followed him, while others, like Nicodemus, questioned more and took longer to come to their faith. In a time and culture that privileged men and a particular ancestral lineage, the experience of the Samaritan woman shows that in Christ there are no outsiders: all can come to him, find salvation, and share that joy with others.” (Eric Huntsman, Becoming the Beloved Disciple, p.123)

For the last few years, my observation of the Advent season has been guided by Eric Huntsman’s excellent book Good Tidings of Great Joy–a feast of art, music, scriptural interpretation, and inspiration that celebrates the miracle of Christ’s birth. This year, my Christmas gift list will also be guided by an Eric Huntsman book: Becoming the Beloved Disciple, a reading of the Fourth Gospel by one of the best Latter-day Saint scholars around. 

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Hope is the Jan Brady of the theological virtues–the sober, responsible middle-child stuck between the mountain moving urgency of Faith and the flashy  never-failething of Charity. Hope does its essential work much more quietly. But it is nonetheless essential work.

If we aren’t careful, we can confuse hope for a sort of lesser faith. Some people know that certain things are true, and the rest of us just hope they are. If we nourish this seed of hope carefully, we are told, it will eventually grow into faith and we will know things too.

Well, I’m not there, and I don’t think that I will ever be. Hope is as much as I can muster, even on a good day. I hope that there is a God. I hope that there is some kind of existence after this life. I hope that my Redeemer lives. And I hope that the universe is organized around principles of goodness and meaningful justice far superior to those I have seen on earth. [Read more…]

Daniel 1, 3, 5; Esther 3-5, 7-8

Let’s start with Superman.

America’s quintessential cultural hero is an icon of assimilation. He is a refugee whose home has been destroyed by an environmental disaster. He immigrates, not only to the United States, but to the American Heartland and grows up on a farm in Kansas, moves to the big city, and becomes a metaphor for the way that America saw itself in the 20th century. He is amazingly powerful, eternally good, and completely assimilated. So assimilated, in fact, that the only thing that can hurt him is a piece of the world he left behind. A small pebble from the Old World reduces America’s greatest hero to a simpering weenie. To be powerful, Superman must leave his old life behind.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt famously examines the “banality of evil.” If I understand her correctly, what she means by this is something like the ordinariness of evil. The horrific evil of the Holocaust was not perpetrated by inhuman monsters with horns and talons, but by ordinary people (like Adolf Eichmann) just doing their jobs.

I take her point, and I agree. Evil is ordinary. But goodness is ordinary too. Most of the time, ordinary people doing ordinary things results in something rare and wonderful. Speaking religiously, the word ordinary comes from the same root as the word ordain. An ordinary life is the kind of existence that God has ordained for human beings. It is a life where everything is in order–the way that things are supposed to be.

The titles that we give to Jesus’s parables are important, Amy-Jill Levine teaches us in Short Stories by Jesus, because they covey assumptions about the point of view we should adopt when we read them. “The Parable of the Lost Sheep” is going to be substantially different than “the Parable of the Careless Shepherd,” even if everything else remains the same. Perspective matters. [Read more…]

Was he really a bullfrog? Hard to tell–we know so little about the private lives of Old Testament figures. But we can be sure that Jeremiah never sang “Joy to the Word”–or to anything else for that matter. Not to the boys and girls. Not to the fishes in the deep blue sea. Not to anyone. Joy, in Jeremiah’s life was not a thing.

But Jeremiah was both a great prophet and a great poet–and his life and ministry can help us understand a lot about how both prophecy and poetry work in the Old Testament. [Read more…]

I woke up this morning with the strange idea that I needed to write a Halloween sermon. Never having done such a thing before, and unaware of any biblical texts to support the Halloween story, I turned to the only Halloween texts that I knew anything about: the movies. But even there, I found little to go on.

There aren’t a lot of really great Halloween movies. Hocus Pocus deserves a mention. It’s not great, but it’s pretty good. And after that we are left largely with with soft-core slasher porn and campy after-school specials–and movies that happen to be scary but I jhave ahave nothing else to do with Halloween.

But there is Tim Burton’s 1993 masterpiece The Nightmare Before Christmas–-easily the best Halloween movie, and maybe the best movie about any holiday, ever made. It’s got it all: visually stunning stop-motion animation, an amazing musical score by Danny Elfman, a unique and interesting story, and a kidnap plot involving Santa Claus. So The Nightmare Before Christmas it is. Here is your Halloween sermon. [Read more…]

The word “consecrate” has a special resonance for Latter-day Saints. The Law of Consecration was once the basis of our social order, and we believe that it will one day be the order of Zion, or the Kingdom of God. To consecrate, from the Latin consecrare, means to make sacred. Anything can be consecrated because everything can be made to serve God. We can consecrate our time, our talents, or treasures, or suffering, and, perhaps most importantly, our stories. [Read more…]

The strong reader, whose readings will matter to others as well as to himself, is thus placed in the dilemmas of the revisionist, who wishes to find his own original relation to truth, whether in texts or in reality (which he treats as texts anyway), but also wishes to open received texts to his own sufferings, or what he wants to call the suffering of history.–Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading

Americans tend to approach two documents–the Bible and the Constitution–as self-interpreting units of meaning that neither require nor permit interpretation. These are privileged textual entities that mean what they say and say what they mean, and all anybody needs to do is figure out exactly what their authors meant by every word so we can download the right meaning directly into our brains and live our lives accordingly.

Treating the Constitution this way gives us the curious legal doctrine of “originalism,” which is fashionable for jurists to talk about in Senate hearings but has never actually been practiced in any meaningful way by confirmed judges. Treating the Bible this way gives us the religious doctrine of fundamentalism, which is at the center the Evangelical Protestant tradition–and, allowing for an expanded scriptural canon, the Latter-day Saint tradition as well. [Read more…]

Isaiah 1-6

I am ordinarily very skeptical of books and articles that advertise some or another scripture “made easier.”  I think, we make the scriptures too easy already. I prefer James Faulconer’s approach in the Scriptures Made Harder series. We should not be too comfortable when reading the scriptures. They are supposed to be hard. [Read more…]

Here is what I checked off my bucket list today: Teach a priesthood lesson about castration and tell a room full of Mormon men that it is a procedure that God, at least metaphorically, wants them to undergo. [Read more…]

I am a Mormon. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  And I am a proud part of the Mormon Church. These identities overlap, but they are not identical. I could imagine being one or two of these things without being all three. I know Mormons who are not members of any Church. And I know people who are firmly committed to the Mormon Church who have disaffiliated, or all but disaffiliated, from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Substantial overlap is not the same as equivalence. [Read more…]

“If I claim to possess the truth, I will be unlikely even to entertain the possibility that others may be right, or at least partly right, and I wrong, or at least partly wrong; unlikely to enter imaginatively into the world of others so as to learn to appreciate the force of their account. . . . Claims to possess the uncontestable truth aren’t always wrong, but they are always dangerous–especially when a person’s claim to possess the truth matters more to her than the truth itself.” –Miroslov Volf, The End of Memory

I’m not a relativist, moral or otherwise. I believe that some things are true and other things are false, and that it is often possible (though rarely easy) for human beings to know the difference. And I believe that the difference matters. [Read more…]

I knew exactly what was going to happen–I had even seen it happen once before–so I shouldn’t have been so surprised. But I was. And shocked, and saddened, and embarrassed about feeling shocked and saddened. And then revelation happened.

This week, my university has been hosting seven Buddhist monks from the Tashi Kyil Monastery in Uttarakhan, India. As these particular monks are wont to do, they spent all week painstakingly creating a beautiful mandala out of colored sand. They finished it at about 12:00 this afternoon. And at 12:15, they destroyed it, swept it into an urn, and took the now-brown sand and dumped it in the Ohio River.

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“OK, that’s all good and stuff, but was Job a real person?”

That is the most frequent question that I have gotten from Latter-day Saints since I wrote a book about Job four years ago. This is apparently a really big concern for some people.

Here is the answer: “Probably not, and even if he was, there is no possible way that the Book of Job records an actual historical occurrence–and of all the questions that someone might ask about Job, the question of whether or not he was a real person is perhaps the least interesting and least important. Job is a poem, and poetry can be revelation and scripture as easily as journalism.”

That’s the short version of the book. Everything else is just filling in the details. What I want to do in the next few paragraphs, though, is fill in just enough of the details to fill an average 45 minute Gospel Doctrine lesson. [Read more…]

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

–William Bruce Cameron, “The Elements of Statistical Confusion Or: What Does the Mean Mean?”

Most educators have at least a passing familiarity with the difference between what can be counted and what actually counts. Some things that students learn–how to spell words, how to do math problems, the capital of North Dakota–can be measured easily, with machine-scored bubble sheets, and used to compare students across the country.
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