Pastors and Historical Research

fact check

I will admit it; I love social media, and I think it is an excellent tool for evangelism and understanding.  However, one of the biggest problems with social media is the ability to post whatever we want and then, just because we know the person who posted it, believes it and then shares it.  I have fallen victim to this myself and have shared items without checking them only to have to take them down after the fact.

As we move along in the political season, and more and more information will be posted online, it is important for everyone, but especially pastors, to verify the information that they are posting. Pastors are community leaders and as such we have a tremendous responsibility to provide factual information.  My new rule of thumb is if I do not have time to verify I should not post it.

With all of this in mind, historian John Fea pointed readers of his blog to a recent essay about the importance of reliable historical research and offered some tips.  Here is a little bit of the article:

A friend of mine was preparing his sermon. We happened to be at the same social function, and so he casually asked me what I knew about medieval illuminations (i.e. fireworks). To be honest, I didn’t know much. From my years of teaching world history I knew that gunpowder and fireworks had originated in Asia and spread rather slowly (along trade routes and through military ventures) to Europe. Hence European fireworks are really an early modern/modern phenomenon.

My friend’s question, however, was fairly specific: when was the earliest use of fireworks for a royal event in England? This was beyond my general knowledge.

I wasn’t worried. I knew I could quickly find the answer. So I did, and told my friend what he needed the next day (late fifteenth century, for those of you interested).

I am a professional historian. But the methods I employed to help my friend are not monopolized by my profession. Most of the tools pastors need for basic yet reliable historical research are readily available in our digital age. So, for those of you who like to “do-it-yourself”, here is a quick guide to becoming (at least for the basic stuff) your own personal historian.

Read the Rest Here

In the Beginning

 

in_the_beginning_wp

The beginning of John’s Gospel is of such importance and of such depth of meaning that we must study it almost verse by verse. It is John’s great thought that Jesus is none other than God’s creative and life-giving and light-giving word, that Jesus is the Power of God which created the world and the reason of God which sustains the world come to earth in human and bodily form.

John was the beloved Apostle and the only one who died a natural death.  He was the last of the living apostles and wrote his gospel and his letters while in exile.  But the thing about John that I find the most interesting is he was the one sitting next to Jesus at the last supper.

In the famous painting of the last supper, we see a figure leaning against Jesus with his head on his chest he ear pressed against him, that figure is John, and he is listening to the heartbeat of God!  John writes his gospel from a very intimate position; he listened to God’s heartbeat.  John’s gospel is a different gospel, and that is one of the reasons it stands alone.

Here at the beginning of his Gospel, John says three things about the word; which is to say that he says three things about Jesus.

The word was already there and at the very beginning of things. John is taking us back to the very first verse we read in Scripture, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1.) What John is saying is this – the word is not one of the created things; the word was there before creation. The word is not part of the world that came into being in time; the word is part of eternity and was there with God before time and the world began. John was thinking of what is known as the pre-existence of Christ.

This idea of a pre-existence of Christ can be tough to grasp. But it does mean one very simple, very practical, and a tremendous thing. If the word was with God before time began, if God’s word is part of the eternal scheme of things, it means that God was always like Jesus.

Sometimes we tend to think of God as stern and avenging, and we tend to think that something Jesus did changed God’s anger into love and altered his attitude towards humanity. The whole of the New Testament tell us, and in this passage from John especially that God has always been like Jesus. What Jesus did was to open a window in time that we might see the eternal and unchanging love of God.

God has not changed; it is humanities knowledge of God that has changed, and it was Jesus who gave us the ability to begin to change how we looked at and thought about God not only in our lives but the world. Humanity could only grasp and understand God’s nature and his ways in part. It was only when Jesus came that they saw fully and completely what God has always been like.

John goes on to say that the word was with God. What does John mean by this? What John is saying is that there has always been the closest connection between the word and God. Let’s put it in a simpler way – there has always been the most intimate relationship between Jesus and God. That means no one can tell us what God is like, what God’s will is for us, what God’s love and heart and mind are like except Jesus.

If we want to know what someone really thinks and feels about something or someone, we do not go to a person who is simply an acquaintance of them, to someone who has only known them for a short period; we go to someone that we know to be an intimate friend of them because we know that they will be able to interpret the mind and heart of the person for us.

John is saying something similar here about Jesus. He is saying that Jesus has always been with God. John is saying that Jesus is so intimate with God that God has no secrets from him; and that, therefore, Jesus is the one person in all the universe who can reveal to us what God is like and how God feels towards us.

Finally, and I have saved the most technical part for last, John says that the Word was God. It is difficult and technical because it involves a little Greek to understand fully what John is trying to say here. Greek, in which John wrote, had a different way of saying things from the way we use them in English. Hang with me now. When Greek uses a noun, it almost always uses the definite article with it. The Greek for God is Theos, and the definite article is ho. When Greek speaks about God it does not simply say Theos; it says ho Theos. Now when Greek does not use the definite article with the noun that noun becomes much more like an adjective. John did not say that the word was ho theos; that would have been to say that the word was identical with God. He said the word was theos which means that the word WAS, or we might say, of the very same character and quality and essence and being as God. When John says that the Word was God he was not saying that Jesus was identical to God; he was saying that Jesus was so perfectly the same as God in mind, in heart, in being that in him we perfectly see what God is like.

So at the beginning of his gospel John lays it down that in Jesus, and in him alone, there is entirely revealed to humanity all that God always was and always will be, and all that he feels and desires for humanity.

If you want to know God, we have to know Jesus, and we know Jesus by studying and following his word and example in our lives each and every day.

Let us pray:

O Word made Flesh, You have come into our midst as light and wisdom, desiring to be known to us in our lives and to be found in the world around us. Open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to recognize you where you dwell—in our midst—Challenging, heartening, lighting the way to truth, peace, justice.

Tips for Cultivating A Habit of Reading Scripture

Reading the Bible

As we begin the New Year we tend to make all sorts of resolutions that we stick with for a few weeks and then abandon them.  This year why not adopt the habit of daily Scripture reading.  There are many aids to make this easy to include having the Scripture emailed to you each day.

I came across this essay, 6 Tips to Cultivating the Practice of Reading Scripture and it is a good place to start.  Each new thing that we do requires preparation to Scripture reading is no different.  Here is a taste of the essay.

When Jesus criticizes two disciples on the Emmaus Road for their failure to believe what the prophets had spoken, the problem was not their inability to hear the prophets or take them seriously. Jesus asked, “Wasn’t it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:26, CEB). “Of course it was necessary!” we might say. But the question remains, which prophets actually document this necessity? “Isaiah 53,” we might respond, but we would then need to acknowledge that we can say this only because we have learned to read in just this way. After all, Isaiah 53 never mentions the Messiah, and Jesus’ contemporaries were unaccustomed to thinking of Isaiah’s Servant as a suffering Messiah.

The problem faced by Jesus’ disciples was their lack of the cognitive categories required for making sense of the Scriptures in this way. They needed more than a commonsense reading of a biblical text. That Isaiah spoke of Jesus was something they had to learn. Accordingly, Luke records: “Then he interpreted for them the things written about himself in all the scriptures . . .” (Luke 24:27, CEB).

Read the rest here

 

Year in Review 2015 #1

TheYear in Review

Drum Roll Please!

The #1 read essay on the blog was a post titled Freedom and Responsibility.  I wrote this in January of 2015 shortly after the shooting at the Magazine offices of Charlie Hebdo in France.  This essay points to the larger issue of how we are to deal with the freedoms that we have and that is with responsibility.

Freedom and Responsibility

Year in Review 2015 #3

TheYear in Review

We are getting closer to #1 but for now we turn to the 3rd most read essay in our Year in Review 2015.  Determination was written during November of 2014 and the focus is just what the title leads one to think, Determination in all situations.

Determination 

Celtic Blessing for the New Year

Monument_to_the_Irish_Brigade_at_Gettysburg
Irish Brigade Monument at Gettysburg

May the blessing of light be on you – light without and light within.
May the blessed sunlight shine on you like a great peat fire,
so that stranger and friend may come and warm himself at it.
And may light shine out of the two eyes of you,
like a candle set in the window of a house,
bidding the wanderer come in out of the storm.
And may the blessing of the rain be on you,
may it beat upon your Spirit and wash it fair and clean,
and leave there a shining pool where the blue of Heaven shines,
and sometimes a star.
And may the blessing of the earth be on you,
soft under your feet as you pass along the roads,
soft under you as you lie out on it, tired at the end of day;
and may it rest easy over you when, at last, you lie out under it.
May it rest so lightly over you that your soul may be out from under it quickly; up and off and on its way to God.
And now may the Lord bless you, and bless you kindly. Amen.

– A Scottish Blessing

Year in Review 2015 #5

TheYear in Review

As we continue to move towards the #1 most read essay on the blog in 2015, we move to #5 Just Hold My Hand.  The inspiration for this essay came a visit to one of my hospice patients and his daughter as he was dying.  I was so moved by how this was affecting her that I wrote this essay.

Just Hold My Hand

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