April 23, 2013

This is the first in what I am imagining as a series of posts about the Bible in which I want to say how and why I find the Bible essential for my spiritual life. I hope these musings may be useful to others. I know the Bible has come more to divide Friends than hold us together, but I believe it could be useful in our finding greater unity among Friends. The reflections in…

Exodus 32 – Moses takes a long time conferring with God on the mountain (40 days), and the people become restless and anxious.  Throughout the wilderness journey, they express the same anxieties. 

Back on earth, down the mountain, life is full of human frailty. So the people go to Aaron and ask him to “make us a god who will be our leader” (32:1). One of the commandments – the FIRST one by the Catholic count, is specifically NOT to make any such representation. …

The B-I-B-L-E

O what have they done to thee?

You used to be the Word of God

And now thee’s bad TV

That’s what I thought last night when I started watching “The Bible” on History Channel last night.  It’s Hollywoodishly dramatic enough that when my good wife fell asleep watching it and awoke during “The Vikings” which…

           “Set off” is the phrase used in the recently released proposal to carry through a schism in Indiana Yearly Meeting.  “IYM (the organization) will remain intact and those meetings choosing option B will continue to be part of this body.” … Meetings choosing option A “will be set off from IYM into a newly created ‘yearly meeting’ or equivalent association.”  So reads the proposal.  (You can read the proposal…

I hope Friends everywhere are paying a little attention to what is happening in Indiana Yearly Meeting, a Quaker schism in the making.  And as the ground trembles in Indiana, I hope Friends everywhere are praying for us to find God’s way through this.

Nearly every North American yearly meeting has some schism in its past, some episode of disagreement, laced with bitterness perhaps, then separation into separate, smaller bodies.  Some of these successor groups thrive more than others. …

 Christians everywhere celebrate communion.  Christians do it because of quite specific guidance given by Jesus in the Bible: “this do in remembrance of me.”

 That instruction appears in all four gospels (Matthew 26: 26-28; Mark 14: 22-24; Luke 22: 17-20), and it is emphasized by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11: 23-26:  “²³ For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, ²⁴ and when he had given…

Could consideration of divorce help us understand how we make use of the Bible?  And might that help us in understanding what God asks of us with regard to homosexuality? 

In Luke 16:18 Jesus says¹⁸ “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”  That’s pretty clear.  But Matthew 19:9 has Jesus saying exactly the same thing and adding “except for immorality.” Matthew has Jesus giving a…

Reading the newspaper this morning, I came across this quotation from Harry Emerson Fosdick: “I should be ashamed to live in this generation and not be a heretic."  That sentence, I learned later, is from the final sermon he preached at First Presbyterian Church in New York City, in March 1925.  The whole quotation is worth noting: "They call me a heretic. Well, I am a heretic if conventional orthodoxy is the standard. I should be ashamed to live in this generation and not be a…

  In the news recently, two events catch my attention -- especially in relation to one another and to Indiana Yearly Meeting’s misguided Minutes on Homosexuality . 

 In New Jersey, Superior Court Judge Glenn Berman sentenced Dharun Ravi to 30 days in jail, plus 300 hours of community service, a counseling program related to cyber-bullying, a $10,000 fine to be donated to a group that assists victims of bias crimes, and three years probation. In 2010, Ravi had surreptitiously…

What is the reach of divinity?         

This is an odd, new question to me, and perhaps odd and new to you, too.  As I reflect on it, however, I realize it is not a new question, and it is related to many questions that have been important to Christians over two millenia.  It is related even to how we read those five Bible snippets that…

 “Where are Quakers with the insistent question of homosexuality?”  Are we welcoming and affirming? Or do we proclaim homosexuality a sin, asking that those with the ‘affliction’ renounce their desires?

I asked these questions in early April seeking responses from Friends in various Yearly Meetings across the United States.  I’m grateful for the many responses that came back.  I didn’t hear from every Yearly Meeting, but I heard from enough to begin to see the pattern – and that…

 While we’re talking about how we read the Bible, whether it is clear and authoritative with regard to homosexuality, let’s consider Genesis 13:15; 15:7,18; and 17:8.  These are the key passages in which God gives Abram (renaming him Abraham) and his descendants all the land of Canaan forever. 

 It’s quite a promise.  It’s relatively rare for God to speak directly in the Bible. This is a specific, important promise that lasts forever.  And remember Abraham himself isn’t from Canaan…

Why do I believe homosexuality is not a sin? 



At bottom, because it makes no sense to believe that it is God’s will for us to believe homosexuality to be a sin, a sin to be avoided even if that requires celibacy of those who have a natural orientation to be sexually attracted to those of the same sex.…

I understand why we should treat the Bible with exceptional reverence, taking it as the single most essential book we have among the millions that have been written. The Bible is the best account of Jesus’s life and ministry, the best account of the teachings, travels and travails of His disciples as they began to preach the Gospel. It opens with the best account of God’s efforts to draw the Israelites into faithful covenant life, an account that provides the necessary context for Jesus’s…

Things have gotten a little too complicated trying to do a scripture blog on Quaker Quaker AND  a separate one on my Catholic-Quaker blog AND on the one I do for our Westbury Monthly Meeting blog, which I call the Narrative of Scripture. I'm on blog overload. Plus there is the Thursday Bible Study my husband and I have going on here at home. We will probably start doing some extra-biblical readings from the early church "fathers" or other more contemporary commentaries. Too many going in too…

If you would like to have some organized schedule for reading scripture, I found this years ago and it has been a great resource. It will take three posts to get it all up but I hope some find it useful. This is OT - Year One.

Old Testament Readings

Year One [You can jump to January]

December:

1  – Isaiah 1

2  – Isaiah 2-4

3  – Isaiah 5

4  – Isaiah 6-7

5  – Isaiah 8-9

6  – Isaiah 10

7  – Isaiah…

Old Testament Readings - 

Year Two

December:

1  – Psalms 1-5

2  – Psalms 6-8

3  – Psalms 9-11

4  – Psalms 12-16

5  – Psalms 17-18

6  – Psalms 19-22

7  – Psalms 23-25

8  – Psalms 26-29

9  – Psalms 30-32

10 – Psalms 33-34

11 – Psalms 35-36

12 – Psalms 37-39

13 – Psalms 40-42

14 – Psalms 43-45

15 – Psalms 46-49

16 – Psalms 50-53

17 – Psalms…