Traveling in Place

Right Paths

“He leads me in right paths for his name’ sake.” (Psalm 23:3 NRSV)

The third Sunday of the Easter season has come to be known as “Good Shepherd” Sunday, because the lectionary texts always include some portion of the 10^th chapter of John, in which Jesus speaks of himself as the “Good Shepherd,” and Psalm 23, which portrays God as the shepherd of Israel.  This Sunday, my sermon will focus on Psalm 23.  This post concentrates specifically on one image found in the psalm.

Among the many interesting discoveries I made while visiting the Holy Land in 2008 was the meaning of the “right paths” or “paths of righteousness” referenced in Psalm 23:3.  As can be seen in the picture to the right, the steep hillsides in the Judean wilderness are often full of narrow ridges.  These are the paths that have been cut by Bedouin shepherds.  It is simply not possible for the sheep to ascend or descend the hills directly.  They are too steep.  So the shepherds lead the sheep in these narrow switchbacks – “right paths” – that prevent them from tumbling toward injury or even death.

When a resident of Judea pointed out these sheep paths to me, I was instantly intrigued by the meaning they bring to the familiar line, “He leads me in paths of righteousness.”  Bedouin shepherds know that the shortest path between two points is not always the “right” one.  In the hilly desert, the narrow circuitous switchbacks provide the sheep a safe way to cross over difficult terrain.  In the same way, God provides for us right paths that will get us where we need to go, but they are slow and narrow rather than quick and easy. 

Why We Worship on Sunday

“Why do we keep the Sabbath on Sunday rather than Saturday?”  This has to be in the top ten FAQ’s I get as a pastor.  Aren’t Christians bound to the Ten Commandments?  The fourth commandment – “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy” – clearly states that the “seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord” (Exodus 20:10).  So why don’t we go to church on the seventh day (Saturday) rather than the first day (Sunday)?

A couple of weekends ago, I was in Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, where my son Alex is in enrolled in a maritime studies program.  For one event, all the students and their families gathered in the building of an old Seventh-Day Baptist church, which at one time was the only house of worship in that little village.  The Seventh-Day Baptists trace their roots to early 17^th century England.  They split from other English Baptists over their conviction that by moving the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, Christians were in violation of God’s laws.  The first Seventh-Day Baptist church in America was founded in Newport, Rhode Island, not far from Mystic.

So do the Seventh-Day Baptists have a point?  Yes, but I believe they are also missing the larger point.  Let’s remember why early Christians adopted a new

Defending Faith

One of the courses I teach at a local Jesuit college is required of all sophomores.  The course content is a mixture of religious phenomenology and comparative studies.  We examine how the five major religious traditions developed historically and how they interpret the world.  A few weeks back, I sketched out the history of Islam following the death of Mohammed.  I explained the events leading to the rift between Sunnis and Shia, and described the major schools within Sunni Islam.  In doing so, I introduced the class to the Wahabist movement of the 17^th century, a resistance to Western colonialism in the Arab world, and explained how it eventually spawned more radical anti-Western movements such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda. 

After a rather lengthy back-and-forth class discussion, the lone Muslim student in the class, whom I will call Kalila, timidly raised her hand.  Kalila is a Palestinian.  She always wears a hajib.  She is reticent to participate in class discussion because, while her English is good, she sometimes struggles for the right words. 

“I feel the need to say something,” she said. 

How Patient Are You?

Last Saturday morning, per my routine, I poured a cup of coffee, sat down at the table and read the newspaper.  When I came to the page displaying church Easter ads, I found ours and discovered that the printed service times and the time for our Easter breakfast were all wrong.  I let out an audible groan and railed against the incompetence of the newspaper advertising staff.  Great start to the day.

After I finished my coffee, I put on my jacket and left for the market to buy bagels and donuts for the monthly Men’s Prayer Breakfast.  I pulled up to the stoplight at the exit of my subdivision behind one other car.  The light turned green, but the car in front of me did not move.  I could see that the driver was not looking ahead but was rummaging for something in the front seat.  I waited a few seconds and then did something I never do.  I made a fist and laid into the middle of the steering wheel to blow the car horn.

At the grocery store, I picked out the bagels and donuts, grabbed a container of cream cheese, and went to the checkout line.  There was only one customer in the express lane in front of me.  The cashier scanned all his items and told him how much he owed.  The customer slowly pulled out his wallet, took out all the paper bills, then reached into his front pocket and removed all his change.  He carefully counted out how much cash he needed, gave it to the cashier, then said, “No, wait, let’s do it this way,” and exchanged one of the dollar bills for some change.  I clinched my teeth and pulled my jacket sleeve away from my wrist to look at my watch.  My left foot started tapping.

And then I realized how impatiently I was acting.  On a better day, I would be

Who Was That Young Man, Anyway?

If you try to harmonize all the biblical accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, you’ll get frustrated pretty quickly.  Some of the details supplied by the four gospels are mutually contradictory.  Does that make them untrustworthy?  I don’t think so.  If all four versions of the story were exactly alike, that would strongly suggest that they were all copying from a single source with no independent verification.  But the New Testament has preserved multiple sources witnessing to the same event.  Some of the differences are too basic to be dismissed as embellishments of one original account.  And yet, they all verify that on the Sunday after Jesus’ crucifixion, some disciples of Jesus (Mary Magdalene being the only one specifically mentioned in all four gospels) found that the stone sealing the entrance of the tomb had been rolled away, and the tomb was empty because Jesus had been raised.

In all four gospels, at least one woman meets some sort of messenger.  In Mark, the earliest gospel (written about A.D. 65), “a young man dressed in a white robe” was sitting on the right side of the tomb.  In Luke (written about A.D. 75), “two men in dazzling clothes” appeared beside the weeping women disciples.  In Matthew (written around A.D. 80), “an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and rolled back the stone” while the women were watching.  “His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow.”  Then, in John (probably not completed until sometime in the 90’s) Mary Magdalene found “two angels in white” sitting on the slab where the body of Jesus had been laid.

"Good" Friday?

One of my sons, when he was 9 years old, asked me, “Dad, why do we call the day Jesus died good Friday?  What’s good about it?”

When I heard that question, old tapes from my past immediately began to play.  I had to stop myself from saying that, even though Jesus’ death was sad, it was a good death because it made eternal life possible for all who choose to believe in Jesus.  But I did stop myself.  My son had asked a perfectly reasonable question, and I told him so.  “There wasn’t anything good about it,” I said. 

I came from a culture that didn’t even hold Good Friday services.  To do so was considered too “Catholic.”  My wife and I, both from the Deep South, were recently trying to remember whether our churches even observed Palm Sunday. There was certainly no processional or waving of palms. (Again, that would be too Catholic.)  We decided the only mention of it was in Sunday School, where it was referred to as Jesus’ “Triumphal Entry” into Jerusalem.  Growing up, we never heard the term “Maundy Thursday.”  If anybody in my congregation was in church on Good Friday, it was because the downtown churches were having a “community service” that – God help us – included Episcopalians, Catholics, and other pagans. 

Ironic as this sounds, those most likely to refer to the day of Jesus’ crucifixion as “good” are those least likely to observe it.  The logic goes like this: there’s no

Heaven on My Mind

I led another funeral service yesterday – the third in two weeks and the fifth in two months.  For some of my colleagues, that frequency might be fairly routine, but it’s more than I’m accustomed to and enough to have me thinking an awful lot about heaven and the promise of resurrection.  I remembered a post I wrote back in 2010 soon after I started this blog (and before most of my current readers knew it existed).  I decided to re-post it today.

Not long ago, I heard an impassioned sermon about how important it is to get our minds off of heaven and onto the world we live in today.  I found this sermon odd, because I frankly don’t know whom the preacher was addressing.  I remember growing up in a time and place where popular religion seemed a bit too other-worldly; not sufficiently concerned with the problems of hunger, poverty, and racism that were all around us.  But the sands have shifted dramatically in the last few decades.  By and large, American Christians are not more focused on heaven than on the here-and-now.  On the left side of the spectrum, Christians are standing up for human rights, immigration reform, efforts to stem global warming, and other causes that may be swept up into the broad category of “social justice.”  On the right, since Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in the late ‘70’s, Christians have been fighting the “culture wars,” opposing abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, and finding ways to chip away at Jefferson’s wall of separation between church and state.  (And today, happily, Christians across the spectrum are beginning to find common cause on some of the most pressing issues of the day.)

In the sermon to which I referred, the preacher argued that when our minds are on heaven, we do not care for creation, and we turn a blind eye to the plight of the poor and the oppressed.  There can be no objection to seeking justice and morality in the here-and-now.  Acknowledging the existence of heaven, however, increases our thirst for justice.  “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” Jesus taught us to pray.  When we know that behind the curtain of time and space exists a greater reality where the justice we seek here is already fulfilled, we do not give up our struggle.  We are empowered to step up our efforts.