my newest project

Please feel free to use the following Advent post (and those that will follow, hopefully daily) for you and your family and share as you see fit.

Advent Year A

“Advent” comes from the Latin word adventus, which means coming. Since at least medieval times, the four Sundays before Christmas have been used to direct the Church's attention to the coming of Christ in three different senses: (1) with reference to Jesus' birth; (2) in the sense of the coming of Christ to our hearts daily, in multiple private/devotional ways; and (3) in his return to Earth, the so-called “second coming.” Often times readings are assembled from various sources to the tell the Christmas story with which we are now (mostly) familiar.

     Some of us now understand the drama of Scripture to unfold in a way that makes the traditional practice, or at least the way readings are assembled and presented, difficult to engage with much authenticity. For example, those of us who read the Bible with a narrative historical framework realize so much of the original intent of the infancy narratives is missing and even distorted by the “traditional” story telling now en vogue. For us, the traditional sense of “second coming” is more nebulous as we read much of what others understand as 'End-Time' prophecy to be apocalyptic descriptions of the Jewish War (and, in Paul, the conversion of the Roman Empire).

     The following is a devotional experiment our family is going to be using. I plan to engage the infancy narratives in isolation from each other in succeeding years. The goal is to reacquaint ourselves with the author's original meaning for each of the narratives. My experience is this often makes the text more foreign than what we are used to in our reading of Scripture. Suddenly the two thousand year old ancient oriental culture seems bizarre and disorienting. I believe this is good—we have become too comfortable with our anachronisms, especially those tainting our Christmas traditions.

     This first year of readings will start with the account from Matthew. This account was written in the last quarter of the 1^st century ce. For context, this is after Nero and the destruction of the 2^nd Temple in Jerusalem, and after the encompassing seven year war (the Jewish War with Rome). It was written to Greek-speaking Jews (probably in Syria) who increasingly felt the tension and developing distinction between synagogue and church. The Gospel according to Matthew (hereafter referred to as simply Matthew) begins with a genealogy that is divided into three sections: (1) from Abraham to David; (2) from David to the Exile (of the souther kingdom of Judah to Babylon); (3) from the Exile to the birth of the messiah. This division frames the subsequent infancy narrative and introduces the themes and images the author will develop later in his account of Jesus' life. I follow this pattern for this first year of Advent (Year A). As noted above, this is a diversion from the traditional divisions based on characters and themes for each week.

The First Sunday of Advent

Matthew begins with a genealogy that is structured to give both a sense of context to his story about Jesus (by summarizing his ancestral history) and to provide a structure for how he develops the story. The genealogy begins with Abram, who is the patriarch of the Hebrews and the father of a son born by unnatural means. In the following reading, Abram is promised an heir whose descendants will inherit the modern day Palestine region.

Genesis 15 (Bible readings adapted from the New International Version)

After these things Yhwh's message came to Abram in a vision,

“Fear not, Abram,

I am your shield;

your very great reward.”

But Abram said, “O Lord Yhwh, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” And Abram said, “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house (Ishmael) is to be my heir.”

     But Yhwh's message came to him, “This man (Ishmael) shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.” Yhwh brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed Yhwh; and Yhwh “did the math” and counted his faith as righteousness.

     Then he said to him, “I am Yhwh who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” But he said, “O Lord Yhwh, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

     As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. Then Yhwh said to Abram, “Know this for certain, that your descendants shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for yourself, you shall go to your ancestors in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

     When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day Yhwh made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.”

Discussion Questions

1. The author of Matthew starts his story about Jesus with a reference to the original patriarch—Abram. In the part of Abram's story above, what did Yhwh promise Abram?
2. The author of the story from Genesis also has Yhwh predict what will happen to his descendants. What is the name we know this story by?
3. Yhwh makes an interesting aside: “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” It appears Yhwh has planned his intention(s) for Abram's descendants at least partially around (with consideration of) the histories of the peoples with whom they are or will be interacting (i.e., the will not immediately inherit the land because it is occupied by others with whom there is not yet just cause to kick them out). Occupying the land promised is an important theme from then until now. Why was it important for Abram to have a child?
4. What does the fact that the child born to Abram and Sarai (his wife) had to be a son say about that culture?
5. The ritual in which the animals are halved is no longer performed. What do you think about this practice? What was it's primary purpose in the story?

Goodbye, FB!

So, I've decided to do it; I'm leaving Facebook. I've been considering it for over a year now. The reasons are multiple. Let me name a few. Primarily, I find it consumes too much of my attention. I don't know if it's me or the medium (or, probably, both), but too many hours are spent in less than productive scrolling and reading. The updates from friends are what I will miss the most, but they take up an increasingly diminishing proportion of what is actually happening on my feed. I've attempted to regulate and spend less time on it, but my resolves are always short-lived and ultimately thwarted. It is is taking attention away from my work, my family, my time I'd rather spend reading, etc.

But there are other reasons. Of course, this election cycle plays a huge role in pushing me over the edge, but it really was a small nudge on someone who was already teetering. I have a dear friend who just posted on FB encouraging people making decisions like mine not to go through with it, to stay the course, to have constructive dialogue with people with whom you disagree because of the palliative or healing effect and the promotion of diversity that would foster. S/he makes a great point. Those are all things I would love. But I'm not mature enough for that. It's too easy not to hear tone and to misunderstand. It's too easy to judge a person by her post or re-post; that reduction of WHO a person IS is always oversimplified and dehumanizing. And there's a chance I'm just as guilty of that as the people in whom I see it. And those constructive dialogues are too rare. I've tried to have them. Most often they are met with a refusal to engage with the complexity of an argument or deteriorate into name-calling or ad hominem arguments. Sometimes I have ended up in a sort of written-vomiting-tirade that hardly represents what I consider to be my true self. Sometimes, in attempts to avoid this, there have been invitations for a verbal dialogue on the telephone; these have been met with flat out refusals (as a scientist and someone who believes in the pursuit of truth or its approximation regardless of previously held beliefs, this is particularly irksome). My guess is this is a result of an increasingly polarized society with a decreasing propensity to perceive complexity and civility as necessary components of dialogue/arguments and understanding. I don't think this will be fixed if I decide to stay on FB. Ultimately, it (FB) has been a source of angst that is proving to be too much for my well-being. Those who know me well know I'm already naturally angsty without FB. So I'm out.

I will be keeping in touch in other ways. I hope to keep at this blog. At one time I was better at it. Expect to see more pictures of the kids here. Also, I hope to spend time writing letters, especially to family, each week. I have email, of course, and I actually prefer it. Somehow that medium allows for longer, more thoughtful discussions.

The Infancy Narratives: Matthew

Hint: there are no shepherds in Matthew, and no star in  Luke.

Inspired by the adult Sunday school topic from last week at First Congregational Church, I decided to write about the infancy narratives. (I know, I haven't even caught up on the summer pictures. But in order to remain timely from a holiday perspective . . .) Following is the first of hopefully three on the separate narratives. Yesterday we received a Christmas card in the mail that had the Shepherds observing the “star of Bethlehem.” The card's mishmash of the various narrative threads confirmed my prior opinion that we have reduced the narratives with our holiday sentimentality to be mere props for a different narrative, which is alien to the scriptural accounts. The intent of these posts is to read the various accounts as individual narratives with unique plots, purposes and motifs. What follows is a brief exegetical project followed by an even briefer meditation.

The Gospel by Matthew begins with a genealogical record of Jesus (an English translation of the Greek equivalent for what we now translate into English as Joshua/Yeshua). It starts with Abraham, follows the “begats” through to David (with a nice round number of 14 generations—or 2 x 7), from David to the Babylonian Exile (when the southern Kingdom was defeated, another 14 generations), and from the Exile to Jesus (again, another 14 generations). Thus, the first chapter comprises the equivalent of 6 groups of 7 generations to trace Jesus' ancestry from the time Yhwh covenanted with Abraham to be his and his descendant's god (and to inherit the land, etc.), to the time the covenant was extrapolated to promise that, though the Israelites were transitioning to a monarchial form of government, Yhwh would maintain the special relationship and one day restore the glory days King David in one of his descendants, to the point where the land vomited them away in Exile being unfaithful to the covenant by following other gods and thwarting justice in the land, to the time of Jesus . . . The emphasis there is on the ellipsis: Israel's history has brought them to this point, back in their own land but ruled over by pagans who have instituted what many, if not most, of the Jews thought of as an illegitimate king (Herod). The equivalent of six groups of seven generations alludes to the sabbatical week and gives the impression that in the story of Jesus to follow, Jewish history has in some sense been completed (or fulfilled—more on that later). The arbitrary divisions from Abraham to David to Exile highlight some of Matthew's themes.

There are, of course, many instances in ancient mythology of virgin (or at least miraculous) births of important historical or mythological figures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miraculous_births). When Matthew attributes Jesus' birth to the “fulfillment” of Isaiah's prophecy, this isn't meant to be the kind of “fulfillment” that most modern readers assume. Isaiah prophesied to King Ahaz that a sign indicating Yhwh would be “with them” in the war with Aram and Ephraim (the Northern Kingdom) would be that a young maiden would give birth and should name the son Immanuel (Immanuel means El (God)-with-us). The Hebrew for “young maiden” is most definitely not the Hebrew word for “virgin” and there doesn't seem to be anything extraordinary about this birth, except its use as a symbol/sign, a common device in prophetic literature. In Isaiah, Yhwh promises to give Judah, the “house of David,” the victory over an apostate Northern Kingdom allied with the pagans. Matthew's point is not this is what Isaiah really meant, happening now in Jesus through a literal virgin birth. Rather, as in many places in his gospel, he is retelling Israel's story and casting Jesus as the true Jew, the one who sums up the long history of calling, election, exodus, temptation in the wilderness, kingdom, exile and eventual vindication. (So, I believe, he wasn't “taking prophecies out of context” to prove something about Jesus from Jewish scriptures; that objection only works with the narrow understanding of what “fulfills” means.) Jesus' conception by the Holy Spirit, then, is a sign that Yhwh is once again with his people to give them victory over another instance of apostate Israel allied with the pagans. Indeed, instead of naming him Immanuel, which would be the obvious choice for a name if the narrow meaning of “fulfilled” is in view here, he is named Yeshua/Joshua/Jesus, which translates He Saves, presumably because he is not just the sign, but the means by which Yhwh will “save his people from their sins” as Ahaz defeated his own enemies. Contextually, it appears Matthew is indicating Yhwh through Jesus would deliver Israel from her current state of subjugation to Rome and corrupted Israel, a result of “their sins” that got them in this predicament in the first place. He certainly does not have in view a universal salvation myth, regardless of how we read that 2000 years later.

I'm not sure Matthew thought through that light from distant objects doesn't work like that. You know, the whole issue of parallax.

When the Zoroastrian astrologers (magi, everywhere else in the Bible translated magicians, not kings) observe (what we can assume to be) a special astrological phenomenon, they understand a new and significant king has been born in Israel. They naturally seek out Herod, the king of the Jews, as he would have it, to congratulate him on his new heir. Whoops, Herod must not have any recent sons. Herod and “all Jerusalem” were pretty upset to hear of a threat to the current political arrangement. Bethlehem, David's City, was identified by the scholars as the expected birthplace of the anticipated god-appointed King who would “shepherd” Israel at a time of national crisis (i.e., for Micah, when the Assyrians came to destroy them). Artistic embellishment on Matthew's part aside (the light stopped over the place Jesus was staying), the “star” reappears and leads the Magi to the child Jesus. Herod, however, is threatened and the slaughter of the innocents follows. Warned by an angel, Jesus' family escapes to Egypt until Herod dies. For Matthew, this another device to use to depict Jesus as re-enacting in his life the long history of Israel, who escaped famine in Egypt and were then led out in the Exodus by Moses, who had escaped a similar slaughter of the innocents at the hand of Pharaoh.

Matthew presents his readers with Jesus, born as a result of Yhwh's promise to deliver his people post-Exile. Although they had returned to the land, Israel's enemies again posed a threat to the future of God's people. The enemies in Matthew are at least three-fold. First, the birth of Jesus marked by an astrological phenomenon indicates that, probably in the back of his mind, Matthew considers Rome, headed by Augustus, to be a sort of parody of Jesus, the coming world ruler. Second, and more obvious, Herod (and the ruling elite) has become the new Pharaoh. Lastly, Israel's sins had put her in this place of servitude, despite covenantal promises that she should be the head and not the tail, a blessing to the nations rather than a byword in a backward and often rebellious part of the Empire. Jesus is the new Moses, born in a time of chaos, to save Israel. He is Israel, taking Israel's own history of miraculous beginnings to exile into his own life.

Meditation

Stripped of the sentimental accretions, Matthew's infancy narrative leaves us with a complex historical narrative re-enacted in his central character. It's an introduction to a larger story, and causes us to anticipate victory, a replay of the Exodus by Moses, or of they heyday of the monarchy under King David. How will Jesus save Israel from Jerusalem's rulers? What will he do about the emperor? How will Israel survive almost certain destruction if yet another, more widespread, rebellion against Rome arises? What will the new Promised Land look like, or, rather, what will the Israel inheriting this land look like? In Matthew, the point is not about abstract and universalizing incarnation or salvation. It is about the historical question of how Jesus would save Israel. The rest of the gospel shows us how, of course: by calling a people around himself, to be, with him, true and faithful Israel, the community embodying the beatitudes, who are aware of an imminent regime change and who find that Jesus really is a threat to the political status quo, predicting its destruction within a generation. He is the one who takes Israel's exile, her sin, onto himself as a means forward for the community through the coming crisis that is already being foreshadowed in these opening lines of Matthew.

Florence, OR

We next used FlipKey to stay at a place on the coast, further north than we'd been before. It was cute little spot with plenty of room for all of us and my mom and stepfather. We were one to two blocks from the beach (but had to walk about four to get access). I enjoyed hearing the ocean for the last time and began my own healing, leaving behind the strife and growing cynicism from my previous place of employment. It was a long recovery road on which I still am traveling, but so happy to begin decompressing. Didn't get a whole lot of pictures there, except one day when we went to a nearby lighthouse (Port Orford, I think).

Leaving San Francisco

We also visited China Town, where the highlight for the kids was actually a little city playground where they got to play with others. We enjoyed sitting for awhile.

After a few days in the city we left, but not without first visiting with some dear friends in Napa Valley. We ate a much too brief lunch with them and then headed out for Mount Shasta.

Napa Valley, with friends from Oak Park, IL

Golden Gate Bridge, on our way out

Mount Shasta is considered one of the Earths 1st Chakra by some. I imagined it would be cool and spiritual to meditate there before heading back East. At the time I thought that, I must have forgotten I had children who might not be as easily convinced of being quiet and contemplative. Well, it was beautiful at least and I got a hike in. We stayed at a hotel in nearby Redding.

This area was watered by a spring that flowed underground at this point. The spring must have been a significant mystical location as it was popular and there were people in quiet meditation there.

I find tree lines fascinating

After that, we stopped back in Medford, OR to pick up my Mom and stepfather from the airport to head to the coast for a few days. Their plane was delayed and so we hitched up our camper in Grants Pass and headed to the coast on our own, to be joined by them the next day.

San Francisco

We left Grants Pass, OR 11 August 2015 and headed for San Francisco. I'm pretty sure we drove straight there. We rented an apartment through VRBO in the Haight-Ashbury district. We were within blocks of the Golden Gate Bridge Park. This was a great area and climate for my morning runs, and we had so much to see and do. Below are some pictures from the park: the Dahlia display and the arboretum were some of the most memorable; Aedyn and I had a brief view of the Japanese Gardens; the kids enjoyed the playground and the Museum of Sciences.

We love our pollinators!

Outside the Museum of Sciences. They were so excited to enter it was very hard to get them to stand for a picture.

Last Days in Oregon

On 04 August 2015 we left our house in Grants Pass for the last time. We had a wonderful time in that home and will never forget our view. We know, and will always appreciate, that the setting was truly park-like and unrivaled, as far as homes we ever hope to live in go. Here are some final photos.

Wish we had some photos of us with our neighbors, whom we miss. We didn't leave Grants Pass immediately—I (Eric) had another week of work at the clinic to finish up. For that week we rented a furnished apartment in a retirement community in town. And then our adventure began . . .