Confessions of a Shiftless Mind

What is a miracle?

To me, a miracle is an unexplained coincidence. There may be a logical, reasonable chain of events that led to that coincidence, but it’s still a miracle. Some people might prefer to think of miracles as an “act of God” where something happens that defies nature. Given how little we still know about the universe, I don’t think that the definition deals with reality effectively. It’s just like how hundreds of years ago, much of what we consider to be commonplace technology would have been considered “miraculous”. Just because we don’t understand how it happened, doesn’t make it a miracle.

I don’t have a problem with this definition, because ultimately, I believe God works however He wants, and I think he prefers the ordinary. I mean, he made the world the way he did for a reason. Why make something only to circumvent the rules to accomplish your will? It would be like building a rubik’s cube then tearing off the stickers so you don’t have to solve it.

Now, that’s not to say that he couldn’t do that. I am sure he could.

Now, what got me off on this rabbit trail? Well, I could list any number of things in my life that I consider miracles, but last night I experienced one that almost fell into that “now that’s not normal” category.

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Here’s something you don’t hear every day - the Bible tells us to fast. Did you know that?

One example:

“Jesus answered, “How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.” - Matthew 9:15

Reading the surrounding passages, it is clear that the bridegroom is Jesus. He is talking about when he has left the earth. The guests of the bridegroom are his followers on earth. He makes it pretty clear: …”then they WILL fast”.

Not all the time, but sometimes. It’s something that you rarely hear about these days. I have certainly never heard a sermon on fasting. I have, once, heard from a pastor on fasting, who during a covenant members’ meeting invited us to join him in fasting. It’s never really been talked about in a prescriptive way, along the same lines as being encouraged to pray, to read our Bible, etc. But yet, the Bible talks in many other places about fasting - fasting and praying, etc. Check out Nave’s Topical Bible entries on fasting.

It is talked about as prescriptive, to help humility, when afflicted, during consecration or commissioning of leaders, and in many other situations. But how many Christians do you know who fast?

I think I first ran across the idea back in high school. A friend of my best friend did a fast at one point. I never thought much about it. At Bible College, I think I recall hearing a professor mention he’d done it on a number of occasions. More recently, I think it was about a couple of years ago, I began to get interested in Spiritual Disciplines. I knew of prayer, and Bible study, but that was it. I had a sense that there was more to it than that.

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A bit of a snowball led me back to a subject I ran across a few months ago when working my way through Genesis again.

I wrote a piece about how people today demand rights to self-abuse so much that in our time it is becoming wrong to care for people - to care for them is equated with judgement, while to not care is equated with “support” for their lifestyle choice. A troll came along and spouted off about polygamy in the Bible, and good old Mark, he pulled a treatise on Biblical polygamy out of his hat.

I read through it, and there was a pile of theology I disagreed with. But it did remind me of something I ran across about Jacob and the mistakes he made, and how, at the end of his life, I believe he repented over.

Mockers of Christianity and Judaism’s stance against polygamy like to point to people like Jacob as cases of “the faithful” who were polygamists. They love to completely overlook the sections of the Bible that clearly teach that this is wrong, and ignore the reality that much of the Bible is an historical narrative, and thus describes the good and bad behaviour of its subject. History is meant as a cautionary tale, not as a prescriptive.

But beyond that, the Jacob story is very interesting. You all are probably familiar with how Jacob met his cousin Rachel, thought she was hot, and committed to work for her father for 7 years to earn the right to marry her. He did so, then his father-in-law snookered him by slipping her older sister, Leah into the sack (consummation was the marriage ceremony in those days apparently). He then promised to give Jacob Rachel for another 7 years of work. Jacob worked, and earned Rachel, despite being already married to Leah.

Yeah, it was wrong for Laban to break his word to Jacob. However, by the custom of the time, Jacob had his wife: Leah. His job was to love her, and he clearly did not. However, he did his “husbandly duty” with her, getting 5 children ultimately from Leah. All the way through the story of his life, we see this family paying a price for Jacob’s favoritism - from competition and betrayal between brothers to bitterness between the sisters over their husband who clearly favoured Rachel over Leah. This was not a happy home with 3 in a marriage.

What I found significant though is the end of the story. Continue Reading »

An article called, “Advancing the Gospel in the 21st Century Part IV: City-Focused Strategy” had a lot of interesting bits. To excise:

We have noted that now there is a mobility of ideas, people, and capital unprecedented since the Pax Romana, and this leads not only to globalization and pluralization (again) but urbanization again.

Note: the use of the word, “again“. This has happened before. The Bible was written to urban churches in a globalized, urbanized culture. The Bible has never been more relevant than today.

How are today’s urbanites more open to the Gospel?

First, they are more open to new ideas and change in general, having been uprooted from traditional settings.

Second, they have great need for help and support in order to face the moral, economic, emotional and spiritual pressures of city life. The old kinship support networks of the rural areas are weak or absent, while the cities have “next to nothing in working government services”. Churches offer supportive community , a new spiritual family, a liberating Gospel message.

Admittedly, the last point is more true in 3rd world developing cities where the governments do not have the money to build the infrastructure necessary to support the millions of arrivals. However, there is no question that even in North American cities, there is a feeling of fragmentation, of alienation that permeates and brings into question all that new arrivals brought with them.

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Meg has the right idea. I just wanted to encourage anyone who happens by here the same way:

Do something good today. You’ll feel better and the world will be a better place.

1. Send a random list email: The ten best things we ever did together;  Your five best body parts and why; Six things I would buy you today if I were Richy McRichersons; Nine nice things I’ve heard people say about you. Just because.

2. Buy someone a beverage you know they crave, just to see them go, “Ohhh! I totally wanted one of those!”

3. Ask someone how they are, and actually listen. Looking them in the eye. Not doing anything else. Asking follow up questions.

4. For once, don’t complain about the thing you always complain about. Unless it’s funny. Then do WAY MORE COMPLAINING.

5. Eat something you REALLY want for dinner. Even if it takes time and a bit of effort.

6. Laugh at a joke that someone tells that isn’t actually witty at all. I know it goes against your human instinct to encourage lame humour, but doing it once won’t upset the balance of the planet.

7. Open a window. Breathe.

8. Do a small chair dance to the song of your choice. Make it good.

Some of these are designed to just make you feel good. I’ll add a few more for others:

9. Fill out a comment card in a store or restaurant. Compliment your cashier or server. Especially if they weren’t nice. It’ll make their day.

10. Hold a door for someone, with a smile on your face. Then hold it for the next person too. You can spare an extra 15 seconds.

11. Bring home a flower for a woman in your life. Even if you are a woman. It means a lot to them. Just one. You don’t need to buy it. You can pick it if you want. It’s June - flowers are in season.

12. Phone someone. Just to say hi.

Now get out there and do good things!

I have been challenged several times lately about the memorization of Scripture. Thus far in my life, my primary means of memorization is coincidental - just exposure to the Bible and certain verses more frequently than others has caused some of them to be recorded in my mind and seem to spring to mind on occasion. This is good - I rejoice in that, because I think that this is what God intended when the Word reads:

Keep my commands and you will live;
guard my teachings as the apple of your eye.

Bind them on your fingers;
write them on the tablet of your heart.
- Proverbs 7:2-4

In ancient times, there were not chapter and verse references - when Scripture was written like this on your heart, you simply knew it.

However, Phil pointed out to me that Scripture is more useful if you can locate it for people to whom you are speaking. It provides more usefulness to the hearer when they can read it for themselves as a result of your reference - and for yourself, so that you can check for yourself that verse.

As I found myself turning to Spiritual Disciplines this week (on another matter, I felt I was being called to fast and pray over something), while I was practicing those disciplines I found myself drawn at the same time to take more seriously deliberate memorization of Scriptures.

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An email to me:

Dear,

Greetings:

My name is Mr. Paul Samson, I work as an accountant in a bank; I contacted you to work together with me in claiming my late client’s estate. Unfortunately he died without a registered next of kin and as such the funds now have an open beneficiary status. You could be made the beneficiary since you share the same last name with him.

This has officially transferred the right to you, as no other person from his family knows anything about this fund with our bank, if you are interested in working with me.

Please get back to me as quickly as possible so that I will give you the details of what we are to do. I wait for your prompt response so that I can give you more briefing of what you need to and how to do it.

Thanks for your co-operation.

Best regards,

Paul

Um, what last name is that again? You didn’t mention it. Then again, you didn’t mention my last name either.

Unless my name is comma.

Let me go check my Driver’s License on that.

Just in case.

I am sitting here in class, and that is good.

I am glad to be able to be here. I want to finish this degree, and this course is a step along that path.

The subject matter is good. I wish I could pay more attention.

Unfortunately, life is a burden today. My wife and I are in a situation right now where I am driven to the feet of my God. We are involved in a situation that I can’t really talk about publicly right now. It is very sensitive and from our perspective, entirely in God’s hands at this time.

I find myself, in one of those rare times when all I really want to do is be in prayer, that God would bring about a work in the hearts and minds of those who may not be His people, but to lift up in them an attitude of selflessness. He needs to stir in them thoughts of the best interests of another, not their own aims. He needs to take a couple’s heart, beaten and calloused by hardship, and allow them to look past their pain to think of the good of another.

But at the same time I am amazed at what God is doing in my heart through this challenge. I am being drawn to fasting and prayer in a way that is completely new to me. It is thrilling and yet startling. I find my spirit divided - as I said, I want to be in prayer for these people, but at the same time I find myself selfishly absorbed by the work of the Holy Spirit that is happening even now.

Pray for me if you have a minute. And for this rather cryptically described situation. I will make clear what is happening as it unfolds and becomes more clear.

I’ve been a Christian for many years now - since I was 16 in fact (wow - that’s half my life this year!) For a long time, I didn’t really think I knew enough or was faithful enough to be used by God to really affect people’s lives. I knew I wanted that though. I spent a lot of years reading apologetics in order to be able to “share my faith” effectively. It never occurred to me until much later that this was not so much to share with others as t was to build up my own faith in what I professed. I wanted to know more, to be sure that my faith was not blind but rational, and moreover, true.

Along the way, I did have opportunities to share what I believed, but not in the way that I expected or hoped. I had thought that the point was to take people who thought that God was a bunch of hooey, and argue them into seeing the truth.

It doesn’t work that way.

What I was given were moments to show people what my faith means - with love, with compassion, with service. What I was given was people who perhaps understood a little bit of who God is, but not really sure how to follow him. I was given the opportunity to point them in the right direction.

Of all these opportunities, you rarely get a chance to hear what happened “after”. Most of my opportunities came in Forestry School, where I made friends with only a few, but I like to think they were good friendships. It would be years later before I would find out what effect I had on them by my faith and openness to share what I believed.

One friend, who I roomed with incidentally, contacted my a couple of years later. While we lived together, he was a staunch atheist, and we whiled away many winter evenings arguing about whether God was real, whether the world was created or evolved, and the truth of the Bible. He was never convinced, and I never wavered, but we remained good friends. He contacted me years later to tell me that he had gone back to church and accepted Christ as his saviour. I had heard later that he had become sick from a rare illness. I never heard anything more, but if he did pass on, I expect to see him again in heaven, and I can’t wait.

I had another friend, a young girl, fresh out of high school. She was so full of energy and life, she was a joy to be around. Continue Reading »

A continuation of my thoughts on communion wine. Spurred by Peter, who was spurred by Alistair.

Luke 22:14-20 only refers to the contents of the cup at one point - where Jesus calls it the “fruit of the vine”. Matthew 26:27-29 is the same in this regard - Jesus uses the words, “fruit of the vine”. To be strictly literal, this would imply that the drink Jesus is drinking may have been of any fruit which grows on the vine. However, I understand that we must be contextual. What did Jesus mean, as a Jewish Carpenter in Palestine in the 1st Century?

Alistair contends, “There is a world of difference between grape juice and wine.” However, there is some debate as to whether the ancients made the same distinction. There seems to be a lot of material indicating that the word translated “wine” was often used interchangably with freshly squeezed juice and fermented juice.

From this essay, we learn the following:

Wine almost always was mixed with water for drinking; undiluted wine (merum) was considered the habit of provincials and barbarians. The Romans usually mixed one part wine to two parts water (sometimes hot or even salted with sea water to cut some of the sweetness). The Greeks tended to dilute their wine with three or four parts water, which they always mixed by adding the wine.

I would guess that the residents of Palestine and Judea would have followed the Greek tradition more than the Roman. Diluted as it was would have brought the alcoholic content of the wine they drank down to 3-4%. Light beer, in our parlance.

In another more scholarly piece I read online, we read this:

Ginberg’s conclusion is confirmed by The Jewish Encyclopedia. In its article on “Jesus” it says: “According to the synoptic Gospels, it would appear that on the Thursday evening of the last week of his life Jesus with his disciples entered Jerusalem in order to eat the Passover meal with them in the sacred city; if so, the wafer and the wine of the mass or the communion service then instituted by him as a memorial would be the unleavened bread and the unfermented wine of the Seder service (see Bickell, Messe und Pascha, Leipsic, 1872).”64

John Kitto’s Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature also refers to the use of unfermented wine at the Passover meal: “The wine used would of course be unfermented, but it is not certain that it was always the fresh expressed juice or ‘pure blood of the grape’ (Deut 32:14); for the Mishnah states that the Jews were in the habit of using boiled wine. ‘They do not boil the wine of the heave-offering, because it diminishes it,’ and consequently thickens it, thus rendering the mingling of water with it when drunk necessary; but it is immediately added, ‘Rabbi Yehudah permits this, because it improves it’ (Teroomoth Perek, c. xi).”65

Boiled wine was a means of storing newly pressed grape juice, to prevent it from fermenting.

Thus, from the material I was able to survey, it appears that it is hard to tell whether the wine that Jesus served to the disciples at the Last Supper was necessarily the alcoholic wine we are more familiar with today. It may or may not have been.

Alistair also says, “Are we willing to sacrifice all of this biblical imagery associated with the Lord’s Supper on the altar of modern evangelical prejudices concerning alcoholic drink? We cannot exclude alcohol from the Lord’s Supper without losing much of the theological import of the celebration.” See, the funny thing is I have no prejudice against alcohol. I don’t mind the occasional glass myself. My dad drank beer all through my years growing up. Yet, I do not share his viewpoint that wine is, and has always been exclusively something that was served fermented. I also do not share his idea that wine is necessary as a relaxant. I don’t need wine to party, to act silly, or to celebrate. I don’t see what this has to do with Jesus instituting wine as the contents of the cup.

As I said above, the idea of the passover feast being a party seems to be a bit of a stretch. From the Jews that I know, the passover is a pretty somber occasion. The Son of God announcing he will be killed the next day would be a bit of a downer too. Why does this need to be a relaxing party again? He says, “The Lord’s Supper should be more of a joyous feast than a sombre occasion,” and he is right, but isn’t the question he started out asking is, “what was this event to Jesus?”

“I have yet to see someone explain how grape juice ‘makes the heart glad’ in the same way as wine does.“. This might be an instance of hyperbole? I know many people who are “angry” drunks or “sad” drunks. Their hearts aren’t made glad - what does this mean for that scripture?

“The real question is whether God accepts alcohol-free celebrations of the Supper.” Well, since God no longer demands any sacrifice from us but faith in the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus Christ, what is the point? God is not accepting anything from us but our faith and on THAT BASIS ALONE are we justified.

Man… there is so much more to say about this subject. Feel free to vent your thoughts.