Anti-Christ Superstar

Lutheran education carries with it some obvious pitfalls.

After 8 years in elementary, four years in high school and three years for post-bachelor work, I think I can speak to the quality of the Lutheran avenues of learning. I would not be the human being I am today without my Lutheran education, and am a strong proponent of such.

That being said, here are the holes that I see:

1) Greek mythology. I don't know why, but in the 14 years I attended Lutheran educational facilities, I don't remember "Poseidon" ever being mentioned, unless you count Danny Trevino in 4th grade telling me about how McHale was in The Poseidon Adventure. Same with Zeus, Narcissus, Perseus and the rest. Maybe our teachers thought they were competition for the one true living God, but I hate it that I have to ask my wife about the Minotaur.

2) The Pope is the Anti-Christ. I'm no friend of Michelle Bachmann, having never met her, but in her shortened run for the White House, she was pilloried in more than one national publication for belonging to a church who believed the Pope was the Anti-Christ.

Lo and behold, she's Lutheran. 

My first thought was, "Oh my gosh, we're still teaching that aren't we?" I remember Oscar Albers, our 8th grade confirmation teacher looking uncomfortable when we asked about the Anti-Christ, and he said, "All signs point to the Pope." Never mind the spiritual implication of that, what about the athletic ramifications? Our basketball games against Bishop Dwenger and Bishop Luers (Fort Wayne's two Catholic high schools) became that much more interesting. I mean, we had the power of God, which was good and all, but here these guys had the power of The Beast behind them! Every touchdown, every wrestling match, each tennis ball hit was fraught with spiritual peril. I mean, what would tip the balance? Would it be a Lutheran high school track meet beating their Catholic counterpart that would reveal the Man of Lawlessness (2 Thess. 2:3)

Sen. Bachmann was actually asked about it during a debate, and she denied belonging to a church that believed that (70 million Catholic/largely Republican voters might have had something to do with that), and it's true-  she resigned her membership in her church the year before. 

To be fair, that church was a Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) church, our more conservative cousin. Their doctrinal statement indeed states that the revelation of the pope being the Anti-Christ is not theirs - it says so in Scripture. 

So there it is.

Fun fact: 1 John 2 says there are many anti-Christs, along with the Big Kahuna; so anyone who is against Christ, is quite literally an anti-Christ. But as for the Capital A Anti-Christ, that one is a little harder to come by. 

Have popes been anti-Christs? Of course. In fact, three of the 10 worst lived during Luther's time. No wonder that Luther railed against the papacy, as Leo the 10th sold indulgences, Julius III promoted his adopted boy-toy to cardinal and one of the worst people in history - let alone popes - Alexander VI (one of the Borgia clan) were his spiritual fathers?

What about our Synod? Surely we wouldn't be as hidebound.

Guess again. 

In my text book and on LCMS's website, it states that the office of the papacy meets all the requirements of The Capital A Anti-Christ. 

But therein lies the rub. The LCMS site explains it a little better:

 Concerning the historical identity of the Antichrist, we affirm the Lutheran Confessions' identification of the Antichrist with the office of the papacy whose official claims continue to correspond to the Scriptural marks listed above. It is important, however, that we observe the distinction which the Lutheran Confessors made between the office of the pope (papacy) and the individual men who fill that office. The latter could be Christians themselves. We do not presume to judge any person's heart. Also, we acknowledge the possibility that the historical form of the Antichrist cold (sic) change.

Two things on that:

1) So long to your dream of ever seeing a Lutheran sworn into the Oval Office. As long as that little paragraph is on our website, ham-fisted journalists are going to find it; they won't bother making the distinction between "Pope" and "office of the papacy" as having the mark of The Beast.

2) This is a bit of ridiculousness. Saying that the office of the papacy corresponds with the marks of the Anti-Christ (which I don't believe it does) makes about as much sense as saying your son's date looks like a hamster: even if it's true, why point it out? The downside of proclaiming this as part of our doctrine far outweighs the upside Lutherans seem to need to be right at all costs.

For my last two live-streamed video conferences with my fellow seminarians, I strategically placed my Pope John Paul II calendar behind me for full viewing pleasure. It's not exactly letting my freak flag fly, but I hope it leads to a dialogue about how we should be a lot more concerned with little a anti-Christs than whether Pope Benedict smells like sulfur. 

Good Friday parable

“Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered Him stricken by God, smitten by Him, and afflicted. But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
Isaiah 53:4-6

The wolf saw the bear before the hunter did. In fact, the hunter didn’t see the bear at all. The hunter was not a great friend of the wolf, but the bear was an enemy of both. The wolf saw, from his place on an outcrop of rock, that the bear was making straight for the hunter, but that it had to cross the wolf’s path to get to the man, who was underdressed in a ball cap, jeans sweater and leather gloves.

The wolf knew the bear would make short work of the man, who was busy at something in the middle of a clearing, paying no attention to his surroundings. The wolf had a decision to make: stay uninvolved and let nature take its course, as it were, or enter a fight that was not his own for the sake of a weaker animal, with the potential of serious harm to himself. For although he would have the surprise factor on the bear, and a superior position, a fight with a bear rarely leaves a wolf unscathed.

The bear was building up steam, sniffing the air, puffing out great clouds of cold air when the wolf was suddenly upon him. The bear was so startled that it had no time to roar, because the wolf was immediately at its throat, and had him down on the ground. The bear reached for the wolf, but its claws hit nothing but air as it struggled against the darkness. The wolf and the bear lay still for awhile, and just as the wolf thought he was out of danger, the bear’s back claws reached the wolf’s hide and ripped. The wolf yelped with pain, but held the bear’s neck fast, getting a new and better grip, and held on until the great bear was lifeless.

The wolf struggled along the path, and made his way over to the man, to assure him that the danger was past. He saw the man on the other side of the clearing, startled at the wolf’s presence, but suddenly pleased. The man crouched down, in supplication, summoning the wolf with a wave of his hand. Here was a new thing, the wolf thought, a man and a wolf, friends at last. He made his way across the clearing, but as he took a step in the center, two metal jaws clamped around his paw.

The pain was incredible, and he knew three things at once – 1) his paw was useless; 2) his life as king of the woods was over; and 3) the man had done this to him.

The man watched the wolf walk in circles for awhile, watching the snow around the trap gradually get pinker and pinker with the wolf’s blood. The man got bored watching the wolf dying after awhile, and then got busy setting something on a tree stump near the edge of the clearing. He took his gloves off to touch some buttons, and finally he was ready. The wolf, tongue lolling out of his mouth, near death, walking in circles relentlessly, looked up just as the self-timer on the man’s camera went off.

"Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."

A few moments later, after suffering at the hands of the one he saved, the wolf died in the pink snow.

(Just so I'm not misunderstood - this is a real photo taken by the hunter pictured here. I came up with the parable when I saw it, and imagined what might have occurred beforehand. Obviously, a wolf is not going to take on a bear, so I'm applying for a poetic license here.

Regardless, this picture's posting sparked an outrage, which you can read about here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2012/04/05/2064017/idaho-wolf-trappers-smiling-photo.html)

He loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah

Holy week. The perfect time to talk about the Beatles.
No, this is not about how god-like the Fab Four are, nor is it to dredge up that Lennon quote about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus (he was right, by the way), nor is it to scoff at the potential Beatl-ettes group. The reason I'm coming to you with news of the Beatles is because of my obsession for metaphors.
This obsession is well-known in my family, who, when I get that certain comparative look in my eye, will interrupt exasperatedly and often simultaneously with: "Yes, we understand it, so we don't need to know what else it's like."
But I was listening to the Beatles this week, as part of my life-list quest to finish 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die. Three things happened.
1) I regret my early life hipster stance against all things Beatles. When I was first becoming a music snob, I obviously eschewed anyone or anything that was the least bit popular. And since they were the most popular band of all time, I necessarily sniffed my disapproval. Well, they are the most popular band of all time for a reason, and listening to Hard Day's Night, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, The White Album, and Abbey Road straight through humbled me. They really are the greatest band of all time.
2) I started a Facebook conversation asking Beatles fans in which three songs the Boys used the word "sin". It's at 38 comments and counting. Winners were Phil Van Munching and Mike Volt Rusticana for getting "You Can't Do That" (Hard Day's Night) and "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" (White Album) No one got "Love You To" from Revolver. Runners up included Virginia, Pete and Lori for earnest tries and Penny for most amusing exchange: [Mike - "No Penny, you can't do that...." (correctly answering the question) Penny - "I can't do what?"]
3) I thought of a metaphor! It happened as I was listening to Sgt. Pepper on my iPhone and one of my ear buds came out. I was listening to "When I'm 64" at the time, and suddenly, I was only hearing the music, and not the words. I realized it would not be safe to put the ear bud back in my right ear, so I continued listening to the rest of the song with only the left ear bud in. To my amazement, the cool Lennon song about growing old together (with Yoko?) became a kind of clarinet-y, circus-y bit of weirdness featuring bells and toy piano. A person who  hear only half of this song would expect a bear in a tutu to suddenly appear.
This became a metaphor for a) our lives without God, b) the Law without the Gospel (!) c) the life of a Christian without church d) Snickers without peanuts. We could go our whole lives of knowing only a) ourselves, b) a brutal, damning law c) the facts of Christianity d) chocolate and caramel and not even know there was anything more to life. But when we strap that other ear bud on, oh what beautiful music is made! We now see the way the song was meant to be heard; the universe explained; the Scripture to be read; the life of a Christian to be lived; the candy bar eaten.
It's almost like living life without metaphors.

Original Sin

Today’s blog is in response to an assignment I have for seminary on original sin, in which I am to respond to the following statement: 

“It just doesn’t seem fair for God to hold us responsible for Adam’s sin.”

My response would be an unqualified, “So?” and if pressed, “Life’s not fair.”

After picking myself up off the ground (for my interlocutor is the size and strength of Pastor Brian, but less Lutheran and more violent), I would ask my new friend to further explain her question. I imagine our dialogue would go something like this:

She: You Lutherans are always going on about the freedom of the will, and that we are saved by grace, but if this isn't Calvinistic pre-determinism, I don’t know what is. You’re saying, with the doctrine of original sin, that innocent babies are born having no choice but to sin, that we are condemned from the outset by our ‘loving God,’ and that we can’t do anything about it?

Me: Yes and no. We are conceived in sin, and there is an indelible mark against us called “sinful nature.” That is why, if you listen carefully on Sunday, that the pastor forgives you of all your sins – the sins of thought, word and deed – but not of your “sinful condition.” Those sins that you commit – the actual sins – are the misdeeds that you confess each week, the ones committed by you. But we can never escape our sinful condition; not by ourselves anyway. So is there something you can do about your actual sins? Of course – you can commit to loving your neighbor and doing all the things a follower of Jesus would do. There is nothing you can do about your original sin (which is not, to quote Eddie Izzard, poking a badger with a spoon, though that definitely is original.

She: But that’s not fair.

Me: Tell that to the child born with AIDS, or leukemia, or crack babies, or children with the proclivity towards alcoholism, or other forms of instant gratification. It’s not fair. And who do we blame for their condition?

She: In the case of some of those conditions, their parents.

Me: And what did they do?

She: They drank or smoked crack while pregnant, or slept with someone who had AIDS.

Me: So you’re saying that the blame lies with the parents.

She: Yes.

Me: Me too.

She: Wait.

Me: No, you’re right. Those children inherited their disease from their parents. We inherited sinfulness from our parents. And lest you go laying all the blame on Adam and Eve, if it hadn’t been them, it would have been Cain. And if Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel would have somehow been able to live a perfect life, someone along the way would have started the stain that became original sin. My choice would be Lamech (Gen. 4:23)

She: But why is this important?

Me: It’s foundational to our belief, because we do not believe that people are inherently good; and think of the shift in our educational, psychological, political and sociological policies if we operated under that supposition. You don’t have to look any further than the recent housing crisis to conclude that it arose from our sinful nature, of wanting something for nothing.

She: I think I’m almost there, but could you give me a metaphor from Bo Giertz?

Me: I’m happy you asked. Bo asked us to picture sin and our sinful nature as a Norwegian bachelor farmer clearing his farmland. Some of his sins are like grapefruit sized rocks evident from the surface that he can easily toss away. One sweep of the ground, rocks in the bin, a good days’ work. As he starts to plow the field, however, he runs into some bigger rocks below the surface. So he spends a week unearthing those sins that are not quite evident from a surface examination. He works hard, and excises all of the bigger rocks. Satisfied with his work, he sets about plowing his field once again, and discovers a sin the size of a boulder. Realizing he cannot by his own strength get rid of that boulder, he calls his friends and neighbors and together they first set about breaking the boulder into smaller pieces, until he can haul them away. This takes the better part of a month, and he and his neighbors are satisfied that he is free and clear to live a righteous life; i.e. plant his crops.

The funny thing is, though, that while he was standing in the bottom of the hole they took the boulder out of, he discovered that there was something hard underneath the ground. Thinking it was another boulder, he quietly tapped-tapped it. It was bigger than a rock, bigger than a bigger rock, bigger than even a boulder. In fact, the more he cleared the dirt away, day after day, he realized that it was not a rock at all, but a foundation of granite that lay underneath his entire land. And upon this discovery, he was humbled, and then rejoiced, because he realized that he had plenty of good, fertile land to upon which to grow his crops; and yet there was this underlying hardness which he could never get rid of.

That granite is our sinful nature, upon which we can live as righteous followers of Jesus, but never escape completely.

She: Thank you, Lutheran man o’ God!

Me: You’re welcome.

Kony 2012 part 1

Is this the very definition of "viral meltdown?"
Within the month of March, the following happened:

1. The Kony 2012 film by Jason Russell of Invisible Children launched March 5.
2. 120 million people watched the film. (This is not terribly unusual for Justin Bieber, say, or JLo, but they have their half billion hits after a year for a four minute music video; Kony, at almost 30 minutes, got 40 million hits after three days without gyrating pop stars).
3. Enthusiasm for exposing the misdeeds of the world's Public Enemy Number One and his capture became important to millions of people who couldn't find Africa on a globe, let alone Uganda on a map. His five year old child, Gavin Danger Russell, was trending large on tumblr.
4. The inevitable naysayers hit back hard: Invisible Children sends only a third of its donations to its area; the film is a propaganda piece that oversimplifies the importance of Kony and is inaccurate in many of its fundamental details; its maker, Jason Russell, exploited his child Gavin in order to further his own career as a filmmaker; and, naturally, that since he is a well-groomed, attractive Christian man, he is obviously a closeted homosexual.
5. Jason Russell had a nervous breakdown. He was filmed in a clothes-less rant in San Diego, and was taken to a place where he can heal. His wife said he was upset by the negative reactions his film caught, and that it will take some time for him to heal.

And we still have four more days in March.

In days past, someone would have to spend a life-time getting famous, based on a body of artistic or political or scholarly work. Their downfall could come quickly, but often it would take a court case lasting months, or be tried in the public square over weeks.

Russell's rise to fame and meltdown happened in about 15 days.

What is a Christian response to all of this?

First, and foremost, we need to pray for Mr. Russell and his family, that he recover his mental and physical health so that he is able to be a good father and husband again.

Second, our prayer is that the message - catch and capture a bad guy - is not lost in the maelstrom.

In the following days, I'll look at the actual film, and what Christians can learn from this phenomenon - and what pitfalls we may avoid.

Old, Hebrew or First?

Pastor Brian, Tracy and I are feverishly working to complete our lessons for tomorrow night's Old Testament lectures - Part 2. We taught the first seven hours of class last month, and that got us to Ruth. Tomorrow night's classes will finish the rest.
But something is bugging me.
Old and New.
Why do we call the Old Testament "Old?" Not that there's anything particularly wrong with being old. Older means wiser, right? Old means experienced and mature.
Except in our culture.
Old means worn out and finished. Kaput. Retired. Ancient. Outdated. Even Scripture says, "You don't pour new wine into old wineskins." Why? Because things that are old are not useful for moving forward. That's a nice way to put it. A plainer way to say it is that things that are old are useless.
Do I agree that old things are worthless? Heavens no. And not just because I'm getting my first AARP invitation this year.
But in our culture, image, as they say, is everything.
Biblical scholars are fond of a new way of referring to The Old: Hebrew Bible. I like this quite a bit, since it reveres and highlights our Jewish forebears, honors our spiritual ancestors, as well as the religion of our Savior.
The problem with it is that if you sell a Bible with "Hebrew Bible" at the front part, what do you call the other part? "Christian Bible"? No, because the whole thing is the Christian Bible, and then we would be in the same pickle as the Mormon church and have to call it The Book of Christian. Shudder. And if you have a book with Hebrew Bible and New Testament that would be very confusing and beg the question "Why is one part a Bible, and the other part a Testament?"
Instead of Old Testament, why not call it The First Testament? That way your Bibles would say "First Testament" and "New Testament." The First nomenclature would stress that God's initial covenant is not outdated, worn out and worthless; far from it, it would stress that it's prime, preceding the New. Not co-equal with the New but of great importance, since it was first.
The folks who would have the most problem with this is dualists: if you have an Old, you must have a New. If you have Hebrew, you must have Christian. If you have a First, you must have a Last. And nobody wants to read the Last Testament, except greedy heirs.
It's either that, or change American's view toward Old. And that idea is nothing new.

Enough of meaninglessness; let's talk semi-colons!

Enough of meaninglessness. Time for grammar!
(For those of you who think that grammar is the height of meaninglessness, fie on you, and a pox upon your house! I would put forth "placement of the salad fork" as the height of meaninglessness.)
My love for the semi-colon is well-known. When I was a part of the constitution and by-law task force last year, my love for the red-headed step-child of the punctuation family reached epic proportions. Even now, when we read the Nicene Creed in church, the members of the committee will seek me out and exclaim, "Did you see those semi-colons?"
Of course.
I was reminded of this last week when reading a friend's Facebook link to The Three Uses of Irony, by theoatmeal.com and from there discovered to my delight the following article. Enjoy.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon

Meaninglessnesses.

Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless!
All week, without any prompting from me, Ecclesiastes has come up in natural conversation four times.

1. Ecclesiastes was the topic for one of the Tuesday Women's Bible Study leaders.
2. A youth came in with a very good question: Why does it seem that everyone's totally okay with the fact that we're all going to die?
3. Another youth asked how Jesus would be treated by the church if he were to come back today, which naturally led me to the Grand Inquisitor sequence of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, in which Jesus is brought before the Inquisition and, well, I don't want to spoil anything.
4. I received a book in the mail with 25 short stories about The Christ, including The Grand Inquisitor.

While you may be thinking that none but the first have anything to do with Ecclesiastes, you would be wrong, for in this book lie the seeds of existentialism, of which Fydor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky is the acknowledged progenitor.
Is there a message for Christians in Ecclesiastes? Absolutely. As Lutherans, we love the third chapter, set to music by the Byrds 40 years ago, that there is a time for everything. We love "a cord of three strands is not easily broken." We also believe, teach and confess that the message of this holy book is found in 8:15:

So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life God has given him under the sun.

But the verse right before that one is this:

There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless.

But then how do you reconcile that message with individual passages like "For who knows what is good for a man in life, during the few and meaningless days he passes through like a shadow?" (6:12)

Pretty hard to paint a sun with a smiley face on the cover of this book. How do you set the bravery of Stephen the martyr, much less our Lord and Savior, against a passage like 9:4b "even a live dog is better off than a dead lion"?

Sure the rest of the Bible consistently warns against riches, and here as well: "Whoever has riches never has riches enough." But is this the same author who spent a third of his book of Proverbs extolling the virtue of wisdom and another good chunk of it praising hard work, who then writes here: 

So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. For a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then they must leave all they own to another who has not toiled for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune.

Despair.

That's a strong word, used only a dozen other times, and only once in the New Testament when Paul reminds us that we are crushed, persecuted and oppressed, but never in despair, because despair implies "no hope."

So what's the answer to this anomaly, this section of seeming despair in a book that's promised to give us hope and a future, as it says in Jeremiah.

First, we don't gain our theology from the Wisdom books. If we did, "Spare the rod and spoil the child" would be part of the 10 Commandments, and we would be reading passages from Song of Songs in church on Valentine's Day. 

Secondly, I reminded my class that Solomon - if he is the author - probably wrote this later in his kingdom after he'd seen the ravaging effects that his capitulation had on God's people. This could be a frank appraisal of a kingship gone bad. Look what good all that wisdom did me, he says.

Third, we're not absolutely convinced that "eternal life" was a for-sure done deal for 10th century Hebrews. Their "salvation" was from oppressors, not necessarily for eternal life.

And finally, as I told the class a few weeks back, "If you're a pessimist, you're not crazy." Every village needs two things: an idiot and a curmudgeon. While the Bible is lacking an idiot, I would put forth Ecclesiastes as the Norwegian bachelor farmer of Scripture: "Ah what do you know? You think that's a new idea? That's as old as the hills. Your cat died - well, sure. That happens. You put your faith in the economy? The stock market? HA! you think you're so smart? Let me tell you something, you don't know nothing, sonny. Nonsense. All of it nonsense."

Meaningless

I've really enjoyed delving into the Old Testament of late, so several thoughts might appear here as a result of that experience.
While I thoroughly enjoyed preparing for all of my lectures - as well as listening to the amazing education that Pastor Brian and Tracy delivered - the book that stuck a chord with me the most was Ecclesiastes because of its frank description of the meaninglessness of life.
I'll dig a little deeper into the actual content of Ecclesiastes on another day. Today's thought is about the Headline Word of Ecclesiastes (1:2), and how the various versions have translated it.

• "Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!" New International Version NIV
• "Vanity of vanities." KJV, ESV and NASB, though the former footnotes it "futility of futilities."
• "Nothing makes sense. Everything is nonsense." Contemporary English Version CEV
• "Useless! Useless! Completely useless!" New Century Version NCV.
• "Smoke, nothing but smoke." The Message MSG

Part of the fun thing about not knowing Hebrew or Greek is being able to try to figure out why a word was chosen for the different English versions, and what shade of meaning is meant by each.
The most popular offering by far is Vanity of vanities, which I think is a milquetoast word. I understand vanity here means hollow and without value and worthless, but for 21st century readers, it is a pretty mild rebuke for the ultimate condemnation The Teacher has for a striving after X,Y and Z. It probably had more pop for 17th century readers, who were more familiar with the second commandment being 'Don't take the name of the Lord your God in vain.' For many of us, the implication is that Solomon is looking at his mirror, and just sees arrogance everywhere. One argument I've heard for it being "the right word" is that when you compare Vanity of vanities to Holy of holies, it makes a pretty nice boxed set.
"Nonsense" is word my mom used on us when we were full of it. "The plum juice just happened to spill all over your freshly-waxed floor." "Nonsense," she'd say. Or "Stop that nonsense!" A bunch of silliness.
"Useless," too, has the shade of meaning of being the salt that loses its saltiness; it is a thing that used to have importance, but it has lost it. It is useless now, but it wasn't always thus. I don't know if that's the direction The Teacher was trying to lead us.
By far the most interesting of the bunch is The Message, which is not unusual. (It seems a little bizarre, doesn't it, to live in an age, when I could drive 45 minutes from here and ask the guy who wrote this version, "Why did you pick that word?" and probably get a response.) The Message is pretty famous for picking some vibrant word choices. I like the image of the things that are important in this world as being nothing but smoke, especially since we have done a pretty successful job at demonizing smokers! Match that up with "Where there's smoke, there's fire" and you could come up with a pretty decent Ash Wednesday sermon: wealth, hard work and wisdom are the source of the flame that turns to smoke. And what are you left with? Ashes.
But the word I like best (and again, your favorite word depends largely on your world view) is meaningless, if for no other reason than its a word that's completely out of character with the rest of Scripture. I love it that this word - and this book - is in our holy Writ. Sure, the rest of the Bible takes sin to task for being meaningless, but wisdom? Hard work? Solomon spent 10 chapters of Proverbs extolling the wonder of wisdom, and had a whole sub-class of Proverbs asking us to look at ants, of all things, to teach us how to live. So how do we hold those two books in the same hand?
Stay tuned.




Our Savior Lutheran Church

Habakkuk the Mucky Muck

So many things to write about, so little time.

The Old Testament Equip class is coming up this Friday and Saturday, so I'm deep into the detritus of the meaninglessness of Ecclesiastes, Abishag's significance and the structure of Obadiah.

In the midst of all this, though, I'd like to share how half of a verse from the second chapter of Habakkuk changed the world.

Now Habakkuk 2 happens to be one of my favorite chapters in the Bible - yes, class, I know I say that about any chapter I'm reading at the time, but this time I mean it. What's not to love about it? It starts out by quoting Bob Dylan (wait, who came first? Dylan or Habakkuk? I think they knew OF each other, but were not FB friendly.) "I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower," which is a clear allusion to “All Along the Watchtower.” The balance of the chapter is a condemnation of the Chaldeans, and lists five woes upon them.

And you know how I love a good woe. Don't get me started on Jesus' seven woes against the Pharisees in Matthew 23. Dead men's bones. Priceless.

Habakkuk's first three woes have to do with venal wealthy and powerful, and that's its own bit of wonder. Then the fourth woe is one for our time - a woe upon drunken perverts. (I haven't forgotten my main point - the half verse - but I have to go one more step off the track for a second). For all the family values folks out there who are looking for an explicit condemnation of drunken perverts, and find that some of Paul's lists of sins (“the sexually immoral”) doesn't really have the teeth they are looking for, turn ye to Habakkuk 2: 15-17. Fifth woe? Don't make idols. Ho hum. But the first four are cracklin' good. They pop!

That's why I love Habakkuk 2. Woes for our time. But you don't change the world criticizing the rich and powerful - necessarily - nor at poking fun at drunken perverts. You change the world by shaking up the religious establishment of your day, by creating new religions and stuff.

Top two candidates: Jesus and Martin Luther.

There are some who say that the most important moment in Luther's life was not nailing/posting/stapling/post-it-ing the 95 Theses on the Door of Wittenburg, his defense at the Diet of Worms, the publication of the New Testament in German or marrying a nun. Some say the most important moment of Luther's life was his Tower Experience, in which he read Romans 1:17 (“For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faith.’”) in a completely different light. Some say that when Luther read that, his vision of God changed from Angry Judge to Loving Father.

Who are these "some" who say that?

One of those "some" is Martin Luther.

He wrote: "Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the righteousness of God and the statement that "the (righteous) shall live by faith." Then I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before "the righteousness of God" had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven.”

For Luther, Paul’s verse was a gate to heaven. But who gave Paul the verse?

Habakkuk.

“Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him,
but the righteous shall live by his faith.” Hab. 2:4

A half verse by a minor prophet inspires Paul, who inspires Luther, who inspires me.

Is this what they mean by “the inspired Word of God?”