Category: Living in The Story blogs

Years ago as my husband was traveling in Turkey, the bus stopped near a little village off the beaten track.

There was a small lake, clear and clean, with a stony bottom. And there was a shrine, marking the place as special, maybe even sacred in a long ago day.

Locals think the shrine might have been built by the Hittite people; old, very, very old.

But the shrine is not what impressed Jerry. Rather it’s the natural spring that feeds the lake; the spring of water the shrine designates and celebrates as special, life-giving; maybe even sacred.

Water may well have been flowing from this little spring for more than 4,000 years. Think of it – before Jesus, before King David, maybe even before Abraham – ever fresh, ever flowing water, giving life to a parched land and a thirsty people.

In the Gospel according to John, we see images of water woven throughout.

Here is Jesus at the annual Festival of Booths that included rituals of water: religious rites invoking God’s blessing of water for the fall harvest. Here is Jesus crying out:

Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink for out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.

John 7:38

Here is Jesus with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well:

Those who drink of the water that I give them will never be thirsty. The water I give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.

John 4:13-14

John’s Gospel overflows with symbols and images and signs that point beyond themselves to something beyond our human ability to speak or to know.

Continue reading “Symbols in John’s Gospel”

I really like the Samaritan woman in John 4.  I wish I knew her name.

I like her spunk and her spirit. I like her questions. I like the way she stays engaged, letting the conversation always go deeper and wider. I like her courage.

I say “courage” because it was not at all proper for a woman to speak to a strange man in a public place. It was not typical for a Samaritan and a Jew to engage in a social relationship. And it took courage for her to go tell the people in her village about this man she had met; it was risky for a woman with a tarnished reputation to bear witness to the Christ.

What would people think?!

In John and in Acts there are two stories we are pondering this week: the woman of Samaria and the man Paul from Tarsus.

Two stories of people who moved from disbelief and cynicism to faith and trust; two stories of people who turned from resisting to following; two stories of people who – because of their passion for the Christ – found the courage to let their lives be radically reoriented and re-shaped by the Christ.

There are countless stories of faith like this.

Again and again, across the ages, around the world, untold courageous people like these have let themselves be changed: their beliefs, their values, their priorities, their behaviors, their assumptions, their lives.

People who encounter the living Christ ARE changed.

Here’s another story of another courageous woman. I found her in her wonderful book called The Weight of Mercy: Deb Richardson-Moore.

Continue reading “This Takes Courage”

Paul stood in front of the Areopagus in Athens and said …

“Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.

While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because God has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you again about this.”

from Acts 17

“When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed…” I’m not a bit surprised.

We’re talking Plato’s Greece here where his ideas had deeply influenced Paul’s hearers.

As a matter of fact, Plato’s ideas have influenced western civilization throughout these many centuries and have even shaped Christian theology.

“Resurrection” wasn’t a category in Platonic thought.

There were, of course, plenty of stories about the gods who would sometimes interfere with death and bring someone back from Hades. But those were only stories; children’s tales.

These tales were nothing to found a faith on. This was nothing to build a life on.

Continue reading “A Whole New Thing”

The voices of biblical woman are mostly muted, filtered through the voices of the male writers of the text. Even so, the women of Scripture speak to us with their own power – from the edges, from the underside of power and privilege.

The women of the Bible do not necessarily show us how women ought to behave; rather they tell us something about how women throughout history have acted within their time and place, from within their own particular circumstances. These women are not to be used as simplistic templates shaped by our own standards of acceptable or unacceptable behavior.

For the most part, the stories of Scripture reflect the patriarchal mores of first, the ancient Middle East and later the Roman Empire. And then, of course, woven throughout these secular influences are the religious convictions of the people of Israel.

The Israelites and the Church did (and do) not exist in a vacuum.

Expectations and pressures from the surrounding culture were as powerful forces then as they are still today and most of us are blind to the many ways our culture influences and even manipulates our religious beliefs and practice.

The work of Feminist scholarship is to critique and question Scripture and its patriarchal bias from a female perspective in light of the cultural realities of the time as well as the eternal ideals of justice and equity.

This hopeful ideals clearly have not yet come into being in our own human reality and it certainly does not exist in Scripture. It is only hinted at, only dreamed about in the stories of the women – our mothers -preserved for us in our Bible.

For our Living in The Story texts this week, let’s look at the lives of two fascinating Old Testament women: Hannah and Ruth.

Continue reading “Faithful Women”