A Fresh Perspective

As far as my memories go back I remember being in the church house on Sundays. It did not always go well for me on Sundays. I can vaguely remember one Sunday when my parents and my best friend’s parents let us sit together during Sunday worship by ourselves. We decided to take the foil wrapper of a piece of chewing gum and make a little paper football. We had a whole side pew to ourselves so Keith slid over to one side and I to the other. We made goal posts with our hands and thumbs and kicked field goals. One of my kicks deviated from its intended path and landed inside a curl of the lady sitting in the pew directly in front of us. She was hard of hearing so we didn’t worry too much, but Keith got tickled and I got tickled, enough that our parents took note. Well, that was the last time we got to sit together for a very long time. I also remember as a kid sitting in worship as the preacher seemed to drone on and on thinking, “What person in their right mind would want to do this eve...

This story in Mark 7 is a story of how some religious leaders in Jesus’s day, and in Mark’s day, and by extension in our own day get around actually doing the will of God while giving an appearance of holiness and making a claim to be dedicated to God. This is a story that is easy to misread. Some read this story as if the major contrast is between human traditions and scripture. That is not the contrast at all. I need to say two things about that: First, tradition is not bad. One of the problems is that many misunderstand the biblical meaning of the word tradition. Tradition in biblical usage simply means “what is handed on.” So scriptures - our sacred texts – are part of our Christian tradition. Paul tells the Corinthians, “I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions just as I handed them on to you” (1 Cor. 11:2). In 2 Thessalonians Paul or someone writing in Paul’s name says, “So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the...

Three times in the book of Acts, Paul’s experience of his encounter with the living Christ is told. In Acts 9, Luke reports the story. In Acts 22, Luke has Paul recount his experience to an unruly temple crowd. And in Acts 26, Paul retells his experience to Festus and King Agrippa. Paul’s own brief account of his encounter with Christ is found in Galatians 1:13–17. Paul explains this experience as a revelation— “God was pleased . . . to reveal his Son to me”—and as a calling through grace “to proclaim Christ among the Gentiles.” Paul says that after this encounter he did not “confer with any human being,” nor did he go up to Jerusalem to get the endorsement of the Twelve (“those who were already apostles before me”), but went, at once, to Arabia, and then afterward to Damascus where he began proclaiming that Jesus was the Messiah. We don’t know how long he stayed in solitude in Arabia, where he was apparently sorting things out. Paul underwent a major transformation as a result of ...