What Makes For a Good Public Funeral?

With the funerals of James Foley and Michael Brown being held this week, I have been thinking about the purpose of public funerals and how we who are called upon to lead them can help both the family and the wider community through liturgy and proclamation.








Funerals are rites of passage for families and communities.








It will be a long time coming.



“Abide With Me” by Elizabeth Strout


What If Jesus Really Meant It When He Said Turn the Other Cheek?


In this series on the historical backdrop of the Bible, we have looked at two events so far: Babylonian Exile and the United monarchy. Today, we look at the conquest of Alexander the Great from 336  B.C. to his death in 323, just before his 33rd birthday.

Alexander’s conquest failed in its political goal; it did not create a common allegiance among the city-states conquered. It did not form a united nation under the “divine” leadership of Alexander as prince or king.

Culturally, however, Alexander spread Greek influence across the whole area you see in the maps at the back of your Study Bible. It’s not that everyone gave up their own culture or deities or local customs; but, they found a veneer of Greek culture spreading across the empire. That veneer penetrated more deeply among the aristocracy and splattered more thinly at the edges of society, but one thing changed for everyone: Greek became the common language of people all over the known world.

Greek thought, in particular the philosophies of Plato and Alexander’s tutor, Aristotle, spread with the language.  Religion, sculpture, theater, and athletics took their form from Hellenistic culture.

What does this have to do with the Bible?  A few things stand out:

Language: After Alexander’s conquest, scholars translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. Many Jewish members of the synagogue and Gentile adherents could read the scriptures only in Greek. We might compare the younger Jewish generation in Palestine to young Native Americans who understand some of the Navajo, Choctaw, or Chickasaw of their grandparents, but they don’t speak it or read it themselves. The earliest New Testament texts we have were written in Greek. The Old Testament in English translation leans as heavily on the Greek translations from Hebrew as it does on the oldest Hebrew manuscripts available. Why? Because the Greek translations we have used Hebrew texts that are older than any Hebrew texts we now have available to us.

Biblical imagery: In the epistle to the Hebrews, 12:1, we find the image of the naked athlete: “let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.” Here (1 Corinthians 9:24-25) is one of many examples of Paul using Greek athletics as a metaphor for spiritual struggle: “Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable garland, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.”

Power:  The military conquest of Alexander the Great, followed by the Roman conquest and military presence in Palestine provided the backdrop for the words “Messiah” and “Savior.” Even for those Jews (and there were many) who rejected the Zealot resistance because they believed that violence did not reflect God’s intention for the world, the idea of a Messiah or Savior who could defeat the power of evil without military might seemed impractical. Whether or not one adopted the view that the emperor was divine, one’s view of a Savior or Messiah was deeply influenced by the story of Alexander the Great.

Choose your question, political, linguistic, or philosophical/theological:

1. Jesus taught non-violent resistance against the Romans (Matthew 5:39) “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.” In a culture formed by military conquest, this would have sounded absurd and impractical. Does it sound any more practical to those of us who live under the threat of terrorism? Or, for our parents or grandparents who fought against Naziism? I’m not exactly a pacifist, so I struggle with this—what if Jesus really meant it?

2. To what extent, if any, has learning a new language affected your ability to think in different ways? To empathize with people from different backgrounds? To understand the ideas of people very different from yourself?

3. In Paul’s most familiar passage, 1 Corinthians 13, in what ways do you find Paul using Platonic or Aristotelian thought in his argument? In what ways do you find him pushing against Hellenistic philosophy with more Jewish concerns, idolatry in particular?

When the churches were full, the budgets rose each year, and the youth choir sang in perfect harmony


Back In My Day . . .

The Bible records two distinct attitudes toward Israel’s monarchy.  On the one hand, the kingdom of David stands as the pinnacle of Israel’s history, the touchstone against which all other generations must be measured, and a period for which prophets and people wax nostalgic.  When Isaiah describes how Israel will recover from Babylonian exile, he says,

“A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse, [King David’s father]
and a branch shall grow out of his roots,” Isaiah 11:1

A few verses later, he envisions a time when the north and the south, Ephraim and Judah, will come back together as they were in the time of David’s reign:

“The jealousy of Ephraim shall depart,
the hostility of Judah shall be cut off;
Ephraim shall not be jealous of Judah,
and Judah shall not be hostile towards Ephraim.” Isaiah 11:13

This passage from Isaiah represents a line of thought that we can trace from Old Testament to New, from the heroic tale of David’s defeat of Goliath to the accolades given to Jesus as he approached Jericho (“Son of David!”) Luke 18:38.  We find a nostalgia for that brief period from Saul to David to Solomon, ~1000 to 922 B.C., about 78 years, as if those few decades represent the way God intended the world to be.  The Kingdom of God and the kingdom of David become interwoven in the first century Jewish and Christian mind.

On the other hand, a strand of thought runs through much of the Old Testament that considers the monarchy a flawed institution, a sign of Israel’s unfaithfulness and susceptibility to idolatry.  In the story of Saul’s anointing by the prophet Samuel, the people demand a king “so that we also may be like other nations” (1 Samuel 8:20). In the context of the Old Testament, becoming like other nations sounds like our cliché of children who say to their parents, “Please let me jump off of a cliff–all the other kids in the neighborhood are doing it!”

This line of thought, with a sardonic and satirical tone regarding mortal kings, continues through the David and Bathsheba story and into the ironic tone of John’s Gospel.  By that time, the Jews had been ruled by Jewish puppets of Rome, such as Herod.  When Pilate writes “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews” on Jesus’ cross, and the chief priests tell Pilate, “Do not write, ‘King of the Jews,’ but, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews,’” and Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written,” we hear John’s devastating indictment of the monarchy.

Here are some questions this raises for us today:  To what extent does the contemporary church indulge in nostalgia for days gone by, such as the nineteen fifties and sixties when, in our memory, or the memory of our parents, the churches were full, the budgets rose each year, and the youth choir sang in perfect harmony? To what extent, if any, do African Americans and other people of color share that nostalgia for the nineteen fifties? What does nostalgia indicate about our theology? If the mainline church continues to lose influence, does that mean that God will be diminished?

Coming Up . . .

The drama of the Bible, from the Exodus to the Resurrection to the spread of the Gospel to Rome, moves across a stage against historical backdrops.  This series of blog posts lifts up six of those backdrops as a way of helping us see more clearly the meaning of the events portrayed center stage.

In the last two posts, we looked at Babylonian exile, from ~605 B.C. to 538 B.C. It ended when Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon and liberated the exiles, giving them the right of return.

Over the next few posts, we’ll take a look at:

  • the conquest of Alexander the Great (336-323) that brought Greek language and culture to Palestine;
  • Roman conquest (200–63 B.C.) that brought “peace to the empire but not peace of mind to its peoples” (Howard Clark Kee) through emperors and puppet kings such as Herod;
  • the destruction of Herod’s temple (70 A.D.) when Jerusalem was sacked;
  • the separation of church and synagogue (late first century).

Today, we reviewed the importance of the rise of the monarchy  between ~990 to ~1033 over a united kingdom that included north and south, Israel and Judah.






Here’s one possibility.




Getting Kicked Out of Your Home

You are sitting in a worship service trying to shed the feeling of discomfort you have carried all week: a relationship gone wrong; a job you have grown to hate, some sense that this is not the life I want. I belong somewhere else.

3589329865_79936367f1You hear Scripture read. They are just words, words you have heard before without feeling anything. But today, in your sense of displacement, the ancient story or psalm resonates. Deep calls to deep and you feel as if the person who wrote those words more than 2,000 years ago had read your mind and your text messages.

If you have ever experienced that profound sense of connection with the Scripture during your own time of emotional turmoil, there is good reason. Almost all of Scripture emerged from the experience of a displaced people.

I will go so far as to say that without a clear understanding of the emotional and faith crisis that crashed down on the people of Israel with their exile to Babylon, we cannot understand the Bible at all. This brief 67 year period, from 605 B.C. to 538 B.C., generated the process of thinking, writing, gathering, and editing the lion’s share of the Old Testament. Almost every word of Jewish and Christian Scripture, Old Testament and New, tells its story on a stage with the exile in Babylon as a backdrop. Even the parts of the Bible that originated before the exile where shaped and edited during, or shortly after, the Babylonian exile.

The Babylonian exile permeates the text of the entire Old Testament. In Psalm 137, we find one of the explicit descriptions of the exile, or captivity in Babylon:

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’

This psalm reflects the emotional experience of Babylonian captivity, and in the next line  the psalmist poses an important theological question:

How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land? 

Keeping in mind the exile experience while reading the Old Testament helps us understand a struggle that may seem quite foreign to contemporary Christians. In the theology of the ancient world, different gods ruled over different lands. The nation of Israel tied itself to the land they believed God had promised them. While Israel grew into the confession that there is one God only, one Creator of everything, the more primitive view of specific gods for different plots of land still clings to the biblical text. Consider, for instance, the story of the healing of Naaman the Syrian (2 Kings 5). After the prophet Elisha makes it clear to Naaman that his healing of a skin disease has come from the God of Israel, Naaman says,


Naaman has been converted, but he still does not quite get the concept of a God who can be worshiped without kneeling on the mule-load of earth he would transport everywhere he went in order to take God with him.

Questions:   In your own life, do you have an exile story, i.e., a story of displacement and restoration, whether geographic or emotional?  If so, in what way, if any, does the Bible inform your own exile experience?

Next post:  Exile, continued . . .