I Want One

Amazon is now selling an Alexa enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass. Imagine Alexa responding to you through a Big Mouth Billy Bass. The technological singularity may come upon us, but if it does so through Big Mouth Billy Basses I,for one, will be much more comfortable with our computer overlords.

Unfortunately Pam won’t let me get one. C’est la vie.

This was adapted from a hacker who came up with this wonderful idea. I hope that hacker received something for the idea.

I Confess I Can’t Remember Verse References

I don’t know why but I often find it difficult to remember Bible verse references – the chapter and verse numbers that we use to signify where a particular verse is found in scripture. This is only important because it is basically a part of church culture that when you quote a verse of scripture the church culture mindset is that you add the reference to it.

Have a friend who is dealing with worry and you want to encourage them? Well Matthew 6:34 is a great verse to remember (the first verse of scripture I ever memorized)  Therefore, you would tell your friend, “Well Matthew 6:34 says, ‘ Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.'” Struggling with feeling content in a situation? Philippians 4:13 (one of the most misused verses of scripture there is) is a good verse to share. “Have you considered Philippians 4:13? “I can do all this through him who gives me strength.”

When I started getting serious about studying the Bible and therefore started memorizing scripture I learned in a culture where you quote the reference at the beginning and the end of the quote. So you would say:

John 14:6
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.”
John 14:6

We quoted the reference twice, while the verse only once – I’m not really sure what message quoting the reference twice and the actual verse once actually sent (and I may not want to know).

Anyhow my problem is that I have always been,and still am, lousy at remembering the verse references of the scripture I memorize. I am good at remembering the actual verses, really good at remembering the content around the verse itself, and even better at remembering whole stories from scripture. In fact, when I try to lift up myself or someone else with scripture I usually go to the stories of scripture. “You’re struggling with God’s presence? Let me tell you about a time in a garden when Jesus felt that same way.” “You don’t feel like God can use you? Can I tell you a story about a man named Ehud?” Still remembering verse references is a pain for me.

Earlier this week I was with a group of men that I study the Bible with each week. We each were discussing one verse that really hit us from one of the chapters of the study. When it was my turn I brought up, “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.“. I was immediately asked “What’s the address” (this is the cool kid way of saying “what’s the reference?”) and I had to admit that I couldn’t remember other than it was in the Psalms.  Once again I felt the pang of shame.

These are guys that I love and I know love me, so I’m not bringing this up to say they did anything wrong, they didn’t. Instead I bring up this example in order to admit that at one time in my life I would have felt shame over the fact that I remembered the verse (the actual inspired text) and not the reference (the non-inspired text). In fact, at one time in my life I would have preferred to have the reference memorized rather than the verse, because if you had the reference memorized you could always look up the verse and make sure you had it right.

When they came around references were a huge help. Suddenly you knew exactly were a statement was because of the book name, chapter, and verse numbers. This was a huge step forward. Yet with a miniature super computer in your pocket that can search the whole Bible in less than a second those chapter and verse numbers really aren’t as important anymore. It is more important that we know what is actually in the verse. So why do I let myself feel shamed for not knowing something that I’m not really sure actually helps my faith?

Maybe this is just my own problem and no one else struggles with this, but at one time I seriously struggled, and every now and then I still do,  with feeling guilty about this. I’m a pastor, after all, I should have these references memorized. What type of example was I setting by not knowing the reference? Funny, I never asked myself what type of example I was setting by worrying to the point of shame about the non-inspired portion of the Bible more than the inspired portion. Jesus didn’t quote the references … well … because He didn’t have them. Our chapter and verse references didn’t develop until the mid-16th century (chapter numbers started appearing by themselves in the 13th century). Sometimes He referenced the author, others times He just said the passage with no reference to the author, and other times still He merely alluded to the passage. If Jesus did this then why do I feel bad when I can’t remember a reference that wasn’t added to the Bible till the mid-16th century and is by no means inspired by God. For the Lord did not say “AND THIS A VERSE NUMBER WILL BE PLACED HERE!”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes a wonderful statement in one of his letters from prison. He writes:

We ought to find and love God in what he actually gives us; if it pleases him to allow us to enjoy some overwhelming earthly happiness, we mustn’t try to be more pious than God himself and allow our happiness to be corrupted by presumption and arrogance, and by unbridled religious fantasy which is never satisfied with what God gives. (Emphasis added by me – Robert)

“More pious than God”. Yep I can relate to that temptation.

It is very important that we hide God’s word in our hearts (Psalm 119:11😁) because it helps us to follow Him, but we (or maybe just me) have to remember what is inspired and what isn’t. For we have an enemy, the Accuser, who will try to use anything to shame us as we follow Christ.

Me: I quoted the verse.

The Accuser: But you didn’t quote the reference.

Jesus: Ahem, I didn’t say the reference anyway and Robert has a cellphone and can look up the non-inspired reference in about 2 seconds, so shut your mouth.

Jesse Tree Week #1

During Advent at Tapestry we participate in Advent Conspiracy with lots of other churches around the nation.  I’ve written about this before on my blog (here’s one such entry). The basic goal of Advent Conspiracy is to encourage Christians to celebrate the remembrance of the birth of the Messiah in a manner that will actually please Jesus. So we focus on four things:

  • Worshiping Fully
  • Spending Less
  • Giving More
  • Loving All

As a part of this year’s Advent Conspiracy we are going to focus the messages around a Jesse Tree celebration with the kids, and anyone else who wants to, making the ornaments for each week. Here’s this week’s ornament suggestion and instructions.

SIDE NOTE – If you aren’t doing so already I would highly encourage you to begin some Advent traditions with your kids. Last year I wrote about some that have been helpful for Pam and me. Here’s the post.

2018 Adventure in Bad Deer Hunting

I have posted in the past about how bad of a deer hunter I am (here and here for example) and I have posted about my desire in deer hunting, to harvest the weak and stupid.  Weak, young, and stupid deer fear me, the strong and healthy just laugh at me and I’m just fine with that. After all, I know I’m a lousy deer hunter.

This week was gun deer season and as typical I was very excited about it because I like to read in the woods as I try to shrink the Wisconsin “rats with antlers” (i.e. deer) herd. In the previous weeks I had spent a fair amount of time in Eric & Natalie G’s woods bow hunting. I saw deer while bow hunting but none were within my 30 yard comfortable range for bow hunting. So I was ready to hunt and read on their property during gun season. Opening day came last Saturday and early in the morning I was ready in the tree stand with coffee, snacks, and reading material.

The sun rose and instead of reading I looked up to see two deer walking toward me, I watched them slowly walk closer and closer for about 40 minutes. I then determined that I wanted to take the larger of the two and watched until he was 70 yards away and in the clear. Then I took my shot. The deer jumped straight up, like they often do when the are hit, and darted 5 feet ahead into some brush. I assumed the other deer, which had been ahead of the one I was shooting, had run off into the woods. I sat and waited to make sure the the deer I hit was dead or if I had not hit it as well as I thought and it would ultimately poke its head up or dart off somewhere else. After a minute of watching for him I saw a white tail jump up and run into the clear as it was running away from me. I took another shot and saw it fall down. This time I could see that the deer was dead. So I climbed down and started to walk over to it.

In this photo from earlier in the year you can see the clearing where I shot both the deer (marked by the star) and the brush that is around it.

When I walked past the brush I noticed a deer and instantly realized what had happened. Actually I instantly thought to myself “Crud, this is going to be twice as much work.”  I had placed a good kill shot on the first deer, which ran to the brush and fell down dead. The other deer, which I had ignored, had run for cover in the small brush instead of going to the woods like I assumed it had. When it jumped into the clear, from the same brush as my first deer, and started to run away I had assumed it was my first deer and hit it too with a clean clean shot. I had the tags for both deer so it was legal that I had killed two, and didn’t therefore didn’t really matter other than double the work for me for that day and no no longer having a desire to go back out into the woods for the rest of the week.

So my reading took place at home instead. This week I only finished 3 books which is especially light for gun deer/reading season since two of those books were start before gun deer/reading season. Here’s what I read:

Anyhow I have maintained my average of  killing a deer every other year of deer hunting, though I guess I need to phrase it to killing at least one deer every other year.

SIDE NOTE – There was a bald eagle flying low over me as I was field dressing both deer. She was just waiting to get at those gut piles. Thanks to being convicted a few years ago to use lead-free ammo for deer hunting, because of the rampant lead poisoning in eagles from lead based ammo fragments in guts piles, that eagle got a good meal with no harm. If you aren’t using lead-free ammo for deer hunting please consider swapping to it. Lead-free ammo doesn’t cost much more and it won’t poison our national bird.

Pawns are the Soul of Chess

Listening to a podcast today I heard the following phrase “The pawns are the soul of chess.” I had never heard the phrase and I found it fascinating. The phrase comes from François-André Danican Philidor, a famous French chess player. Francois was one of the first to realize that pawns instead of being weak, almost throwaway, pieces were more important than the back row seemingly high-value pieces. I am no expert on chess but I love Francois’s thought concerning pawns. Many may love and concentrate on their queen, or have intricate plans for the use of their bishops and rooks, or love the power of their knights, but Francois insisted that “the winning or losing of the game depends entirely on (your pawns’) good or bad arrangement.” Apparently in chess, as in life, the little things are the most important.

2.3 Million Choices

This is why our small choices matter so much. winning or losing in life depends so much upon the good or bad arrangement of our many small choices. Those small choices when arranged properly add up to wonderful things. The Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed by methods that we still don’t completely understand, but the most likely scenario is that 30,000 workers through incredibly strenuous and monotonous labor moved and placed 2.3 million two to thirty ton blocks of stone. Nothing special other than the incredibly result of a lot of people pulling and working together.

Many years ago anytime our boys would leave the house Pam started telling them to “make wise choices”. Because, even though we can’t control everything about our lives, if we consistently “make wise choices” things go better in life and if we consistently make unwise choices then the opposite is true. Pawns may be the soul of chess but our small choices determine the soul of our lives.

This is true in faith:

  • small choices to forgive small things tend to lead to being able to forgive the really big things
  • small choices to serve in small ways tend to lead to being able to serve in big ways
  • small choices to pray in small ways prepares one to pray in big ways
  • etc, etc, etc

It is true in our families:

  • making consistent, small choices for our marriages tend to lead to healthier marriages.
  • parenting is all about small choices – uncles, aunts, and grandparents can do the big fun things, but the small choices that parents make define who the child will become (personal side note here, I personally think one of the best small choices you can make for your kids is a consistent bed time.)
  • Our families’ finances are all about small choices.

This is basically true of almost every aspect of our lives. The issue is that making consistently good small choices it much more difficult than making a good big choice once in a blue moon. The big choices come around much less frequently. The small choices come by every day, if not every hour. That is why they are so important. That why true servants serve in lots of little ways. True loving people love in lots of little ways. True leaders lead in lots of little ways. Etc. Etc.

Pawns are the soul of chess and our small choices determine the soul of our lives. So make wise small choices.

Now I Fee? The use of “f” as a Long “s”

Because of the Thanksgiving Holiday and all the wonderful things that are a part of it (mhmmmm leftover smoked turkey sandwiches) I’m running a little behind my normal sermon preparation. So at the moment I am sitting at the Mission Coffee House, after not being able to access the internet at Emy J’s and finding Zest Coffee & Bakery closed for the day, listening to a young man and a young woman talk about his possible engagement to another young woman, while I work on the message for tomorrow (yep I am late this week). If you are curious it is my ease-dropping self’s belief that she is really into this guy because she is smiling a great deal, playing with her hair, leaning in a great deal, and trying to convince this guy that an engagement wouldn’t be the best thing at the moment. I’ll put my headphones back on so that I’m less tempted to be creepy.

“Now I FEE”????? That changes the meaning of the song a little. 🙂

Anyhow one of the things that I love about preparing messages is that I inadvertently learn random things that aren’t a part of the message. Today’s random lesson is that at one time the letter “f” was often substituted in print for the letter “s” to signify that this should be a long “s” sound. Many of you, if not most, probably knew this already because the few who read my blog are amazingly smart people (which confuses me as to why you would read my blog). I learned this factoid when I was looking for a photo of a hymnal version of “Amazing Grace” specifically to discuss the line “was blind, but now I see”. I found the photo attached to this post and started to use it as an image slide for the message tomorrow until I zoomed into the specific line and noticed the “fee”.  Of course, I had to chase this rabbit and see why it was printed as “fee”. Here’s a Wikipedia article discussing the Long S.

It is a good reminder that language changes because it is organic in nature. This is incredibly important to remember when we are talking about scripture because the temptation is to take our modern meaning of a word or concept and place that on the lips of biblical authors. We always have to go back as far as possible to understanding what they were saying/writing in their time and discovering how that relates to our times and life. In many ways we are exactly the same as Ancient Near Easterners and in other ways we are completely other than them. My general rule of thumb is that if it costs me nothing then I am interpreting the verse wrong. 🙂

Now to get back to my image slides for tomorrow’s message.

SIDE NOTE – The guy just said “I’m basically dating my mother” loud enough for me to hear through my headphones. This just got too interesting to ignore, so I am going to pack up and go home to I get away from the conversation. 🙂

The Gratitude of the Dependent

Miroslav Volf wrote a wonderful little book that I read a few years ago with a focus on giving as a very human response to the fact that we receive from God. The book is titled “Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace“.  The basic point of the book is that we are not indeependent creatures but dependent upon God’s giving and therefore as non-independent creatures the appropriate response on our behalf is to follow in the nature of our Creator and also act in giving manners.  We give in gratitude for all that we have been gifted.

So much of Christian faith revolves around the fact that we are the receivers of God’s gracious gifts and our response to those gifts.  We are dependent. Christian faith begins with this fact, because it begins with the acknowledgement that we need the Lord’s forgiveness (the gift of not receiving just punishment for our sins against God, our fellow humans, and creation).  If you claim to be a Christian but aren’t a dependent recipient of God’s grace then you are misinformed concerning what Christianity really is. We are dependent upon  His grace and mercy. We are not independent creatures.

That’s what I love about Thanksgiving. Yes being with family and friends is great, the food is wonderful (leftover smoked turkey sandwiches truly make me happy for the week after Thanksgiving), and a nap during a Thanksgiving football game is a beautiful thing, but what I love most about Thanksgiving is the recognition that we are not independent creatures. We live and function because of the that which we freely receive from God. When I realize that I exist within God’s gracious gifts I then have a responsibility to use those gifts to help others. “Freely (I) have received; freely (I should) give.” If I wasn’t dependent upon Jesus then I could make the argument that others should take care of themselves because I took care of myself. Yet as a dependent creature I can’t make that argument.

The 4th of July may be what we call Independence Day but Thanksgiving is our collective US of A recognition that we are dependent. Thanksgiving is our Dependence Day.

Thanks Dependence Day to all of y’all.

 

I’m a Musical Guy

I didn’t know that I love plays in general and musicals in particular until Pam and I started dating.  My family did many great things, I just don’t remember going to many plays or musicals. Maybe we did and I simply don’t remember it. I do remember dove hunting, fishing,  going to Rocket Speedway to watch races (I still have floating around in my head a great/disturbing image of the thrown up remnants of a hotdog eating context in a Rocket Speedway tub urinal), every now and then watching tractor pulls, and going to lots of my football and baseballs games, but not plays or musicals. So when I learned that Pam loved theater, I, therefore, went with her to various plays. I was going because she wanted to do but what I discovered by going with her was that I  really like plays also. I still love hunting, fishing, and old cars – tractor pulls aren’t really my thing anymore, but I also now love plays and musicals.

The result is that we regularly go to plays and musicals as a family. Since my mother has moved up here to Wisconsin we’ve gone to “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”  by UWSP (great performance but I wouldn’t recommend the play – amazingly depressing) in October, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”  by the Wausau campus of UWSP (good performance and very fun musical) in December, and next month we’ll see an Broadway touring company performance of “Fiddler on the Roof” (where upon I will walk around singing and shimmying “tradition” and “if I were a rich man” – yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum).

Last, night we went with my mother to the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee put on by the Wausau campus of UWSP and I was pulled into the play as a spectator.  I was given the word “cenacle” which means “1. a group of people, such as a discussion group or literary clique. 2. the room in which the Last Supper was held.” I would have missed the word anyway, I have always been a terrible speller, but the second Jesus was mentioned all I could think of was “synagogue” and that tainted any chance I had of spelling “cenacle” correctly. We love going to UWSP’s plays, their theater department is truly wonderful. Before last night we had never been any of the performances of the much smaller Wausau campus . They did a very nice job last night.

I think the reason I like theater so much is because ultimately the crowd is always a part of the play. Some plays such as “Spelling Bee” purposefully involve the crowd while others like “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” don’t. Still the audience affects the performance. A good audience energizes the play. There is a difference between the performance of actors with a good crowd and a bad crowd. The performance of the actors in a movie are the same whether there is an audience in the room or not. My experience in a cinema is with a crowd that’s into the film is often better, but realistically the audience doesn’t connect with the performers at all because that isn’t possible with film. It is with theater. This is probably why I love singing with other people in church but don’t really care about listening to “worship” music on my own – or when I do I enjoy doing so it is because it reminds me of singing with others. May also be why I’m not a big fan of video church. The connection matters.

Anyhow I would encourage everyone to go to a play. It is a wonderful way to spend the evening.