Monthly Archives: September 2019

One of the more controversial stories in the Bible is the story of Lot and his daughters in the cave after the destruction of Sodom.  The distress is not over whether the story is true or not, but whether it should be included in scriptures.  What point did it have?  My students were appalled at the story.

it is interesting that the daughters lost their husbands and Lot lost his wife in the memorable salt pillar episode.  In the smoking demise of Sodom, the group thought that the world had ended and they must begin again, helped along by a bottle of wine, thoughtfully brought along by someone in the party.  They must begin again to populate the world in a variant of the Adam and Eve story.

But the solution came with a certain humorous twist.  A student, Ruth, raised her hand with eyes like saucers.  Ruth, Ruth, Ruth, she kept repeating.  One of the children produced by that incestuous drunken orgy was Moab.  Moab began a line that rose to redemption in the person of Ruth.  Ruth, a link in the line of the Messiah, came from the moral and atmosphere darkness.  Diamonds in the mud.

The story of Lot in the cave is important to the story of Ruth and perhaps should be studied in preparation for the gentle maiden.

I collect bits of prayer that I can use when people asked me to pray. So often we pray using such familiar words that people stop listening. Sometimes if you use a sentence from a great prayer from the past, it kind of wakes folks up. These bits and pieces are from the year 1000.

1. Jesus, we love you. You shine in our darkness.
2. Jesus, we are so glad you came to save us. The whole world is being washed with your light.
3. The light of your coming has driven the darkness from our lives.
4. In our weakness, we embrace you who became one of us because you loved us.
5. Father, we love you because you despise no one, reject no one, drive out no lonely soul, welcome everyone into your arms, and opened the doors of heaven for all of us.
6. Your love flows into our lives with quiet peacefulness.
7. You enter us to calm our troubled heart.
8. Forgive us sometimes for thinking we are the master of our lives because when we leave you even for a moment our life becomes a burden.
9. We do not want to live for ourselves but to rise into the beauty of your heavens to be wrapped in warmly in the blanket of your love.
10. Lord, destroy our darkness with your daylight.

Aren’t they beautiful! They were prayed by people 1000 years ago. I read them through each morning and when someone asked me to pray I try to use at least one of them in my prayers. When I can’t sleep at night I’ve become so used to them that they run through my head.

Here are two different translations of my favorite verse, well, maybe one of my favorite verses. It is from Psalm 27. They too have given me much comfort. They are from Psalm 27:8.

My heart says of you, “Seek his face!” Your face, LORD, I will seek.

My heart has heard you say, “Come and talk with me.” And my heart responds, “LORD, I am coming.”

Faith is an odd concept.  I remember the first time it was brought to my attention in a way and place that I couldn’t ignore.  The pastor in catechism stood before my desk and demanded that understand it.

I muttered and meandered with a skill that has always gotten me through such situations until he decided to help me out.

“If you were on your back porch on the railing and your father came out and asked you to jump and he would catch me, faith would be closing your eyes and leaping into his arms. Faith,’ he said, “was what drove that leap!”

As  I walked home afterward, the conversation bothered me.  I didn’t like thinking about closing my eyes and jumping.  I wanted to jump with my eyes open.  Do we really have to close our eyes?

The one who would catch me was my father, not a stranger.  He had caught me before.  Faith seemed to me to be an action based on experience.  It is not simply a belief in a theological or historical belief, it is an action.  It is a habit of thinking and acting based on knowledge gained by experience.  It is not blind.