Matthew 2.0

From Debra Rienstra

Thanks to my colleagues, this blog has been hitting its stride in the last two weeks (IMHO), day after day taking on challenging, serious topics with admirable insight and forcefulness.

So it’s time for something silly. 

I’ve been out in my yard lately, enjoying this flawless May weather and waging the annual battle for beauty and order against chaos. And I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ agricultural parables, and how he might tell them a little differently today, in American suburbia, than he did back in the ancient Near East. Maybe something like this… 

Matt. 7:24-27

Therefore everyone who hears these words and puts them into practice is like the wise woman who followed the instructions on the internet when she built her retaining wall. She dug a deep trench and used gravel sand for the base. She patiently leveled the bottom row and used blocks with integrated setback. She created a vertical layer of landscape fabric and gravel for drainage as she backfilled, and even sealed the caps with construction adhesive. When the rain came down and the water table rose, that wall had beautiful drainage and it did not budge even an inch. 

But everyone who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like the neighbor who just slapped down a stack of blocks on Saturday morning and spent the rest of the day watching the game and slurping brewskies. When the rain came, the water soaked in behind the wall and the whole thing bulged and the blocks tumbled every which way. It looked like a dumped-out bucket of Legos, and all the neighbors laughed.

• Read more.

Epithet

From James C. Schaap

Just a week or so ago, Frederick Manfred would have celebrated his 100th birthday, had he lived. He didn't.  He died in 1994, from the complications of a brain tumor.

Manfred was a Siouxland original, a CRC boy, Calvin grad, a giant of a man—6’9” when he descended on the Calvin campus and was recruited post-haste for the Calvin basketball team.  He didn’t do well in freshman English that year, but no man I know was so purposefully devoted to calling at Feike Feikema, the name with which he was born.  By life’s end, he’d written a couple of dozen novels, some of them almost biography, others what we might call Western history.  He was as generous a man as I’ve ever known, someone others have frequently called “a force,” like the wind on the plains he loved.  Once he told me one day, when he was a boy, he sat down on the back step of his house near Doon, looked out at the open fields all around, and just wondered what the story was of the land where he was born.

I miss him. He certainly was a force in my life, a man so immensely passionate about what he did and what he loved doing that he couldn't help becoming an inspiration to others.  I used to bring gangs of students up to his place, and every year they’d pile back in a van in a kind of stunned silence, even awe. Like no one else, he urged me to take an interest in writing--and he did so long before he ever knew me, or I him.

• Read more.

Body Ascension

From Thomas C. Goodhart

Then he said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you--that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high." Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.

Luke 24:44-53

Today is Ascension Day. As such I thought I might ponder something ascension-ey. Reformed Church folk, in my limited experience, don’t do a whole lot with Ascension Day. We certainly believe and think stuff ascension related; it’s part of our theology. It’s in our creeds and may be incorporated into our worship language. But otherwise, we don’t do much with it.

That is why in the local church setting I have appreciated working with neighboring congregations. For the last couple of years the good people of Trinity Lutheran Church in Middle Village, Queens have welcomed the good people of Trinity Reformed to worship with them. And this year, I had the opportunity to not only preach but also preside at the Lord’s Supper. 

• Read more.

Recovering Civility.

From Jes Kast-Keat

Confession

I feel a bit awkward in writing this post. It is probably because I feel insufficient to be the one writing on this topic. I hold views about which I could easily get polemical...but I don't, or at least I try not to. I am committed to speaking my truth as through my experience in this world and in conversation with the Word of God (this is what I call self-responsibility).  I am committed to voice. Voice meaning the proclamation and bearing witness of God experienced through my sense of agency. I give myself permission to take up space in this world. My feminist lens reminds me that many women and people of color often do not feel empowered to take up space because the dominate voice controls the landscape. In some sense I am aware that my very,  - nephesh (body, soul, mind), can initiate conflict by my mere presence.

Speaking Your Truth 

I yearn for people to offer their truth and experiences in the public discourse just as much as I expect it from me. When people offer themselves there is bound to be tension, disagreement, and a difference of opinion. It can be uncomfortable and sometimes we don’t know what to do when we feel uncomfortable. Thus when someone offers their perspective that differs from ours we internalize this as someone attacking us thus we sometimes fight back with words that are quite mean and downright degrading of the image of God in the community around us.

• Read more.

Coercion?

From Scott Hoezee

Perhaps not all readers of "The Twelve" will be aware of it but in some circles within the Christian Reformed Church these past ten days there's been some serious dust-ups surrounding "The Form of Subscription." The Form is the document CRCNA pastors, elders, deacons, and also Calvin College and Seminary professors sign to indicate their ascent to the version of the Reformed faith that gets taught in the Confessions: The Heidelberg Catechism, The Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort.   The most immediate conversations were sparked by an editorial in the Banner by editor Bob DeMoor to which former "The Twelve" blogger Jamie Smith fired off a very impassioned response.   Since then the Facebook page for Christian Reformed pastors has been lit up with multiple posts--usually very long posts (including my own, I confess!)--as pastors from all over North America have shared thoughts. Curiously, although this by no means counts as scientific evidence, my own observation on this conversation has confirmed Smith's contention that it's mostly Baby Boomers with a 1960's hangover who chafe under the allegedly constricting nature of signing on to 400-year old Confessions whereas the younger set of Gen-X and Millennials are far more willing (even happy) to embrace a confessional position. Indeed, just about every former student who graduated from my seminary since 2005 and with whom I am friends on Facebook has embraced Smith's position over against DeMoor's editorial.

Interesting. But as I have been caught up in these conversations, I've been struck by the number of people who tend to refer to signing the Form and having these guiding Confessions as being mostly all about a distasteful matter of coercive force.  

• Read more.