Week 10 (Year 1, NL)

Is Matthew so embarrassed by Bethlehem’s lowly status in Micah that he feels the need to punch it up a little?

At Matthew’s house, we learn about more than just Jesus’ message.

Sitting and talking with a boy from Ethiopia, I received a radical dinner invitation.

It is a challenging task to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

What would possess me to copy a chapter of the Bible by hand?

I'm giving thanks for the very personal ways I am blessed by people acting outside their job descriptions.

Matthew’s Beatitudes are meant to give comfort, not to challenge.

According to the scholarship of the mid-20th century, Micah 6:1-8 is—like similar passages in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos—a “covenant lawsuit.” The name of the literary genre is taken from the Hebrew word rib (pronounced, “reev”), frequently translated “debate” or “controversy” or, in most of these passages, “complaint” or “case.” Such language conjures up the image of God as plaintiff and Israel as defendant, gathered before some court that would (imagine this) have authority over both. Personally, I think such a literal reading of the “lawsuit” form stretches the theology farther than it will go, but my point for the moment is that a rib is the sound of God complaining.

When I met Jonah I noticed two things: he was wracked with overwhelming guilt and very much wanted to die, and he knew the Bible.

What makes kindness a distinctive mark of the new creation?

Just as loving mercy is a means to doing justice, so is walking humbly with God. Yet in the sexuality debates raging in the mainline church, humility is seldom easy to find. Both sides cling to the fiction that they harbor gospel truth.

Herod tells the Eastern intellectuals the truth, and the rest is history.