Disciple Bible study, 9-4-19, Samuel & 1st Kings

As always, my extremely innocuous question to begin as we look at two kings and one and two Samuel.

Um did anything stand out in the reading?

Did you get any new insight?

Did anything bother you, or did you come with sort of questions from the reading?

I think the majority of the kings seem to be rather weak in the terms of the truth of the covenant.

Very fair.

In fact, there seemed to be only like two or three decent ones, if you don't mind me saying.

And even they didn't seem really paragons of virtue.

And it just kept going and going and going, and it kept repeating.

Yes.

And it still is somewhat still.

Maybe we can review that.

So the two kings that stand out as being decent, Hezekiah, although when God says, You're, you know, things are gonna go bad, and uh I'll destroy this for your grandchildren, Hezekiah says, At least I don't have to see it.

That's interesting, right?

And then Josiah, who does this really big thing and makes one mistake and is immediately killed.

Solomon doesn't come out great, really.

You know, we we tend to pass on in Sunday school.

He's this great king.

He's really quite awful.

I don't know if you noticed.

And and we got three at the very beginning what kings will do.

They will take your children from you and make them their servants and and their and your soldiers, they will tax you to death, and the people say, Great, let's have that.

Yeah.

Because all of a sudden they want kings, and then they're wiser down the tomb.

Yeah.

Yes, it seems it sure does.

It sure does.

It's really kind of hard-pressed, as you say, to find any king that is both strong, effective, and righteous at the same time.

I don't know if that much has changed.

Well, I think it's very fair.

And and maybe if you didn't mind me putting my you know, exposing my thoughts here a little bit.

I think we mentioned this a couple of weeks ago.

The president gets a lot of attention nowadays.

Fair, although, you know, uh we kind of like to uh cover up things in our past that we didn't like.

Like that Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, and essentially, I mean, I don't know if you want to use the word rape, but um essentially raped his slaves.

Um John F.

Kennedy was really quite a philanderer.

We like to cover that up and almost push the world the nuclear winter with the bay of pigs, right?

We just conveniently say that was a lapse in judgment.

You you you you you know, so um hard to say hard to say the person we now like to talk about is necessarily worse than who we've had in the past, even if more public uh with speech.

And this is one of these things I think that we forget is our presidents don't tend to be paragons of virtue either.

So is it just because absolute power corrupts absolutely?

I think we're still called to honor those whom God has chosen without judging that they are not worthy of his choice.

It's this is really tough.

And what it means to be chosen by God is, I think, always up for redefinition, right?

Does God choose?

We got to read this last week.

I didn't pick you because you were good.

I didn't pick you because your parents were good.

I picked you because everyone else was worse.

I mean that was the message we got.

And worse, really, in the sense that maybe no one else listened.

Maybe maybe we're the chosen people are the ones who listen.

Which could be anybody.

It just always makes me think of Teddy when he says, couldn't you have chosen somebody else when you see the things that happen to God's friends?

That's the first prophet Moses says, I wish you'd ask somebody different.

I don't want to do this.

It's really interesting that over and over, in fact, almost every since we're doing prophets, almost every prophet says, no, thank you.

No thanks, I don't want to do that.

And they can't seem to get away from it for for one reason or another.

It's a great theme though that you've you've landed upon.

Anything else stand out or any questions do you want to chase down?

Again, it was a marathon read this week.

I don't I don't understand how I don't understand why they chose to turn into the old thing of one decay and then all of a sudden all these other things that I don't try to understand why.

And the other thing is I didn't realize that there were so many prophets that you talked about 400 prophets on.

Wow, that's a lot.

Good.

So let's see if we can talk about those in turn.

The first one is why would they turn to other gods?

And to be honest with you, we often think that these were monotheistic people from the get-go, and um, that is not a good assumption.

I I I want you to know that most scholars and even a careful read of the text is uh people really weren't monotheist until after 540.

Uh this idea that God is the only God, period, we don't really see until uh Isaiah beginning in chapter 40, which most scholars date to after that.

So what do we have before that?

Um scholars like to use this word genotheism instead of monotheism, which is that there are many gods, but we're only going to worship one.

Can I ask you a question?

Please there.

When is when was uh Zoroastrianism?

Oh, it's much older than Judaism.

Much older than this.

Was that not a uh monotheistic religion, am I mistaken?

It's more monotheistic.

Now, what people would tell you is that Judaism is the first extreme monotheism.

The thing about Zoroastrianism that's a little bit hard.

If you know Zoroastrianism, it actually was sort of one of the dominant religions.

Alexander the Great essentially wiped it out, but the Persian Empire was Zoroastrian.

Zoroaster or Zarathustra seems to have been a Hindu, actually, who who sort of um had this epiphany that instead of there being 330 million expressions of one God, he kind of went to the oneness.

Um it depends how how you read Zoroaster though.

A lot of folks seem to read him as a dualist, it's good versus evil, although essentially uh it that's only the appearance of things.

Evil's going to lose and good's going to win.

But it's, you know, it always starts to be interesting.

Now, I would tell you, like in Christianity, we're monotheistic, except we believe in a trinity, so there's three, and then the way most Christians behave, quite honestly, is that the devil is also some kind of deity.

That's how most people function.

They don't say that, but the devil has a whole lot of power in most Christian expressions.

Now that's ludicrous.

I want you to know.

It's ludicrous philosophically and biblically, but most Christians behave as though the devil has a whole lot of power and is fighting against God for your soul.

Now, really, if we're monotheistic, that's all poppycock.

Because the devil is a created being that has no power whatso I mean, has no power compared to God, right?

I mean, but we didn't, most Christian folk don't behave that way.

So that's what becomes this really interesting thing.

Like if I started asking Catholic people, what do Catholics believe about X, Y, and Z, I guarantee you they'll tell me very different things from what official church teaching is.

So the question is, what's official and what's practiced, and which one's more important anyway?

And I think when we start talking about why are these other gods, what we don't know is the people who wrote these scriptures were the literate ones, the 5% or smaller.

We don't know what the other 95% people believed or did.

I don't know if that makes sense.

They also they're old gods, and that was comfort.

It's tradition.

And part of that, for what it's worth, is even in this name for God right here that's used in the north, El is one of the gods of the Babylonian, I mean of the Canaanite pantheon, and in Babylon as well.

So did they decide that the God of Israel and El were like the same thing and roll it into the word?

I mean, this is the kind of history of religion stuff we don't exactly know.

But part of what we see is that common people really were attracted to particular practices that the authors are saying are no good, but they they keep returning to them.

So a couple of these things without being super boring, hopefully.

Um the Canaan people in general seem to be, they seem to think that God lived in the sky.

And the way you worship sky gods is by going to high places on mountains, right?

And the gods of the sky, there's a couple of gods that live in the sky.

Baal is the lord of the rain.

And Baal is also the lord of fertility, and Baal is expressed in a bull.

Like that's Baal's form.

You can read a whole bunch of this literature about how Baal the god behaves, but essentially you go to high places.

Now, what's interesting is that Elijah seems to think God lives in the sky because Elijah goes up onto Mount Carmel, right?

And that's where you have the competition between gods of the sky.

Is it Baal or is it God who controls the rain?

God has a bow.

I don't know if you've noticed this.

God has a rain bow, and we think of that as a sweet thing.

It's a bow.

And lightning is the arrow, and God puts it down for Noah.

Right?

I'll put my bow down when it starts to really rain.

I won't wipe it out with rain.

But we think of it as like peace and love.

It's a weapon, it's God's power, sir, that God lays down.

And that's wrapped up in sort of this sort of history.

Now, the Canaanite gods, they don't all have, they don't have wives.

That's the wrong thing.

They have probably what's best understood as consorts.

And the the chief consort, Baal, or El, it depends which one you you make primary, is the goddess, Asherah, or Astart.

And what we found all over the place are these little clay figurines of big breasted feminine figures, headless or no facial features, but these are like fertility statues, and they're all over the place.

And the idea is you have this symbol of feminine fertility, you plant it on your crops, you put it under your bed at home, like these things are supposed to help make you fertile.

And part of the thing that you see over and over again that we don't always get is prostitution and adultery.

Um I practice was you would go to the temple, and there would be offerings of meat that you would offer to the gods so that you could feed them.

You didn't see them eat it, but they ate the essence of the food.

And in exchange, you could eat, you could eat the meat.

They ate the life force, you fed the gods, you pleased them, they would give you rain or fertility, and you got to eat the physicality of it.

Right?

So all meat is sacrificed.

We don't do that now, but then everything was whether you were Jewish or whether you were Canaanite.

Then they have these particular women, and you can read about this in James Mitchell's book, The Source.

It's really, really quite good.

Women that they've essentially called an enslaved from foreign cultures, or women who have no dowry to be married, so they're kind of donated to these Canaanite temples and they're made into prostitute, is what we would say, but really they're priestesses.

And the way the priestess functioned is privileged men would go and have sex in the temple with these priestesses to encourage the gods to have sex in heaven.

Now that isn't really prostitution, you have to understand because they didn't keep the wages.

They live at the temple.

You have sex at the temple as an act of worship.

That's their sex slaves.

They're sex slaves in the temple, but that and this is all what we would call it.

And now hopefully you start to understand why it is that temple prostitution was hard to stamp out.

Right?

You weren't just paying a prostitute, it was you were worshiping God when you did this.

Like you were helping the world when you went to the temple and had sex with a sacred prostitute.

And we asked, why was that a draw?

You know, why would they turn from the one God to that?

I mean, that's pretty powerful.

Pretty powerful motivation.

Yeah, and the other thing is you start to think, and there's this, this it sounds deprecatory, it's called sympathetic magic, right?

The idea is fertility on earth encourages fertility in the heavens, right?

I mean, so so that's part of the deal.

We don't always realize this, but the Hebrew people weren't the only people who circumcised.

Egyptians did it, Canaanites did it, Hebrews cut off more skin than the other cultures.

Um but the sympathetic magic is when you prune a bush, it is more fertile.

So, in Canaanite culture, circumcision had the understanding that it's a fertility gesture.

Now, really, really.

You don't hear that nuance when you read the Bible.

You hear this as a sign of the covenant.

But when you think, why would people do that?

Because we figured out when you trim a bush, it the branches grow back stronger.

And if you don't trim the bush, it actually ends up being much weaker.

And fertility was so key to survival?

It was everything.

And curiously enough, rain, I didn't want to roast him out, but rain was considered to be Baal's semen spilled on the ground.

I mean, they they understood it spiritually, that Baal is having sex with the earth, if that makes sense.

Which would explain to you why you bury the goddess statue, but also what the Asherah pole is.

The Asherah pole is just a big pole in the ground.

It's Freud would call it a phallic symbol to show that Baal is impregnating the ground so that your crops can grow.

I mean, I I know what I it sounds like this is all primitive and these are silly people.

Not at all, right?

This is all actually not scientifically incorrect with the idea, right, that rain, particularly in a culture that's arid, is essential for fertility.

I mean, you live and die by whether or not it rains, and so they're doing everything they can to try to make that happen.

And it's really pretty high-level thinking if you think about cognitive.

It's it's yeah, we can always look at ancient practices and say they didn't get it, but but you know, I mean, again, it's it's interesting to think about how it is that you induce nature to behave a certain way that you need.

And that's that's part of what's going on here.

What was the role for male prostitutes?

Wow, I mean, that's like a new thing and doesn't seem to be like widely carried on.

Um and I haven't found a great answer for that.

But male prostitutes, it seems like that's male-on-male behavior happening.

Women didn't go to the temple as free people to have sex with male prostitutes.

I don't think so.

I think that's men on men.

And the only thing I can really understand about, I mean, this is really hard.

I hadn't really quite found the great article that explains that practice.

Um, because in general, male on male behavior is uh a sign of dominance.

And so the only thought is that you go to one temple and do this to dominate the lesser gods, to show that in your body.

I mean, I that's that's my hypothesis because I don't have a good scholarly article about that.

Homosexuality, as we think about it, hardwired or deformed or whatever.

It just wasn't around.

You simply weren't allowed to do that.

Greek people did it with their slaves, but everybody was assumed to be straight, if that makes sense.

So again, it's it was a sign of either dominance or body worship, but but not like we would understand it orientation to today.

Does that does that make sense?

Uh there's no really um behavior doesn't really exist among the Canaanite gods that I know of.

No homosexual Canaanite gods.

But again, sexuality is a sign of dominance.

Uh so when you read uh Sodom and Gomorrah's story, it's not that these are just gay folks.

What they're trying to do is show these people that they're in the bottom of the pecking order by gang, right?

I mean, that's it's like this is like prison sex.

So I think to think about that in the temple is again a showing other gods subject, it makes sense.

You know, we read particular songs that say, ascribe to the Lord all you gods with a small g, which again is like this mentality that there are other gods, they're just beneath God.

Like there's a hierarchy in heaven with this God on top and some other ones underneath.

Does that sort of make sense?

In fact, when we're talking about there being edits in the text, this is a um a phrase that shows up sometimes as alternates, the sons of God.

And often it gets translated as angels.

But that isn't right.

The translation is really clear.

These are sons of God.

Angels is a totally different word.

So what's happened is that some people became uncomfortable with this idea that there's other like spiritual realities, and they were comfortable with that.

So they turned sons of God in like demigods, right?

They turned that into messengers.

I'm not saying they were wrong.

I'm not saying they were wrong.

But originally there's like twelve sons of God in Jewish sort of folklore.

The Satan is one of them.

So that's part of what's going on.

And then, you know, uh, I don't know if you noticed, but um, when Hezekiah reforms the temple, there's like a snake on a pole in the temple, and Hezekiah finally burns that up.

Well, Moses made that snake, right?

It's a weird story.

I don't know if you know it.

Um the people walk through the valley, and all these snakes start biting them, and uh Moses complains to God, and God says, Well, make a snake on a pole, and then the people look at the snake, they won't die from the poison.

The snakes will continue to bite them, but they but they won't die.

It's a super weird story because you can't make an image of anything.

I mean, I don't know what we do with the story.

Except 600 years later, that snake is still around, and people have named it, which means they're worshiping it.

I mean, it's it's an idol, essentially.

And it's in the temple as one of the sons of God.

Because it's just good to know one other bit about talking about angels.

There's two kinds of angels in the Hebrew Bible: there's cherubim and seraphim.

And the seraphim are flying snakes, like snakes on a pole.

Think about the medical symbol, the two snakes.

That's a sleepius, the Greek god.

The snake has the healing power because it sheds its skin so it never dies.

I mean, this is kind of like the mythology of the Canaanite culture.

And seraphim are like snakes that fly that are always on fire.

And here's a seraph on a pole in the temple called Nehushtan.

I hope this is an off the topic, but the snake first shows up in the story of Adam and Eve.

So I don't know how it goes from there up to being a seraphim.

Yeah, I mean again, there's always this weirdness about snakes.

I mean, I'm sure there are cultures where people are not weirded out by snakes.

But we've inherited this sort of weirdness because I guess they slither, and again, they shed their skin.

So you can read in the story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, that Gilgamesh gets like the magical fruit that will give him more mortality.

And of course, as all dumb people do, he doesn't eat it, he takes a nap.

And while he's sleeping, a snake eats it, which is why the snake lives forever, because it sheds its skin instead of dying.

I mean, people they knew snakes died, but the the shedding of the skin was this symbol of like regeneration and growth.

And that's really old.

That that idea is really old.

I mean, the epic of Gilgamesh is from like 2000 BCE.

It kind of reminds me of those videos you see of the copybura's being hypnotized by the uh boat constrictor.

They just sit there and watch it.

Yeah, there's something strange about about I mean, all animals have their own things, right?

All animals have their own things.

By the way, I'm not saying any of this stuff is real.

What I'm saying is it completely permeated the culture around them.

Like it, and and we don't actually know much about Egyptian religion, so you've got to think these people are exposed to Egyptian.

Egyptian religion is super weird.

And and, you know, I had a professor from Johns Hopkins that said all that stuff you learned about how this means this and this means that, nobody actually knows anything about you.

You know, Horus is Ra's son and he's an eagle, but he's also Ra's eye.

So i is he actually an independent being, or is he like just Ra's?

It's all strange stuff like that.

So if the people were formed in Egypt and they come out, like they they've gotta be touched by these Egyptian conceptions, and then they come into Canaan where there's other conceptions.

I mean, I think that's it.

It's fascinating.

You could spend a whole lot of time on on this stuff, which is and it is interesting.

It's interesting because it's like people at the time had this backstory that we've now completely lost.

Like flying snakes.

You don't ever see those pictures in the Sistine Chapel.

You see these like fat babies.

But there were no fat babies because the cherubs, and we'll read about it in Ezekiel, they had four faces and they were covered with eyeballs, and that's not pretty.

So we we don't depict that.

You know, we depict angels as beautiful human beings.

When when this is a funny thing, angel just means messenger, so angels might all just be human beings in the Bible that God puts a word in.

Cherubim means those scary monsters, and seraphim means snakes, and then there's messengers.

As you said, there's a bunch of prophets, right?

There's a bunch of prophets.

Oh, oh, sorry, and why turn to Baal?

Well, it could be that you prayed to God and it didn't rain.

And now you're thinking, do I double down and keep praying to God or do I hedge my bets?

So I think that's part of it, right?

These people have been doing this a long time, they're still here, so maybe I can do both.

The thing about polytheism is there's always room for another God.

Always.

There's no threat in polytheism.

In fact, like in the earliest church, a lot of people just added God to the Greek pantheon, because there's always room for one more, and that's part of what we get.

Paul saying, hey, uh, don't do temple prostitution with other gods.

And that's the metaphor is about going to the temple to worship these other people.

Uh uh, why so many prophets?

Well, I mentioned this to you last time, and I don't know if you want these words, but there's actually, and we noticed it this time, there's four different kinds of prophets.

The classical one is the word Navi, from which we get Navim.

But do you notice that Samuel is also called a seer.

A seer.

Like he can, he knows things.

So the Navim are the ones who speak a word from God to the people.

They're like God's satellite dish, right?

Seers, on the other ones, are the ones that like are kind of clairvoyant.

So you want to know where your donkeys are?

Ask the seer.

Because the seer can see beyond the human eye.

This is a different word.

In Hebrew, it doesn't matter necessarily, but that's called the Roy.

So Samuel is an Avi, but he's also a Roe.

And then there's another word that's sort of like, I mean, it gets, they all get translated the same thing, but really it's like an ecstatic thing.

You notice like Saul is in the company of the prophets, and he like takes his clothes off and rolls around on the ground.

That's a hotse.

Now, your Bible will call them all prophets, but they're different Hebrew words, and they appear to behave very differently.

So, look, there's one Elijah thinks he's the only prophet, the only Navi, but there's another 150 Roe who have never put their name to the Baals.

You see, that's how there can be so many.

Now, some of these people work for the king.

Yes.

Like they're paid to do this.

And sometimes people aren't paid, and they say all those people are wrong.

And then there's like this conflict.

We've actually found like a ton of these little tiny writings in cuneiform by these guys that tell you how to interpret a sheep's liver.

So, in order to predict the future, you'd cut a sheep open and look at the liver, right?

Those are one of these kinds of people in Hebrew.

Well, that means divination is what they practice.

There's one other kind of person, uh, and this is this one shows up too.

We said in the text, there's a man of God.

That's what he's called.

We don't get a name for him.

There's a man of God.

So there's Navi, there's prophets, there's seers, there's ecstatic prophets, and then there's men of God.

Sometimes your Bible will call them all prophets, but again, they're not all the same thing.

And they all do slightly different stuff.

We didn't read the story, but you know, Saul, the ecstatic guy, goes to a witch who brings Samuel up from the grave.

And the Bible doesn't call this a vision, like seems to think this happened.

That Samuel comes up out of the grave, and he's not happy about that, by the way.

He's very, very perturbed about this.

So again, this is a mentality that is foreign to us because while we understand some people read horoscopes in general, we think that's entertainment.

There are people who think that's very real, and we usually say, hey, you know, there's a lot of fruits in the basket, so that's that's fine.

But but these people thought that there's prophets, and then there's holy rollers, and then there's people who can practice divination, and then there's these other men of God.

I mean, they just they had room for all of that.

And part of that, I think, speaks.

They still do.

Well, and sometimes we do too.

It's a really interesting thing, right?

Because superstition still exists.

Now, we don't necessarily worry about black cats and ladders and things like that, but you know, in some ways, if upon a close examination of our habits, I think we would probably find a little bit of superstition.

And here's part of the interesting thing, right?

When you're polytheistic, there's always room for one more.

So I think this this speaks to people at this time had not made a clear monotheistic decision, and that's evidenced in even the kinds of prophets that they hold room for.

Now there was there was at least one instance of someone being raised from the tip.

It happens twice.

And they're not, and this is a really good thing for us to say, um, just to pull out on our fancy vocabulary, right?

We often don't realize these words are very different.

It's the great thing about English, we have 600,000 words, but sometimes we we dumb our own language down.

This happens a bunch of times in the Bible, somebody dies and they come back to life, but they will die again.

I mean, the widows, boys, they're gonna die again.

This is distinct because you die and you get your life back in such a way that you'll never die again.

And this has only happened to one person in our scriptures.

And curiously enough, when this happens, your wounds have to close, and in this one, you keep your wounds eternally.

But he was he had been he had been dead for two or three days though.

So the Jewish belief is that your that your spirit leaves and hangs around for three days before it goes down to the grave.

Okay.

Which is why Lazarus is such a big deal.

He's been dead three days before Jesus shows up.

So he's already totally in the grave, if that makes sense.

Also, notice the sympathetic magic.

I know that's a terrible phrase to use, but Elijah and Elisha stretch themselves out on the body.

They don't say like get up.

They like, and they breathe into it.

And they put their eyeballs on top of the eyeballs.

As if they have enough life force in them to kind of impart backing to the body.

It's very, in some ways you could say like it's weird, but in some ways, again, it kind of makes more sense.

Yeah, when he's breathing in, it's a sufficient.

Like breathing in.

It's like CPR.

But now these guys have been dead a long time, but you know, but but it's that it is part of that symbol, breathe my breath.

Yes.

Yeah.

Is that connected to Jewish people have to be uh buried within?

Within 24 hours.

And they can't go to the morgue ever in the hospital.

They're not uh filled up with it.

They verify today that you are dead.

And and and how old that 24-hour practice is, I can't tell you.

You know, it's sort of like you've heard you're Jewish through your mother, right?

That's only a thousand years old.

I used to know why that changed, but Judaism is clearly patriarchal.

Because we talk about the patriarchs, not the matriarchs.

If you look at the genealogy of Jesus, it isn't Mary's genealogy, you hear, it's Joseph's.

Which is funny, right?

Because they're not related.

But uh the Ezra, uh, because of all of all the different peoples that had come together during that time, when they came to try to be Jewish again, they had to decide who was really a Jew or not.

No, it's it's it's way newer than that, because Ezra is in around 540, but the matrilineal comes happens since we've entered the CE, the common era.

The one that I was talking about is that generally the Jewish people.

Anyway, that they usually try to put another little remote and sound.

It's something we didn't realize.

What Jewish people are great about doing is disagreeing about everything and then coming back.

So they have disagreements and they leave and they come back.

Christian people have a disagreement and they never want to talk again.

So it's a really interesting thing, is that they come together in order to disagree.

It's kind of a great thing that we've lost.

Um, okay, one of the things that's really important is that I told you the Canaanites in the area of Palestine today worship the sky god.

But if you were to go on the other side of the Jordan to like, let's say Moab and Amna, Amon Ammonites, right, they worship earth gods, and to worship the earth god, you don't go up, you go down.

You get closer to the earth.

So you go to the relative minimum, not to the maximum.

And you may not have noticed this, but um the earth gods are called like chemosh or milcom.

In fact, David gets the crown of Milcom.

We're not sure if he wears it, it's a talent of gold.

But you see a lot of the um kings, Manasseh particularly, he's like the worst king ever.

He worships Milcom by passing his son through the fire.

And what that means is he burns up his firstborn son.

That's very painful.

And you get and understand the sympathetic magic.

We're gonna have a deal, the gods and I.

If I give my most valuable thing up, then to that God and convert it completely so that it's gone, then that God owes me something very valuable.

I don't know if you caught it, but Jericho is built.

When Jericho is rebuilt under King Ahab, the builder buries his firstborn son in the cornerstone.

This is that divine transaction.

You know, we usually do something little.

I know you think about this as kids.

God, help me study for this test, and I'll become a nun when I grow up.

I mean, this is the kind of like bargaining with God that we do.

So we can say it's weird, but we do it.

I mean, we still think about a transactional relationship with God.

So these people actually just took that real serious, right?

So seriously.

Again, your most valuable thing is your firstborn son, because that's your heir and your possession.

And that's keymotion milk.

By the way, um, if you've been to Jerusalem, the low point outside Jerusalem, it's there on that map here.

You see the temple up high there?

That's the relative high point.

That's Mount Moriah.

Come down to the bottom right there.

You'll see it right here.

This is the valley of, it's called Gehenome.

In Greek, that's the word Gehenna, which maybe you've heard, which is where we get the word hell from.

That's the place where people worship chemosh and milkomb and burned up their firstborn children.

So there's this assertion that hell is where you burn your child to appease God.

It's an interesting definition of hell, isn't it?

It's not where you're tortured with ironic punishments.

It's where, in order to appease God, you enter transactions to the loss of other folk.

He never asked that, really.

Abraham.

Abraham.

Yeah.

A lot of folks read that and say God's trying to see if Abraham will do what all the people around him are doing to their own gods.

So it's a test.

But you've got to think about this too.

Like, uh, there's a lot of different ways to think about that story.

Uh if God knows everything, why does God need to test people?

Well, maybe God's doing it for Abraham's sake.

Or maybe the ancient Hebrew people didn't think God knew everything.

Which is probably likely, by the way.

Omniscience is like a Greek idea.

It's philosophical, it's it's not, you know, but it you hear what I'm saying.

I'm not saying God's not omniscient.

I'm saying our relationship with God over the last 6,000 years has certainly changed the way we understand.

I'm not saying God's changed, I'm saying we've changed.

Our thinking has changed.

Absolutely, our thinking has changed.

There's another way to hear the story, though, which is, and I know this isn't the way it's written, but what if Abraham thought, you know, I want to give God my best thing, so this is what I'm gonna do.

You know, we pray in the Lord's Prayer, lead me not into temptation?

Does God lead us into temptation actively, or do we sometimes follow our own false gods into doing things to serve God that God never wanted to begin with?

So, so I don't know.

I think this is a great thing, is there's not like one interpretation has to be right, although some can be wrong.

Yeah.

Right?

I mean, like, I think if we heard the Abraham story and said God wants this kind of blind faith, I'm worried that's not a good interpretation.

You know?

Actually, the rabbis take Abraham to task for not saying no to God.

They say, look, he argued for Sodom and Gomorrah, people he never even met.

He didn't argue over his own son.

What a loser.

I mean, that's a strong rabbinic read.

The reason I say that is because we weren't allowed to say stuff like that in Sunday school when I grew up.

What we learned is you do whatever God tells you, even if it's this, but that's just terrifying, isn't it?

We didn't ever say, and what we heard is, oh, well, God would never ask you to do that.

But wait, in the story, God asked him to do that.

So what's interesting is when you grow up Jewish, you grew up hearing that Rabbi Gameliel says this, and Rabbi Akiva says this, and they disagreed, and then there's three other disagreements.

So you get to hear competing ways to hear the story, and then you kind of have to choose your own adventure.

Which would suggest that you should develop discernment.

Well, it's interesting to think about.

If I told that story in chapel today and I said, What do you think Abraham should do?

I guarantee you, every one of our kids would say, not do it.

Yeah, yeah.

And I agree with them.

Don't you?

Not do it.

Now, how you not do it becomes the interesting question.

That's why I think this is so valuable to read.

When we normalize the story, we actually aren't doing what our Jewish ancestors did with it anyway.

When we read the story as a conversation starter.

And as a question, what adventure do you choose?

We're actually doing a little bit more of what our Jewish brothers and sisters continue to do with the story.

And I hope you're seeing already a little bit, and I'm showing my cards here, that um Bible doesn't mean book, it means books plural.

And in some ways, what we get is not a monologue when we read scripture, we get a conversation.

Wasn't there a sacrifice present though we uh can use?

So that that's what I somehow learned, that God knew that he couldn't go through.

I mean, God had provided uh a ram shows up, right?

It's caught in a thicket.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We also get this weird concept that sacrifice means you convert something into nothing.

Right?

Something has to die, and that's not right.

Sacrifice, sacrifice means to make something holy, and holy really means just to make something extraordinary.

So think about this.

If a firefighter goes into a burning building to pull somebody out, it's a sacrifice, right?

Do they have to die for it to be a sacrifice?

When you say, like, what a sacrifice.

We say this about veterans.

Even when they come home alive, what a sacrifice.

You did something extraordinary, right?

So think about when these people in general, when they offer animals or when they offer grain, they get to eat it.

They don't lose it all.

What they're doing is putting it on God's table, giving a life to God, and eating the meat.

And that's a sacrifice.

So sometimes we think sacrifice means this extreme thing when honestly sacrifice could just mean saying hello to somebody in the morning that we'd rather not.

I mean, really, it's it's helpful to think about small things.

God of the small things is really, really helpful.

Does anybody ever think maybe it's the ram that's sacrificing?

Uh it's a great question.

I mean, it it would depend on your read.

I mean, Jewish butchers realize every time you kill an animal, you're violating one of the ten words, but they call it a sacrifice, right?

They give the life force back to God, but then you do get the meat.

So, you know, Abraham and Isaac, they ate that ram.

Nobody would burn up a whole ram.

You just wanna do that.

Native Americans was to let have the same.

They give thanks to the animal.

To the animal.

That's right.

For their sacrifice.

And the the culture way of doing things, I presume would be not so bad for the animal.

They slit its throat with a samurai sword.

I mean, like with the sharp, sharp sword.

Yeah, I mean it's the same thing with farmers today, right?

Farmers really understand that when the animal goes through distress, the meat tastes different.

So most farmers who kill their own animals, they give it a feed bag and they shoot it.

Instead of hanging it upside down and stunning it with a rivet gun three or four times.

You know, I mean if this seems off topic, I don't think it is.

That's what's great about Bible study, is it connects to everything.

I want to make sure you didn't miss something that happens, which is that the king of Israel is not made with a crown, but with anointing with oil.

Samuel anoints the king with oil.

This is actually not completely unique because the queen or king of England is also anointed with oil still today.

Um, and again, that's like putting the crown on their head.

I I think that might be why we have the sacrament of unction.

Yeah.

So you can be anointed with oil, and I think it is this idea that in a moment of your need or your weakness, your your grief, that uh the community is going to treat you like royalty, and precisely in your neediest moment, you are royalty to God.

I I think that's where the oil comes from.

I have not read a scholarly article about it, but I think it's right.

Uh did you notice?

Just I just want to call a couple, did you notice out?

Um, because we we read a whole lot.

Um there's something really interesting.

Nathan is the prophet who accosts David.

You're the man who did this, right?

When you read Matthew's genealogy, Jesus comes from David, Solomon, Rehoboam.

When you read Luke's genealogy, Jesus comes from David, Nathan, Rehoboam.

Now you have to decide.

Does Solomon have a nickname Nathan?

He clearly was also called Jebediah.

We read that in the story.

Is Luke saying Jesus comes from David physically or in a tradition he's king and counter-king?

The prophet who calls kings to the carpet.

It's a choice.

David fasts because God might change God's mind.

Did you notice that?

So we usually think God will never change God's mind.

We say stuff like that, but we pray and ask God to do stuff we want.

So we actually kind of believe God changes God's mind.

Otherwise, most of the prayers we pray would be silly.

I don't know if that's occurred to you.

But here it is, right in the story.

Moses changes God's mind, right?

God says, I'm gonna kill all those people, and Moses says, No, that's not a good idea.

You really shouldn't do that.

God says, fine, have it your way.

Well, we don't.

I mean, we we sometimes pray like that, although we would be very afraid to outwardly say we are praying like that.

You are.

I mean, not me.

But we're really uncomfortable with God changing God's mind.

You know what I mean?

We are.

But in the text, they're not that uncomfortable with it.

I don't have a definitive answer.

I just want to say these things are in the story that we we bought our nails.

I mean, again, I would if I'd said in the fifth grade, God can change God's mind, my Sunday school teacher would have said, no way.

And I'm telling your mom you said that.

I mean it.

No, that would happen.

There are certainly a lot of human characteristics for God.

And and by yeah, and by the time we get to where to where we are today, those are for the for the most part, they've all seemed to found life.

Yeah, I think.

Yeah.

Although I would tell you in some of our practices not the case.

I mean, again, we sort of think like, oh, my brother's sick, God heal my brother, God heal my brother.

And if we say it enough, then that'll make God do it.

Which is very anthropomorphic, right?

Which is like we just get on God's nerves and God'll do it, just so we'll quit asking for it.

The only way we can understand God is from our human reference.

Yeah.

Which makes it entirely right and dangerous sometimes, right?

This is why I just I think this is really, really fun.

I hope it doesn't come across as like blasphemous or unorthodox.

Like, I just think it's really fun to expand our our thinking about even our own practice and how it is we can enliven the words and things we use.

It's it's it's all I mean, the Bible's not embarrassed about any of this stuff, even though my Sunday school teacher was.

So it's so it's not something we need to be embarrassed about, is what I think I want to say.

Um couple of the things maybe that are interesting for you to make sure we highlight, because it's gonna happen later.

You know, some of the um Ahab asks the prophets, the ones he's paying, should we fight?

And they say yes.

And one of them even makes horns and puts them on his head and says, You're gonna you're gonna gore those people like a bull gores with iron horns, right?

And that's a little bit weird.

Why wouldn't you just say go fight?

And it's because actions speak louder than words sometimes, right?

And you're gonna notice some prophetic behavior is that actions speak louder than words.

Ezekiel does crazy stuff.

Uh Isaiah is gonna do some actions, like he's gonna walk around naked for a whole year on the city wall.

Um, if you didn't know that about Isaiah, you'll get to we'll read it together.

He walks around just stark naked on top of the city wall to show the people where they're going.

They're going into captivity as slaves, if they don't change.

In this sense, right, this is like that man standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square.

Sometimes actions speak louder than words, and we we still get that.

It's like Rosa Parks saying, It's not getting up.

That's a much stronger reply than saying, I won't get up.

You know, you just don't move.

So this happens sometimes that people do um performance art, if that sounds like the right phrase.

Did you notice that the Lord puts a lying spirit into all those prophets?

Not the devil.

The Lord.

That's because these folks think everything comes from God, period.

Which which means you you that's much harder from us because what we say is all the good stuff's God and all the bad stuff's the devil, so it's nice and neat.

But a couple of times in in the scriptures we see uh like Saul is tormented by an evil spirit from the Lord.

And we have to decide what's that mean.

God allows it to happen, God causes it to happen.

In some ways, it's really interesting to think about, and this is really hard for us because a lot of times we say things are evil or bad because they're inconvenient for us, right?

So if somebody has Alzheimer's, it's like this terrible thing.

But the scriptures are really clear that God made the potential for Alzheimer's.

Everything that's made, created, comes out of God's essence or hands, including death.

So we sometimes, I think, get all terrified about these things.

Genesis isn't so terrified.

Genetic variation that doesn't go well, that comes from God too.

And so do viruses.

They're really good at what they do, viruses.

You know, really good.

It's just extremely inconvenient for us.

It's a foreign way of thinking.

You know, viruses are like evil because they hurt human beings, and so are hurricanes, but they you know, they kind of help the earth not explode.

You know, so we this is this interesting way that's a little more holistic in thinking, but again, but it's a stretch for us.

Do you think that the world is evolving in a better direction from those days?

Well, you know, interestingly, um Ecclesiastes seems to think there's nothing new under the sun.

So s so m maybe, although interestingly enough, right, in terms of like catastrophic wars, um it's been a while.

Well, a little war, but there's still awful things in the world.

I don't know if things are are you know, there's these two great words that Aristotle uses when he talks about um things, there's the substance, there's the essence of things, and then there are the accidents.

So that the essence is like the chemical formula, and the accidents are like the the outward expression of the chemical formula, right?

So so interestingly enough, when you hear in the Roman Catholic Church transubstantiation still tastes like wine.

The accidents don't change, but the chemical formula changes to blood.

I mean, that's what it means.

Um so it's hard to know if uh the form has changed or just the content has changed.

Like the expression.

You know, I mean we have a lot of technology now.

We relate to each other very differently because of things like phones and social media, and we had medicines we didn't have, and are human beings still at the end of the day animals?

Are we above the animals?

Like completely different?

Like these are I think these are really great questions.

I I don't I don't it depends on the day you ask me.

We feel relatively safe sitting here talking about these just awful things that happened to our ancestors actually.

Yeah.

I think that's right.

And again, that's a luxury we've only had in this in this country for like a hundred years.

That we had the time and and the education to be able to read this ourselves.

Otherwise, we would have all been minor members of the gentry, you know.

Did I miss any highlighting things?

No, the what I should have done is when I'm re-embowing these kings is to trick them all out because I because I'm again here a little confused.

Some study Bibles will do that for you, and actually, if you look for like Kings of Israel timeline, they'll they'll give you one.

Part of the thing that gets confusing is sometimes the story is about the kings in the north, and then it'll switch to the kings in the south.

And and you didn't realize that switch happens.

Because it's running these two in parallel, right?

And so reminder that the north is Israel and there's ten up there, and the south is Judah, and there's one or two down there.

That's what was getting me confused sometimes.

Absolutely.

Because they were changing it, and I didn't and I didn't realize it until until I really got into it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, he was not the same country.

Can I say something which is way off the top?

No, I didn't apologize.

This comes from this document.

Yeah.

Which is uh uh an out-of-print book that is an ancestral history.

And uh and it says, you know, King Jedediah and Solomon is put out.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, sorry, sorry, that's not a good king.

His sons murdered in front of him, his eyes are put out, and then it stops.

But this history says that he had two daughters arrived.

Uh read this.

The second daughter of King Jediah of Judah, escaping the Babylonian invasion from Judea by sea with Navoscotia.

History relates she remarried one of the Baruch, settled in what is now Belgium, while our younger daughter, Tio Tephi, the tender twig, came to Ireland in flight, married King Harrimon, also called something I can't pronounce Harriman, and was buried at Tara.

But this is the history of the in the British Isles.

Yes.

That's interesting.

Because it doesn't say anything about this.

But they're women.

They're women.

And only rarely, like Job's new daughters, they all have names.

But in general, you don't you don't get that.

And this kind of thing that you read, it's the kind of thing that was the most popular kind of story in the Middle Ages.

There's a whole compilation of it called the Golden Legend.

And it's um Sure.

It's it's it these kinds of stories are all over the place.

When I was in Georgia, Georgian churches are depicted with icons of these sorts of stories.

In case you're wondering, the Book of Mormon tells you where the Native Americans came from.

The Native Americans have the lost ten tribes of Israel.

So you have ever wondered where they went, they came here.

Now, we can sort of laugh at that, but that's kind of what this is.

You know what I mean?

It's filling in gaps.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's fun.

I think, I mean, it's fun.

And what's interesting enough is a lot of art is informed by it, and unless you're from, unless you're familiar, you you don't even realize what you're looking at.

I I'll show you the Georgian icon with this story when it arrives.

It's in the mail to me now.

It's really similar.

Somebody in the hospital told me a story about the native merits now they arrived.

I thought it was I I had no idea that it had any credence anywhere.

No, it doesn't have any credence at all, but it's in the Book of Mormon.

I mean, it's complete crazy because uh, well, I shouldn't say that.

Scientifically, it's not in accord with science as we understand it, which is that there was this land bridge, right?

And the first hominids made their way over it.

I suppose you could say that's a story like this one.

What do we choose to believe, right?

I want to make sure we answer these last questions together because I hope you found these really interesting.

Particularly, what are warning signs that a church is losing or has lost biblical memory that gives its identity and purpose?

Yeah.

What are warning signs a church is losing identity and purpose, if you prefer it that way?

I wondered if you had any thoughts to that question.

I think less people are attending the church.

Well, into the teachers that they are in college.

They start questioning more.

And well, a lot of the college people are associated with Roman Catholic.

And uh they weren't even allowed to read the Bible when they were young because that was for the priests, not for you.

So all of a sudden they're opened up to all these different religions, and they start to question, and they start to fall away.

And I think that the money problems to keep the church surviving.

They have to have money, and in some of these areas, people don't have any money.

Of course they do what they can, but things change.

And then some people, some of the churches, they don't like it.

You know, they want a priest that will agree with them, not the one that'll go in there and start.

We had a priest that we call, it was his gotcha servant, because you could actually see people kind of cringing.

Um I loved him.

I thought he was great, but a lot of people didn't like him.

And the young priests that came in with their sandals, and you know, they didn't like that.

They didn't like, you know, they just they actually had it removed.

So when you start doing that where the people send such control, the young people fall away because things don't make sense to them anymore.

You know, too many rules.

So I guess a good question I have is people not attending church, is that a s is that the core condition or is that a symptom that churches are disappoint that are not giving what they're supposed to give?

Do do do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Like well, we always laugh because my husband was a Roman Catholic and became Roman Catholic and was engaged to another guy, but I used to tease him about the Ten Commandments.

You know, your Ten Commandments are not the same as mine.

And oh yeah, they are.

And I said, well then how can you how can everybody sell so many idols?

The statues to the Virgin Mary, the statues to Joseph, the statues of this.

I said, those are idols.

There's nothing in the Ten Commandments about the idols.

And when he started reading, that's when he realized, he said, I've been lying to all these years.

And when we joined this church, we asked the priest, you know, what's the difference between Episcopalian and Roman Catholic?

And he said, Episcopalians are a Roman Catholic without the guilt.

You know, and you don't have to pay to be forgiven.

You don't have to pay to do this and that.

Yeah.

But that makes a lot of sense, because a lot of this is Roman Catholic teachings, but without the guilt.

You know.

Huh?

Good Roman Catholic, Henry VIII.

Yeah.

Yeah, but the point so we could have his other wife.

Get rid of this one and get a divorce.

The uh evolution of the prosperity.

The more you get.

Yeah.

And you know, I think when you start to try to tip a tap with God, that's where the church begins to try to try to to to put the message in the tip of tap thing.

That's when it becomes a law.

Well didn't they weren't wrong?

They were doing that way back when then.

Yeah, four books of the Bible.

Yeah.

Oh, worried.

Yeah, I mean at least my my thinking is this on that.

You give to God or to the church, and the Spirit you give what you can give.

Exchange, He can give you what you cannot get for yourself.

And that's what I think.

I think where do you crazy right now?

What do you expect from a church?

What do you expect from the church?

The church can't identify that.

I think that becomes a problem because then you don't know why you're there.

Other than you think if I don't go, something's gonna happen.

That's interesting.

I mean I don't I don't have the answer to this.

Mind you, I don't.

But I but he will let you know that that Christianity is sort of decreasing everywhere in the world except for places like Africa.

And the kind of Christianity that's growing there is not episcopal or presbyterian, it's largely sort of Pentecostal, what we would call, you know, um holy roller types.

Um and and there is this interesting thing that came out always ten years now, um, that said uh that people's correlation between church maps to words like it's interesting, the biggest one was, and this is 10 years ago, um uh homosexist, that is like hates gay people, and then judgmental, second, uh, and then hypocritical.

Like those are the biggest three things.

I used to teach at a Christian school, and one of the parents was very upset that I was teaching the Bible to his son with some threads.

He said that we should indoctrinate his 16-year-old son so that he had a firm faith.

And curiously enough, what I noticed, and many of our faculty members noticed, is that our kids would leave Christian high school and then they would sort of lose their Christian identity.

And the solution was indoctrinate them more.

It was sort of this interesting thing.

I actually came out on the other side, they'd never been allowed to ask any questions, and now that they could, they threw everything away because there'd never been any room for things like doubt and curiosity and how it is that science might dovetail with scripture instead of contradict it.

Um these were interesting things, so there was like no flexibility, and and when you talk about common purpose, you know, I'm positive church means something different to everybody in the room.

And to me, the interesting thing about the Episcopal Church is I don't understand why it's not growing, is that there is room for everybody in the room.

Yeah.

Because it doesn't have to mean the same thing to everybody.

The idea is that regardless of what how we differ, we have more in common than we have apart.

It's an interesting sort of thing here, you know, uh, because we're not like the Catholic Church without guilt.

We're completely Protestant Church in belief.

We're Rome Catholic in liturgy, so we use a lot of the same words, but they all have different meanings.

This is sort of this really interesting thing, and as such, there's like room for everybody.

And this is one of those questions that's vexing because of the way I grew up is hey, times are changing, so hunker down on what we have in here, maybe so don't let don't let women be priests would be one of those things.

Because they weren't allowed to be priests, except they were prophets, right?

I mean, when Josiah finds that scroll, it's a prophet who's a woman, and Holdah who tells him what to do.

So, in some ways, we're preserving this by doing that, but it but it you you know, I think that's sort of the hard the hard bit, and it seems like most people just really looking for relevance.

Um I see I have a little different view of when kids grow up and leave the church and experiment and begin to think for themselves and explore other thinking, they they deconstruct their faith on some level so that they can reconstruct it on a more solid basis, and then that's when they they come back to the true essence of Christianity.

That's my thinking in my experience.

It'd be interesting.

It'd be really interesting if the church embraced that instead of shunning people.

Yes, you know.

Sometimes I think times in general are difficult.

And I uh I this comes from a friend of mine who became Catholic, left the Episcopal Church and became Catholic because, in her words, she had been through a lot.

She needed something that gave her I think she needed somebody to tell her what she believed.

Here are the rules, this makes sense.

That's what she needed to think for.

It is, and it's not so much that she didn't want to think for herself, but she had been through a lot in her life and lost a child.

And I think what she needed at that time was for somebody to say, this is it, this is the answer, and here are the rules.

Yeah.

It's interesting you said that because um, you know, one of the the some of the growing parishes, again, it's shrinking everywhere, but there was a surge in these non-denominational churches, which really meant Southern Baptists without the name on it.

And the Mormon church has grown 10% every year since it was founded.

And in both of those, and no no casting shade here, but everything happens for a reason, and everything is black and white.

And and I have to say that I would like everything to happen for a reason.

I would like to know that everything is part of some master plan, but I think that also introduces crisis to people when, say, their children have leukemia.

Or um, and and I don't know, this is this interesting thing, like whether or not we we we want a community where who will walk with us and grieve, or a community that will tell us what everything means.

And and I I that might be part of what's going on.

Um you start to say, well, geez, the community that's just there with you empathically has no power over your life.

And that's the definition of empathy, right?

Is it's not power over, it's power alongside, right?

And and and I wonder if that if we don't ourselves idolize the wrong things.

You know, we we honestly would sometimes rather have magic and fate and black and white than we would human connection, which you know, and my most sober moments of thinking that that's where the real magic is, is in human connection.

Um so I don't know the answer.

I mean, I don't know the answer to this question.

We scratch our heads, you know, and in my job, I mean, look, it's a call and it's a job.

I I go to vestry and it's like a business meeting, but we have a mission, so we don't always make business decisions, and then I'm like the guy who serves communion.

It's weird.

For for all of us, it's not just weird for me, it's weird.

And uh, you know, like a long time ago, like even 10 years ago, we learned in seminary, don't be friends with parishioners because you're crossing boundaries.

And some of it I get, and and and some of it I think is worth risking.

And how much can you do it?

Because at the end of the day, the reason we met is because of church.

So that's our common thread, and what happens with that is weird.

I don't know if that makes sense.

I'm not just talking about priestly life.

I mean, I think church as a whole, as a whole, it's the inside into the way the whole thing works, and I just I think it's hard because if a priest makes a mistake, then they're a bad priest.

But but maybe they're just human beings, you know?

And it is hard when somebody's made a decision you don't agree with about an administrative matter, it can be really hard to well receive communion from them because you think that they're wrong.

And and this is sometimes like the way I wonder if we don't relate to religion in general.

It's messy because we say God's in it, but it's also a human enterprise, and how you tease that out is really, really hard.

I I tell you, I think the episcopal way of structuring churches is flawed.

I just think it's better than any other one I've been a part of.

But I definitely see the limitations, you know.

The bishop owns this property.

I think that's weird.

But it's better than what I grew up doing.

I think it's weird that I'm tenured.

You can't fire me.

The bishop can't either.

If I'm a heretic, the bishop has to call an ecclesiastical court to try me.

That's weird.

But I'll tell you what, it beats the heck out of the locks being changed on the parsonage because you didn't like my sermon.

I mean, like there's reasons for all of this stuff.

Job security is nice, and I've seen it burn other parishes where people used it to their advantage instead of used it to like be prophetic.

And then how prophetic do you want to be?

You're gonna stand up in front of your people every week and talk about how they're doing it wrong, they're not gonna come anymore.

You like there's gotta be some kind of like nexus, like in all relationships, you know, and and um I don't know, maybe part of what I'm struggling with is like the church, we we often just split the hairs wrong, and we forget that father doesn't know best.

Because I don't.

About everything, you know.

Um but I'm here to serve communion, and I hope we'll take it together even when we disagree.

You know, I mean I but I think that's tough because we don't i it it's hard when there's chinks in heroes armor, you know, and I don't just mean that about clergy, I mean that about each other, and I mean that about the way we think about God.

And how we carry all of that cognitive dissonance.

I think I just I think it's I think it's tough.

And maybe maybe that's the hardest bit about all this.

Because you know so much, it would be hard to reconcile everything.

And and yet I practice so little of what I know.

I mean, this is the truth about us being parents.

If I did, if I was the parent I knew to be, I'd be a much better parent.

But like I know all this stuff, and in the moment, I still say, like, you know, take that.

And honestly, like, I mean, again, I know stuff, I know how I'm supposed to do this and that, and I'm still like petty and vindictive, and you know, like my ego is wrapped up in all kinds of things, and here we are together.

And it was the same thing back then, so many of the letters to the churches are the end of relationships.

And I wonder if part of the church going forward, like, is to be honest about that and to struggle with that.

Yes, you're my priest, and damn it, you really made me mad when you did that.

And I'm still gonna come to the Lord's table with you behind it for now.

You know, I mean, I just mean that.

I I do, you know, I I I don't it comes across that you care, and that makes a big difference.

You're not just injured, yeah.

Not just going through the motions.

I'm not just talking about me, mind you.

Well, I mean, okay.

This is a tough talking about you.

Well, but it doesn't come across to everybody, and I mean I think that's again, I think that's how we struggle with with this.

I mean, there can be priests that just really kind of act like maybe they just assume get done with it.

I don't get that.

Well, they're a they're a here's uh rewarding before their time.

Yeah.

Our priests that we had in Florida, they fired because the they had a beautiful record where they was a beautiful the church was in an area that kind of went downhill and got a lot of low-income, you know, not quite what you want for your neighbor, but it was a beautiful house.

Well, the priests had two grown children, and they also had property in the back that had classrooms and all.

Well, they tore up this thing and made a living place for his son.

Okay.

Then the priest decided, well, you know, I don't have any equity on this house because I don't own it.

And I'm going to be retiring in about eight years.

So he bought a house.

Well, you know, well, the church had to pay his rent on, you know, on his house because they, you know, said they would provide housing allowance.

Yeah.

Well, the only problem was they had to pay on that other house, too.

So he moved his daughter in there.

And um, because a friend of mine, who he made a mistake when he made her the treasurer, um, she started looking at all these expenses and took it to the vestry and said, Look at the thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars that our church is paying.

And they went to the bishop and they said, we're paying for both of his adult children to house them.

And look at the money that's going out of the church funds to do all this, and pretty soon the bishop shows up and he is no longer being a priest.

Now, see, this is exactly what I mean, not talking about me.

I mean, again, how messy this is.

And and and I think that's part of the deal is how do we navigate something that will always be messy?

And do we ch and I'm just gonna tell you, because I've been involved in churches that split, not as Episcopal, well, I have been involved with this too.

Um, do we take our toys and go home?

And at what point do we s do we have righteous indignation and we separate ourselves and stay together and work for reconciliation?

And we find both things in the book here, you know.

I mean, and I think that's the hard, that's the hardest thing about all of this, you know?

And again, it's whether it's your leader or in a parish or some kind of national church identity, and it just it's just messy, you know, it's really messy.

And um I think sometimes we we'd rather lie about the mess than call it messy and try to find grace in it.

So I don't know.

I mean, I just I don't know.

You've been super good, thank you.

Uh I'm we're spinning our wheels, and we'll see you next week when we read Amos.

Okay, but what are we supposed to I'm