B-B-B-Betty in a Dress

Have you ever heard of a mondegreen?

That’s the technical word they give it when you listen to something, but you hear something different.

Apparently, people do it all the time when they’re listening to song lyrics, for example. There is some phrase that is sung, but their ear picks up something different, often with irrational results.

Want to see if you’ve ever mondegreened? Okay, if you have even a passing familiarity with popular music, you might be able to guess what famous songs produced the following mondegreens. (I’m guessing most of us are in middle age somewhere, so I’ll keep the examples a bit retro.)

Cosmic Accidents and the Chain of Command

Many years ago now, a man I love and respect opened up the book of Matthew and read us the story of the centurion’s faith. You will recall that the Lord commended this Roman soldier as exceptional because he understood that Jesus possessed the ability to heal from far away as easily as he could heal when immediately present, so he didn’t wish to trouble the Lord unnecessarily by asking him to undertake a journey in order to do him a favor.

The centurion expressed his conviction this way: “I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

“Only say the word ...” Wow. That was indeed great faith, and the Lord responded to it.

Having Your Cake

We are forever being told we need to keep open minds. Close-minded people tend toward confirmation bias. We wouldn’t want to just see what we expect to see, right?

Hey, an open mind is a wonderful thing. But an open mind needs to be open the same way a baseball glove is open.

Anonymous Asks (145)

“Can the balm of Gilead heal?”

Well, there’s an obscure question for you!

I suppose first we should probably ask what the balm of Gilead is. I don’t imagine most people, even some regular readers of scripture, have the slightest idea.

Genesis 37 makes reference to a “caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead” and bound for Egypt. These men were merchants and traders, and one of the goods they had for sale was balm, salve in the form of wax or resin to be applied topically. They acquired this balm east of the Jordan River in Gilead, later part of Israel. Genesius’ Lexicon says this medicine was secreted by a plant known to grow only in that region, though the actual species is today a matter of dispute among scholars. The plant was extremely rare, its medicine believed to be very effective, and was highly valued and sought after. Once Israel conquered Canaan under Joshua and populated the Transjordan highlands, they effectively cornered the world market on Gilead’s balm.

Honoring the Weakness?

“Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel ...”

Here is a verse often considered controversial. Obviously it is not truly a matter of controversy; an apostle wrote that the woman is in some sense “weaker” than the man, and the Holy Spirit of God spoke through him when he did. He wasn’t being a misogynist; the very notion is ridiculous. So then, our responsibility as followers of Christ seeking to live for him is to accept what we read whether the notion of inequality of the sexes in any particular area appeals to us or not.

Mining the Minors: Amos (15)

Like most fathers, I disciplined my children when they were young and disobedient.

We can think about discipline in either of two ways: firstly, as punishment for sinning, which it most certainly is. When an evil act is committed, it deserves a penalty. Justice cries out for it, and if justice doesn’t make its voice heard, a child’s siblings generally will. But secondly, most acts of discipline are also designed to encourage repentance. A good father desires that the offender learn his lesson and stop offending, both for his own sake and for the sake of those he offends against.

Both these aspects of the disciplinary process are in play in God’s dealings with Israel in Amos 4.

Too Hot to Handle: Rethinking Sunday School

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: I have a confession for you, IC. I was a terrible kid in Sunday School. I made everybody’s lives miserable, from the guy tasked with leading the singing to my individual Sunday School teachers. I really didn’t like it much.

The odd thing is that I had nothing against church particularly, or the Bible. I even believed it was true. But I was a total cut-up.

How about you?

Immanuel Can: Yep. Dead with boredom, and ready to make trouble.

Untwisting God’s Words

Tertius once told me about something that happened to him many years ago, when he was a young Christian. He had started to study the Bible with a friend who had a particular mainline church denominational background.

One day he received an angry letter from his friend’s priest, who was upset about the idea that two lay people were attempting to read and understand the word of God without his “professional” help.

“No prophecy of scripture is of any private interpretation,” declared the priest, quoting part of 2 Peter 1:20. From this, he expected Tertius to see that it was just wrong for a person not approved and trained by church authorities to dare to read and understand for himself.

The Wrong Word

Sometimes we’ve just plain got the wrong word in our Bibles.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I know translators are highly skilled people. In almost every case when it was first translated it was the right word. It was clearly understood by its audience. It was the best English equivalent in its generation for a particular Greek or Hebrew expression.

But languages evolve. Meanings morph. Sometimes they even reverse themselves. Words that worked in one generation no longer transmit the intended message without causing confusion, eroding our ability to grasp what the writers of the word of God were trying to tell us. More than a few beloved expressions hang on well past their expiry dates.

My candidate of choice? The word “grace”.

Reality Check: Religious Freedom

Religious freedom is not a Christian value.

There, I said it.

Now, let’s be real about it: religious freedom is certainly a value held and promoted by many Christians. It is also a benefit that, when conferred on us by the occasional society that looks favorably on the faith (or simply neglects to single it out for special persecution), has made preaching the gospel a whole lot less painful for those who preach it. If I could have religious freedom or not have it, I would certainly prefer to have it.

Nevertheless, these things in themselves do not make religious freedom our inalienable right, and they should not remotely encourage us to seek to spread it around.

Anonymous Asks (144)

“Did God make any promises to Abraham that remain unfulfilled?”

I count 40 separate promises to Abraham made over the course of seven chapters and a period of (very approximately) 40 years.

How about that.

Mileage May Vary

Your mileage will certainly vary, for a number of reasons. For example, promises #3 and 4 could be considered a single compound promise if you like, but since they affect two distinct groups of people and could each stand alone, I am reading them as two separate promises.

Recommend-a-blog (32)

Free trade is “a policy followed by some international markets in which countries’ governments do not restrict imports from, or exports to, other countries.” Or so reads the Infogalactic entry on the subject. The history of free trade goes back centuries, at very least to Adam Smith in 1776, but its global application really awaited the decades following WWII. I grew up with the idea, and accepted it unquestioningly as a “good” of sorts, a necessary corollary to freedom, capitalism and economic growth that benefits all.

After all, who wants to be a commie pinko, right?

Mining the Minors: Amos (14)

Why would God extend an invitation to sinners to keep right on sinning? Isn’t that the exact opposite of what he really wants?

It’s not a bad question. Yet the scripture frequently shows us God standing back and allowing the sinner to act out the evil in his heart, from his warning to Cain in Genesis 4 that “sin is crouching at the door” (which went sadly unheeded) to the accumulated sins of Babylon in the book of Revelation, which are “heaped high as heaven”.

This divinely permitted real-world actualizing of the evil desires of the heart often comes at great cost to others. Yet here in Amos, God once again invites the people of Israel to “multiply transgression”.

Too Hot to Handle: Alt-Personhood

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Fox News reports that the Baltimore Book Festival has dropped Rachel Dolezal’s invitation to participate in the festival this year after receiving too much negative public feedback.

You may remember Ms Dolezal from a flurry of media scrutiny in 2015 when it was revealed that the leader of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People wasn’t really a person of color after all, but was in reality a little blonde in blackface.

Tom: IC, I don’t understand. Society says it’s not only okay but morally imperative for me to self-identify as a woman if that’s how I feel about myself, even if I have been born biologically male. It will defend my right to call myself any made-up gender I like, even to the point of stripping you of your right to disagree with me about it in the public space.

Getting Reading Right

So I got talking with a guy the other day.

Those of you who know me know I’ve made my career among secular people. Philosophy being my thing, I’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of different sorts of people — many very far from Christian. But in this case, I was talking to a youngish Christian who had been pulled sideways by reading too much of the Unitarians and various Gnostic sects before getting his grounding in scripture. He’s got shaken about the general reliability of scripture, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and a variety of other issues, and he’s working his way through them.

I asked him what he thought was the touchstone of truth. He’d already expressed doubts about large sections of scripture, so I wanted to know what he was relying on to show him what was reliable and what wasn’t.

Faithful and True

Nobody likes being told they are wrong. It’s hard on our pride. For this reason, we may behave very badly in the process of being corrected. But if you’ve ever stumbled around in the dark, looking for answers and living with the painful consequences of your own mistakes, then you may have come to appreciate the value of a faithful and true witness; one who risks your anger and hostility to tell you the real story about yourself; one who cares enough to get involved when others would simply keep quiet, go about their business and let you continue in your misery. Faithful and true witnesses are rare and precious.

And if you have ever told the truth in front of hostile men and women who don’t want to hear it, then you know the cost of faithfulness and truth in giving testimony.

The Motive Doesn’t Matter

In chapter two of Daniel, the Chaldean king Nebuchadnezzar dreams of the end of all this world’s great secular empires ... including his own. A great stone representing an eternal kingdom set up by the God of heaven destroys the image of which Babylon was the golden head.

The weak point of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream was its feet, which were a less-than-sturdy composite of iron and clay. Perhaps with this in mind, the king eventually decided to build an image of his own. His version was ninety feet high, with no weaknesses which might be easily targeted by other would-be empire builders. Anyone who observed it saw nothing but gold from head to toe.

Anonymous Asks (143)

“If Christians are forgiven, and they know they will be forgiven no matter what they do, why should they refrain from doing evil?”

Jesus warned his disciples from the very beginning of his ministry on earth to expect that there would be counterfeits among their number. The apostle John writes about what happened when Jesus began to perform miracles in Jerusalem at the Passover. He says, “Many believed in his name.” Then he adds this: “But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.” Some of these “believers” were not genuine in their desire to associate themselves with him, and would later fall away.

Inbox: Meditating on the Cross

Recently received from Bernie, and well worth sharing:

“ ‘Don’t cross me.’

  ‘You’re making me cross.’

  ‘I’m at a crossroad.’

All these common phrases speak to a conflict — and not a minor one at that. “Cross” is the coming together of two (often mutually contradictory) standards. What you are choosing to do is not what I want you to do — and thus I am “cross”, or you are “crossing” me. When I’m at a “crossroad”, I am faced with a choice that is one of two directions that do not go to the same place.

“Cross” is a collision, an intersection, a choosing point.

Mining the Minors: Amos (13)

I am understandably reluctant to compare other men’s wives to cows. Let’s just say the criticism may not be well received.

Amos says some hard things, but they were given to him to say, and he dared not water them down or modify them. These are God’s words, not his. And if God wants to call your wife a cow, you had best listen. More importantly, your wife would be wise to pay attention.

Then again, if she were wise, the Lord wouldn’t be calling her a cow.