My conversation with the foremost Pentecostal Theologian, Amos Yong, has 2 parts. First, we talk about the themes in his new book “The Bible, Disability, and the Church”.
Below is part II of our talk. We cover some excellent topics like healing, God’s will, social oppression in the church, communal prayers of lament, his Disability Bible project (and more).
View my 3 Part video interview with Caleb here.
The 10th Anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy a week from this Sunday. We will once again see images and recount the horrors of that day, and try in memorial to accept the reality of this world. Most of us don’t encounter death and our own mortality too often. Most of us don’t constantly see suffering, and witness grief and loss.
Please take some time today, or this weekend to remember that the events of 9/11 still bring pain to many. Loved ones are missed, and we can’t gloss over the national tragedy that left a collective hole in our hearts, even ten years later.
This seems a fitting time to discuss an author who is very acquainted with death. It’s his job to be, and his perspective can be very helpful to us. As promised a couple of weeks earlier, the following is my personal interview with blogger and upcoming author Caleb Wilde, a 6th generation Funeral Director, seminary student, husband, and expectant adoptive dad.
My Questions for Caleb:
1. Being a 6th generation funeral director, you have quite a unique vantage point on life, loss, and mortality. How do you think you live life differently than other Christians because of where God has placed you?
Caleb: In traditional religious calendars, the day in-between “Good Friday” and “Easter” is called “Holy Saturday”. “Holy Saturday” is the day the disciples’ hopes and beliefs were engulfed in death and silence, as they viewed their Messiah’s death without the knowledge of the resurrection.
In some sense, I live the life of Holy Saturday.
As funeral directors, we’re paid by families to be a human shield to death, whereby we make death somewhat easier, less real and more proper. As this human shield, I’m affected. I’m affected by the brokenness, by the grief, by the hopelessness I see in faces, by the newly fatherless/motherless children, the tragic deaths and the accidents.
All this has made my personal faith more sensitive to questions of God’s goodness and justice. It’s not easy for me to understand ideas of “eternal hell”, or ideas of “meticulous divine providence” or even “absolute foreknowledge” or “omnipotence”.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m still a Christian.
2. What do people misunderstand most about your work?
Caleb: We’re a lot like pastors. Our jobs are really quite similar, except that one is recognized as “ministry” while the other is “business.” That’s probably the largest misconception … there’s no way funeral directors can meet with grieving families through the most difficult time of their lives and come out on the other side as “business people.”
Everything else is true, though … we are dark and we are odd people.
In ancient times, death practitioners were ostracized from normal society by rule. Today, we’re partly ostracized from the norm of society by practice.
3. The constant stream of customers (people dying, and their families burying them) can make one grow numb or cold toward the concept and process of death and burial. Do things still surprise you or impact you? What kind of things?
Caleb: There’s something so unnatural about death that (save the very old) it’s difficult to become numb.
4. You’ve probably thought about what you’d want your own funeral to look and sound like. Can you tell us about that?
Caleb: About two years ago, I started taking one minute video clips of myself, so that by the time I’m 70, I should have a montage of age progression videos that can be used for my funeral.
I’ve also talked about recording a message from myself to my family and friends that could be shown at my funeral as the eulogy. But, by the time I’m ready to die, I figure they’ll have holographic projections, so I’ll wait for that tech until I record my final goodbye.
5. The saddest funeral I ever went to was for a 13 year old boy who took his own life. What have you learned about people during the time of more tragic circumstances that you’ve been a part of?
Caleb: Funerals/death are a perfect storm: you have death, the inheritance money, high emotions and family you might not like too much who are around you all the time.
Funerals intensify people’s real character. You see the best in people and you see the worst. The bad people will do horrendous things at funerals, like start fights, curse out their family members over money. And you can see Jesus in the good ones.
6. Do you find your work mostly depressing, hopeful, profound, mundane, etc.? Would you recommend this vantage point to others?
Caleb: It’s a tough ministry that has little boundaries. Many funeral homes are also generational, so many of us work with our dads, grandfathers, uncles and cousins, which can make this at-need work that much more difficult to set up healthy boundaries.
Similar to any ministry, I think there should be a passion for death work … a calling of sorts, whereby you know this is what you’re supposed to do. And being a “calling”, few have witnessed this vantage point.
It’s unique.
7. Do you want to stay in the family business? Why or why not?
Caleb: Next question : )
8. Tell us a bit about how you view suffering, pain, and death from your unique perspective…which probably has a lot to do with the message in your book.
Caleb: I’ve built my understanding of God around suffering, pain and death. It’s a local theology. And my understanding of God, suffering, pain and death in light of my faith is the content of my upcoming book, “Confessions of a Funeral Director.” Hopefully, it will be out in less than a year. You can get an idea of how death has affected my view of God at my blog, www.calebwilde.com. My book, though, will contain much more narrative than my blog.
9. What’s your best idea for a Smart Phone app.?
Caleb: I live near Lancaster County (PA), home of the Amish and Mennonites, so there’s a lot of intermarrying in these parts. Not to mention, most of the towns in the rural areas of Pennsylvania have families that have lived there for centuries, so many of them are related.
I have an idea to partner with Ancestry.com and create an app the lets you bump smart phones with another person and it will tell you how you’re related to them. My theory is that this will greatly help the evolution of humans by creating a purer gene pool. The apps name is “Bump it before you Hump it”.
THANK YOU, Caleb, and best wishes on your book. I’m really excited to get a copy.
The working title for Caleb’s book is Confessions of Funeral Director. A bit more on that here.
So, my reader friends, what are you curious about? Ask Caleb your deep, dark, or even silly questions!
(This is being submitted to the Deeper Leader Synchro Blog sponsored by Evangelical Seminary. Find out more here.)
WARNING: This post may rock your world. (a.k.a. “BOOM post” )
How should we read and study the Bible?
Debates on this will rage, but one thing we often assume that we can simply read the Bible and understand it. Essentially, the Holy Spirit just pops the correct meanings into our brains. Right?
If that were the simple truth, we’d all be, at least mostly, on the same page in Christianity, and we ARE! Um. bzzzz. No…not. at. all.
The Holy Spirit will convict our conscience of sin, and the Holy Spirit help us understand certain things about God’s nature and his grace. Yet, some huge obstacles lie before us concerning the details of Scriptural text.
These details can, and do turn into doctrine or false teaching that fall outside the intent of the text. In clumsy hands, dogmatic presumptions of the Holy Spirit’s opinion have led to all manner of errors, deceptions, injustice. And this study method, if you will, has even started more than a few whacky cults. Yes, and some involve koolaid.
SO!
If you forget EVERYTHING about this post, please don’t forget this. When interpreting the meaning of the Bible (a.k.a. engaging in hermeneutics) remember: A scripture passage cannot mean something different than its original intent.
Huh? What?
Let that red text sink in. Please…Re-read it.
Seriously. It’s a huge deal once you truly comprehend it, and even bigger when you apply it.
A scripture passage cannot mean something different than its original intent. (That’s a needed re-refresher. Please bear with me.)
Understanding the Bible involves a continual tension between discerning…
Our understanding and the writer’s intent.*
Here are just 5 a mere few of the obstacles that can hinder a proper understanding of scripture:
– Language barriers (Ex. Jesus spoke Aramiac, The New Testament was written in Greek (a dead form of the Greek language now,) and English was taken from the Greek. This book collection HAS TO be divine and God-breathed to still transform individuals, whole communities, and cultures through its message of the Good News!)
– Historical distance barriers (Now is later. Stuff has changed. ‘nuf said.)
– Cultural barriers (We don’t wear the same stuff, and do the same things, at all. period.)
– Circumstantial differences (But one example: Every church has “its stuff” unique to it. Particular concerns and problems.)
– Our lens/perspective, education, and experiences (I hope this is self-explanitory. If not, maybe this blog is too much for you. No worries. Just search this blog for “humor” and forget about this post entirely.)
Quick & Hot Tips for the Good Book
When reading, and attempting to understand a Bible passage,
– include paragraphs and sections, rather than a sentence, a phrase, or a lone sentence. (Nothing can twist scripture more than attempting to find meaning in a small phrase of scripture, instead of taking the complete thought and verbiage into account. You wouldn’t want to be taken out of context, so you know, do the right thing.)
– Read a few translations (Don’t parse words. Just don’t. It’s major mistake! Chances are the translators had to give it their best guess. Plenty of words in ancient Hebrew, and Greek, won’t and can’t translate out of the original language. Translators disagree. A lot. So, don’t assume you have read the perfect word choice. The word may not have been used or known outside of that one, or just a few, times.)
– Consult commentaries (These folks have dedicated their whole life to studying the Bible, the ancient culture, the history, etc. They’ve studied deeper, longer, and harder than you, and probably have some great insights from their research.)
Yes. This post was a “BOOM post”. It may come off sort of… um… strong. I see people all over the place butchering what the Bible says simply because they are naive. They haven’t bothered or known how to read the bible in a way that will get things at least mostly right. They start to sound goofy pretty fast. Next time you hear someone spouting off about a Bible passage, inquire if they’ve done the passage good justice by learning it intelligently in these few ways; then (as nicely as possible) challenge their mode of learning and teaching.
Bible study is a vital spiritual discipline, and like prayer, fasting, giving, and all the rest should be done through being better informed. Learning is a continual process. Keep up with it!
*Some of my information is straight from Stuart and Free’s fantastic book: How to Read the Bible for All its Worth. Many agree that it’s the book par excellence, for understanding and studying the Bible. Give it a whirl.
Did this post help you think of the Bible in a new way?
What has helped you understand what the Bible says?
I’m not trying to carp, but they say things come in threes:
1. Introduced to “Fish Pedicures”.
2. Our kitchen sink smells like tuna (still).
3. Osama bin Laden is buried at sea.
Now, I’d sooner get a defective Nembutal enema then be correct here, butt (sic.) it seems that things have been pretty fishy. (Read: peculiar and fish-centric) Okay, I sort of made the second one up. I probably should have mentioned dead schools of fish or something.
Today, I feel a well….a “disturbance in the force”. Something just isn’t right…ya know? Maybe in the universe. Maybe in the thinking I read reverberating through social media. It’s not just the caffeine talking. I have some very conflicting thoughts and emotions at this point. Something is the matter.
With this talk of the most wanted wealthy, terrorist mastermind being “brought to justice”, I am reminded that human justice (so-called) is focused on retribution and punishment. Those are its first aims. But, must’n we realize there is no justice qua justice at the hands of human beings?
Can this man’s death heal the wounds of those who lost loved ones on 9/11? Never. There has been no score settled. Nothing can repay or compensate for that type of destruction and loss.
Here is where ultimate triumph can only come through the practice of forgiveness. It is the hard stuff, the stuff that happens supernaturally–not through our strength.
Grace trumps our flawed and immature (human) slant on Justice.
Will we ever get justice right?
God cancels our debt. My debt. Yours. Bin Laden’s. God’s work at the cross and ongoing through his people is the working out of this cancelation which does not overlook the evil, but negates it. It pulls its teeth out. It becomes victorious in the most scandalous way (compared to our standards). This way is very unpopular, I might add. Check out the movies. We like revenge and payback. Our movie stars exact it out for us, so we can feel comforted.
So, absorb the important part. The weight and burden of the disparate of goodness and evilness funnels down and is defeated and overcome by sacrifice, and by grace. Christ Jesus’ death on the cross. This is God’s active dealing with evil and human nature gone wrong. In all cases.
I didn’t think I’d feel this way, but all the bin Laden news and stuff has just left me with the creeps. We need help.
What must we change about our view of justice with regards to God’s holiness and mercy? How can we understand and enact justice better, and our active role in meting it out?
Tell me: What are your feelings about the ways of justice, or the recent events concerning Osama bin Laden? Was “justice served”?
And In what ways can grow from this? (And, Yes, I’m fishing for your thoughts.)
Evil is a complicated topic. There is much disagreement on the details of it.
I will be attempting to open the topic up to reflection and discussion on April 30th. (Bethesda EC Church, Reedsville, 9:30am)
To learn more or prep yourself for the class, you can read a few posts I’ve already done on the topic, here, or this one on hell here. You can read the information wikipedia has offered, and click here.
I highly recommend N T Wright’s work on the topic. “Evil and the Justice of God”. Really clever stuff!
Here’s a 2:47 minute video promo on the book:
Even more interesting (and NOT a promo piece for the book) is Wright’s response on Hell. About 3:16 minutes.
On April 30th, we’ll encounter “Theodicy”, also known as the topic of why a good God allows evil, and these such questions:
• What or who is evil?
• What is the point of evil?
• Why does God let evil happen?
• What should we do about it?
So, I’m putting those tough questions out to you. Maybe you’ll help me prepare for the class a bit better. What is a “must” to include in my lesson? What bit about “understanding” evil has been most helpful to you?
Thanks for your help.
-Lisa
