Sturtz Stuff

When I heard about the book by Hays and Hays titled The Widening of God Mercy I was intrigued. I had read Richard Hays' book The Moral Vision of the New Testament in seminary, especially the chapter on homosexuality. I ended up adopting much, if not all, of Hays' position on homosexuality and often used his reasoning while serving as a church minister.  I have read other things that Richard Hays has written such as Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness and found it beneficial to my understanding of Jesus and what it means to be a follower of Jesus. When it was suggested that Richard Hays might have changed his mind about what he wrote in  The Moral Vision of the New Testament  on homosexuality, I wanted to find out for myself.  My Context I spent over ten years doing youth ministry in the local church. I now know many adults who used to be teenagers in my youth group. Some of those adults are gay or lesbian. That means unbeknownst ...

Some folks like to hug, and others would rather eat glass than get a hug. Okay, maybe not eat glass but they aren’t into hugs. You know who you are! Wherever you might be on the hug me or don’t hug me spectrum our human bodies were designed for human contact to thrive.1,2 Physical touch like a hug or holding a person’s hand can reduce pain, lower cortisol levels, boost immune responses, and foster empathy. Physical touch can also have a positive impact on our emotional health as well. It is a powerful moment when you feel down, outcast, and excluded and someone acknowledges your humanity with a handshake, hug, or hand placed on your shoulder. The point is there is power in human touch that goes beyond what our eyes can see. Frederick Buechner in his book  Whistling in the Dark talks about the power of human touch when he writes:  I hear your words. I see your face. I smell the rain in your hair, the coffee on your breath. I am inside me experiencing you as you are inside you ...

There are a lot of things to protest in our culture at the moment. We have witnessed protests that desire to lament racism. We have seen protests that yearn for justice for the disenfranchised and poor. In the midst of all of this I have not witnessed a single protest suggesting that less listening needs to happen. “There is too much listening!” is not the cry of any protester. In fact there is a deep desire to be heard. Not just heard but listened to and understood in some manner.  In all my years of doing local church ministry, serving as a chaplain, being a Father or just doing life I have never had anyone complain about having been listened to well. Nobody has ever complained that they felt someone had truly listened to them. Most of us have experienced the opposite. Perhaps there are a few rare occasions that we might recall in our lives when we could say that someone truly listened to us.  More often we feel ignored. We feel like there was a lot of talking yet nobody was...

13 Later they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to Jesus to catch him in his words. 14 They came to him and said, “Teacher, we know that you are a man of integrity. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are; but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not? 15 Should we pay or shouldn’t we?” But Jesus knew their hypocrisy. “Why are you trying to trap me?” he asked. “Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.” 16 They brought the coin, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. 17 Then Jesus said to them, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” And they were amazed at him. (Mark 12:13-17)  What are your politics Jesus? That is what these questioners sent by the Pharisees and the Herodians want to know. They trot out a specific and highly contentious political issue in an attempt to trip Jesus up. The Pharisees...

Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” 27 So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian[a] eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Kandake (which means “queen of the Ethiopians”). This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, 28 and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet. 29 The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.” 30 Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked. 31 “How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. 32 This is the passage of Scripture the eunuch was reading: “He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth. 33 In his humiliation he was deprived of justice. Who can speak of his descenda...

We were all born into a world that is in love with differences. The love language that we have all learned is that of enmity towards those who are different. By the time I was a teenager I had been to Sunday School long enough to learn that all other churches except for those from my tradition were suspect. Their doctrine was wrong. Their view of the Bible was wrong. The church I went to emphasized, almost every Sunday, that our community did things in the manner of the early church. That made us special. Because our doctrine and practices were better, my church was in some sense superior to say a Baptist church or a Methodist church. We knew who the real Christians were. In fact my church community could give you the book, chapter and verse, from the Bible, as to why we were better.  The central question of faith for me as a kid was who is in and who is out. Faith was a debate and faithfulness was about being both right and self-righteous about being right. This kind of posturing ...

Don’t know if you have ever seen the TV show called Six Feet Under . It was a show about a family that own and operated a funeral home. Each episode started with a short vignette in which someone would die. The character that died in the opening vignette would become the body at the family funeral home for the rest of the episode. There are about six main characters on the show. However, the way that the show was shot, written and produced it made sure that there was one main character that was above all the others and in the forefront of everything that happen to all the other characters. That main character was death. Death was at the forefront of every show. It made the show very challenging to watch. It confronts you with something that we spend most of our lives attempting to ignore. The reason I bring this up is because this is very much like the book of Ecclesiastes. The book’s main character is death. The book constantly brings up the issue of death. Which is a reason why t...