Core Values

  Jack Ingold scored the last bucket in Lipscomb University’s first-round game in the NCAA
tournament against Iowa State. 

    It would have been really cool if the senior from West Virginia had hit a three to win the game at the buzzer. That isn’t how it happened. It was an uncontested layup. The outcome of the game was not in doubt, nor was it really ever in doubt. Lipscomb was a 14-seed in the tournament; Iowa State was a 3-seed. Fourteen seeds were 23-133 in the first round going into this year’s tournament, and Lipscomb did not shock the world. Their season is over.

     So is Jack Ingold’s college career, I suppose. He wasn’t a star for Lipscomb, or even a starter; he played the last two minutes, when both teams were emptying their benches. There won’t be an NBA contract in his future. But he can say he did something that few people who play college basketball can; he played in and scored a basket in the Big Dance, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.

     Pretty good for a guy who started his career as the team manager. Jack wrote just over a year ago on the Lipscomb athletics website about “falling in love with basketball” as a kid and wanting to play basketball at Lipscomb since he was in the fifth grade.  He also writes honestly, 

“Through tears, fits of anger, and fear of the future, I shut out the world. No one would ever understand me and what I was willing to do in order to reach my goal. In my heart I knew I would reach the top of that mountain and I longed for the day I would stand proudly looking down on all those who said I wouldn’t."

     The Covid pandemic affected his senior year of high school, and he had no offers from colleges to play ball. He went to Lipscomb anyway, and tried to find a way to be part of the basketball team. “Basketball was not something I did, basketball was who I was,” he wrote. “Without it I was lost, the time I used to fill with basketball became filled with anxiety, poor decision making and insecurity. I was falling down the mountain and had no way to stop myself.”

     Jack eventually earned the opportunity to be the team manager, with a promise from Head Coach Lennie Acuff that if he did well in that role he could dress for games and play some the following season. By his junior year, here’s what Jack had learned:  

“All these years someone much greater than myself was writing my story and guiding each of my steps. The Lord did not bring me to Lipscomb to play a sport, but instead graciously provided me this avenue to share of His goodness. My life has become much bigger than basketball. I'm called to serve, love and share the story God has given me.”

     For most of us, maybe, there’s something in our lives that, if we lost it, we’d be rudderless. What we all need to learn, I suppose, is what Jack Ingold learned: That Jesus wants to be that for us. And that, because of him, our lives are bigger than whatever else gives us satisfaction, joy, purpose, and identity. In Jesus, our lives are bigger than whatever else we might fall in love with. We’re part of his story in the world, called and given the responsibility of serving, loving, and sharing the stories God has given us.

     Our world needs that. Where love and compassion are seen as weaknesses, our world needs us to double down on them and show their strength and power. In a country whose leaders are right now shutting people out, cutting people off, and ending programs that help people who will otherwise fall through the cracks, in order to benefit the few who already own most of the wealth and power in the nation, we simply must remember that Jesus is our first love. 

     John wrote that there’s no other way to love than by laying down our lives, the way we’ve learned from Jesus. When others demean compassion and care for others as being “woke” or “politically correct,” we must remember that the only way to love genuinely is by our actions, in generosity and kindness. It demands persistence, single-mindedness, and a willingness to put others above ourselves.

     It may even require that we let go of what we love most in the world, and discover someone even greater to love.

     Jack Ingold actually got a lot of camera time in the last two minutes of Lipscomb’s game this weekend. That’s probably because of this video, which kind of went viral back in December at the beginning of basketball season months after Jack's post. I won’t spoil it for you; just make sure you watch it somewhere it won’t be awkward if you tear up. 

     Listen to the words that describe Jack: “You are selfless…thankful…humble…driven…committed…responsible.” Those are what Coach Acuff refers to as “core values,” and they have to do with a lot more than basketball.

     May we all pursue those core values in everything we do.

     And may we love Jesus and the kingdom of God above all else. 

A Psalm for Grieving Voters

I've been hearing from a lot of people this week who are feeling disappointed, betrayed, and angry. Those feelings come from a lot of different places, but they coalesce around the election of a convicted felon, a man who lobs words like weapons of mass destruction into riled-up crowds, and then pretends to have no responsibility for the outcome. Some are afraid for our democracy, because of the things he's said about "enemies" within and his apparent disdain for the limits of Presidential power, not to mention his unwillingness to give it up. Some are angry because of the awful words he's casually spoken, or sanctioned with his silence, about women, people of color, and immigrants. Some are horrified at the allegations of (and at least one finding of liability for) sexual assault. No President is perfect, every one of them has made mistakes. But it is hard to imagine that we've ever elected one when we knew so thoroughly who we were electing and what he intended to do once in office.

     I say all that not to blame anyone for their vote. Only to say that the feelings of those who are grieving and angry are valid and legitimate.

     So I want to tell you that if you're feeling disappointed, betrayed, and angry, you have a place here. Some of us know exactly what you're feeling. Some of us, maybe, can't know exactly -- but we care that you're feeling it. Those feelings do not make you unpatriotic -- sometimes the most patriotic thing we can do is hold our country to a higher standard. They are neither sins you need to repent of, nor character flaws you need to fix. They are legitimate, and they matter.

      Please hear me when I say that you do not have to pretend you're OK to have a place here. We want to be a community
where you can process those feelings. Where you can just sit with them, if you want. 

     If it makes your skin crawl when someone quotes 1 Timothy, where we're told we should pray for those in power, if you're not ready to even think about that yet, I promise, some of us get it. 

And all of us -- including those who might feel better about how the election went -- will give you the space you need to mourn, and hurt, and work out how to carry on.

     We're going to read together this Sunday from Psalm 146:

"Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save...Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD their God."

And we'll be reminded that we are a community not because we agree on who is most qualified to be President, but because we believe in God, our Father, who is "faithful forever." In his Son, Jesus. We're a community because we're inhabited by his Spirit. And we'll remind each other that our work is not to seek power and privilege in aligning ourselves with the ruling party, but to be a countercultural people who are busy doing God's work of serving the powerless in our world:

"He upholds the cause of the oppressed

     and gives food to the hungry.

The LORD sets prisoners free,

the LORD gives sight to the blind,

the LORD lifts up those who are bowed down,

the LORD loves the righteous.

The LORD watches over the foreigner

     and sustains the fatherless and the widow,

          but he frustrates the ways of the wicked."

Please know that you have a place with us. Please know that, however you're feeling since election day, you're loved and appreciated, and you're an essential part of what God is doing in our neighborhood, our city, in our country, in the world.

On (Not) Having a Hot Take

If you've been watching the Olympics, then you know that there are a couple of things we Christians are supposed to be up in arms over. Or maybe we're not.

     The first is what might have been a mockery of the Last Supper during the opening ceremony, titled “La Cène Sur Un Scène Sur La Seine,” a pun playing on the fact that Cène, ("Last Supper"), "Scène" (stage), and "Seine" (the river that runs through Paris) all sound alike.

     Or maybe that title was actually invented by media, and not the organizers, and maybe it wasn't intended to be a reference to the Last Supper at all, but rather a reference to French food and Dionysius, the God of wine. (The Olympics, of course, originally honored the gods of Mt. Olympus.) Or maybe it was intended to refer to DaVinci's painting -- or to one called “La Cène Sur La Seine,” which hangs in the Pompidou Museum -- but wasn't intended as mockery.

     And then, as if it isn't hard enough to process what we ought to be mad at, there was the saga of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. Khelif was disqualified last year from the IBA championship because her testosterone levels were too high. 

     Or maybe not: the IBA -- which isn't recognized by the IOC -- backed off on its claims, saying only that she failed "a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential", and was "found to have competitive advantages." (It's not hard to discover that the boxer she would have faced in the finals of the event she was disqualified from was Chinese. The IBA is a Russian organization. Make of that what you will.)

     In any case, Khelif has never been found to be ineligible by the IOC, and so was allowed to compete. She was born, lived as, and has always been a woman. But when Italian boxer Angela Carini took a punch to the nose and withdrew from their fight, the Olympics were accused of turning the beating of women by men into a spectator sport. 

     So who are we supposed to be mad at? It's hard to know, isn't it? But, obviously, we're supposed to be mad. The media tells us so. Social media. Conservatives think we should be mad at the liberals, and the liberals think we should be mad at the conservatives. You have to pick a side, right? WWJYA? -- Who Would Jesus Yell At? 

     Or maybe we don't have to be mad at anyone. Maybe we shouldn't be, in fact. Maybe one of the reasons that people are walking away from Christianity in droves is that anger is our default setting. We're always running hot, looking around for someone to be mad at. 

James wrote, two thousand years ago, "Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires." I think we really need to hear that again. I think we really must take it seriously and live it out. 

     Human anger doesn't accomplish what God wants accomplished in society. Everyone does anger. Everyone is looking for a fight. What Christians bring to the table is something that we only get from the gospel, from "the word planted in you." Knowing Jesus means we can choose to listen. To ask questions. To really hear what people are saying. We need to listen before we speak. Sometimes we need to listen instead of speaking. 

     I think if James was with us today, he'd say you don't have to have a hot take on every news story. He'd say you don't have to post an opinion every time something happens in the world. 

If there was mockery intended in The Scene on the Seine, then those who put it together are still people. They're still loved by God, and what I haven't heard in any of the "Christian" hit pieces is an ounce of love. 

     Imane Khelif is a human being. So is Angela Carini, who had to say goodbye to the Olympic dream she worked so hard for. They aren't just positions on a spectrum, pawns in an ideological battle. There aren't always easy answers and black and white positions to stake out. Life gets messy. And so sometimes we have to just shut up, really try to listen to people, and refuse to bow the knee to those who say we have to have an answer. 

     Maybe we'll find out more. We'll find out, maybe, about injustice, corruption, abuse. Maybe we'll find out that everyone was innocent of wrongdoing. If so, will those who came with angry hot takes apologize? Or will they, more likely, delete the posts that embarrass them and turn their attention to the next outrage in the news cycle?

     But we know, human outrage and anger doesn't save. It doesn't help. It doesn't bring about true repentance and it doesn't transform lives. 

     The gospel can. Love can. Love that gathered broken people to a table together and offered his body and blood for them. Love that took the blows of outraged, angry people and didn't resist, didn't fight back.

     Will people in our world see that love from us? Or will they only see our outrage and anger?

About That "Very Critical Alert..."

 I've been asked a couple of times recently about a meme running around on social media. It's kind of a mashup of accusations against the New International Version and English Standard Version of the Bible, tinged with some Satanic Panic hysteria. Ordinarily I wouldn't think it would even deserve comment, but since I've been asked, and since we have the NIV in our pews at Northwest and I know some of us use the ESV, I thought maybe I should comment briefly.

     There are different versions of the post, but most of them start with something like "VERY CRITICAL ALERT." They go on to allege that the NIV and ESV have "removed 64,575 words from the Bible, including Jehovah, Calvary, Holy Ghost, and omnipotent, to name but a few." The post also says that the versions in question have "removed 45 complete verses." 

     You're advised at the end of the post that "if you must use the NIV or ESV, buy and keep an earlier version of the Bible." The loss of all these words and verses, the post alleges, happens when you're asked to update digital Bible apps. 

     There's so much ignorance here, willful or otherwise, that it makes your head spin.

     To address the words that the versions in question supposedly leave out: "Jehovah" occurs 4 times in the King James Version of the Bible, but is used much more often in the American Standard Version of 1901. It's a very awkward attempt to denote the name by which God revealed himself to Israel, often spelled Yahweh or just YHWH. Since Jewish people often tried to avoid pronouncing God's name (even when the pronunciation was known) to keep from taking his name in vain, they would substitute the word Adonai -- "Lord." "Jehovah" is the combination of the consonants of God's name with the vowels of adonai. It doesn't appear in the NIV or ESV because nearly every modern translation now signifies the name "Yahweh" by "LORD" (in all caps). God's name is not removed in those verses -- it's just translated "LORD."

     "Calvary" doesn't appear in Luke 23:33 because it's just a transliteration of a Latin word that means "skull." The NIV and ESV translate the word instead, and so, instead of "the place which is called Calvary," you have "the place called the skull" -- which is a better translation.

     "Holy Ghost" doesn't appear in the suspect translations because modern translations use "Holy Spirit." "Omnipotent" doesn't appear because newer translations choose "Almighty". Strong cases can be made that for modern English speakers, those choices are better.  

     As for the 45 verses supposedly "removed" -- it is closer to the truth to say that older translations "added" those verses. The people who translate the Bible from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek to English (or any other language) need a base text to translate from. Since there is no "original Bible," translators work from handwritten copies of copies of copies, mostly in small pieces, a few complete or almost-complete manuscripts, and some quotations and sermons, ranging from the second century to the 13th or 14th century. All of those manuscripts and fragments differ from each other in small ways -- including words, phrases, verses, and a few even larger chunks that appear in some manuscripts and not others. 

     People who specialize in using those manuscripts to reconstruct
the text of the Bible that underlies our English translations are always working and revising as our understanding changes. They have criteria for making the decisions about what is most likely to be the original text of the Old and New Testaments. It isn't an exact science, but it IS a science.

     Earlier translations, like the KJV, used a base text that is different from the one used by more current translations, because the KJV translators didn't know about the many manuscripts discovered in the 413 years since it was published. Some of those differences include verses that are no longer regarded as original by most scholars who specialize in this field. Those 45 verses cited in the meme fall into this category. They include the longer ending of Mark, several instances in the Gospels in which harmonization occurred (Why "remove" Matthew 18:11 and leave Luke 19:10, which both say the same thing?), and instances like the Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7-8 in the KJV), in which it seems that commentary originally jotted in the margins of a manuscript was included in the Bible text by later copyists. 

     In short, the VERY CRITICAL ALERT actually describes the normal practice of biblical scholars who want to reconstruct as nearly as possible the original text of the Bible -- with nothing subtracted from it or added to it --  and translate it in a way that can be understood.

     Every major English translation that you're likely to get your hands on is useful and can be trusted. Don't fall for posts by people who, at best, don't understand the nuances of a very specific field of study. 

     Let's thank God for Scripture, and for the people who help to make it more accessible and understandable. And let's read it often -- whatever translation you choose!   

Trying a Different Bible: "Foaming at the Mouth" in Micah 2:6-11

 Sometimes a different Bible translation catches me flat-footed. It happened just recently to me in a study of the book of Micah. I asked someone to read out loud chapter 2:6-11, which in the New International Version (my default translation) says this:

“Do not prophesy,” their prophets say. “Do not prophesy about these things; disgrace will not overtake us.” 7 You descendants of Jacob, should it be said, “Does the LORD become impatient? Does he do such things?” Do not my words do good to the one whose ways are upright? 8 Lately my people have risen up like an enemy. You strip off the rich robe from those who pass by without a care, like men returning from battle. 9 You drive the women of my people from their pleasant homes. You take away my blessing from their children forever. 10 Get up, go away! For this is not your resting place, because it is defiled, it is ruined, beyond all remedy. 11 If a liar and deceiver comes and says, “I will prophesy for you plenty of wine and beer,” that would be just the prophet for this people!

The reader used the New English Bible, and here’s what he read: 

How they rant! They may say, “Do not rant”; but this ranting is all their own, these insults are their own invention. 7 Can one ask, O house of Jacob, “Is the LORD’s patience truly at an end? Are these his deeds? Does good not come of the LORD’s words? He is the upright man’s best friend.” 8 But you are no people for me, rising up as my enemy to my face, to strip the cloak from his that was safe and take away the confidence of returning warriors, 9 to drive the women of my people from their pleasant homes and rob the children of my glory for ever. 10 Up and be gone; this is no resting-place for you, you that to defile yourselves would commit any mischief, mischief however cruel. 11 If anyone had gone about in a spirit of falsehood and lies, saying: “I will rant to you about wine and strong drink,” his ranting would be what this people like.

Just at a glance you can see the differences. There are several that would be interesting to talk about, but what struck me is the lack of explicit mention of anything related to prophecy in verse 6. 

     That was only strange to me because I took for granted that the NIV was pretty literal.

     It’s not, though neither, really, is the NEB. A very  literal translation of verse 6 might go something like this:

“Don’t drip,” they drip. They shouldn’t drip such things. We will not be overtaken by humiliation.”

Obviously, that’s not very helpful. This is an excellent example of how translation must sometimes include  interpretation in order to yield anything intelligible. This is a tough verse for folks who claim that the only good translation of the Bible is a very literal one. 

     So what’s going on here?

    The New English Translation (not related to the New English Bible), in one of their wonderful notes, suggests this translation: “‘Do not foam at the mouth,’ they foam at the mouth,” assuming that the use of “drip” has to do with spit flying from a speaker’s mouth during a particularly impassioned diatribe. In other words, in this view the prophets are “spraying” out words of judgment, and their hearers, with equal vehemence, are insisting that they shouldn’t say such vehement things. 

     The NET’s main translation isn’t quite as memorable, but still tries to capture something similar: “‘Don’t preach with such impassioned rhetoric,’ they say excitedly.” 

     The same word is used twice in verse 11. The NET has there, “If a lying windbag should come and say, ‘I’ll promise you blessings of wine and beer,’ he would be just the right preacher for these people!” In their note, though, they suggest, “If a lying windbag should come and say, ‘I will foam at the mouth concerning wine and beer,’ he would be the foamer at the mouth for this people.”

     (“Lying windbag,” is a great translation too.)

     While I love the “foaming at the mouth” translation, I’m not sure it’s validated by other places in the Old Testament where the same word refers to speaking. The word can be used of speech that isn’t vehement, and is even the opposite; take Job’s description of the respect he commanded before his troubles, where he says, “People listened to me expectantly, waiting in silence for my counsel. After I had spoken, they spoke no more; my words fell gently on their ears.” (Job 29:22) Or Song of Songs 4:11, where the Bride’s “lips drop sweetness as the honeycomb.” Or in Proverbs 5:3, where “the lips of the adulterous woman drip honey.”

     In Ezekiel, the prophet is told (in the King James Version) to “drop thy word toward the south” and “drop thy word toward the holy places” (NIV “preach against the south” and “preach against the sanctuary”). 

     In Amos, as in Micah, the prophet is told by (presumably) the leaders of Israel to “drop not thy word against the house of Isaac” (KJV). In each of these cases, perhaps the prophets were intense in their preaching, spit flying, foaming at the mouth; preaching “against” something or someone certainly suggests that.

     So what’s the “right” translation here? I’m not sure, to be honest. The NIV might miss something by just translating “drip” with “prophesy” in Micah 2. But the New English Translation and the NEB might oversell it with their “foaming at the mouth” and “ranting” translations.

     What different translations of the Bible give us are different options. They keep us from being locked in to one reading of texts that might limit or even prevent our understanding. 

     To be sure, those options are all human ones, and as such subject to every conceivable human weakness.

     But God has chosen to communicate his word to us in just that way. God’s word doesn’t change. But human language always does. So communicating that never-changing word will require some work, some patience, some prayer, and some humility.

     So when you see a difference between two translations don’t let it bother you. It’s not the sign of a conspiracy that someone is trying to change the Bible. It’s a sign that necessary hard work or interpretation is happening. That human beings still care to understand the Bible. 

     Let’s not be drips about it. Let’s not foam at the mouth over it. God still intends that his word will fall into our ears.