Power blip
This day started out poorly. Power went out at 7:15, when it was 2 above outside. Evergy blamed “equipment failure,” promised to restore power by 8:45, then 9:00, then 10:00 a.m. Service was finally restored about 9:30. Happy days are here again!
You just don’t know how much you rely on electricity until you walk into a room and flip a switch – and nothing happens. What a wonderful world, eh?
Power or not, we left home to go to Resurrection Spring Hill for a work project on Martin Luther King’s birthday. We filled 800 lunch bags with prepackaged food – in less than an hour. That’s testimony to some careful prep work and the number of volunteers who showed up to help. I don’t think I’ve seen the church parking lot so full since opening day on Sept. 8. A great turnout for a good cause!
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Sad to say, I read that Alabama and Mississippi still celebrate King’s birthday in conjunction with the birthday of Robert E. Lee on Jan. 19. How can we celebrate the birth of a human rights pioneer on the same day that we remember (and some celebrate) the birth of a vicious slaver who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers (both sides) during the Civil War?
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In my most recent blog, I remarked on the death of two giants in our land, former President Jimmy Carter and theologian John B. Cobb.
Today I want to remember another giant, theologian Richard B. Hays, who died Jan. 3.
Since 1996, his book The Moral Vision of the New Testament has been a standard text in almost all seminary classrooms. Only months before his death, he and his son published The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story, in which the elder Hays concludes that his earlier reading about the Bible and homosexuality was wrong.
In his earlier work, he stated that the Bible clearly condemned same-sex relationships. In his later work, he states though the rules have not changed, how we may interpret them has changed. We need to view all biblical passages through the wider, kinder lens of God’s love, for even God once admitted, “I gave [ Israel ] statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live” (Ezekiel 20:25).
Father and son Hays conclude, with Saint Augustine, that any reading of the Bible that does not lead you to greater love is a faulty reading. Naturally, the book has been greatly debated, and the elder Hays has been condemned in the usual circles for having changed his mind.
Such is the courage of giants.
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Maybe he’s not a giant yet, but Jeff Atwood is working on it. He’s the co-founder of Stack Overflow, a tech startup that was sold for $1.5 billion in 2021. He hasn’t revealed the size of his fortune, but he says he’s going to give away half of it in the next five years. He says it’s his way of evening out some of the inequalities between most Americans and the privileged few.
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It’s too cold to do much except blog, so I’ll be back soon with that promised mention of the top book of theology of 2024 and a surprising slip of heresy by a major Christian publisher.