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Bible meme

I’ve been tagged by the Young Fogey:

1. How many Bibles are in your home?

Five full Bibles
Four children’s Bibles
Three partial ‘Bibles’

2. What rooms are they in?

The five full Bibles are in the family office.
One children’s Bible is in the dining room the others are in the children’s rooms.
Of the partial Bibles, one is in our office, and two are at our parish.

3. What translations do you have?

Whole Bibles

  1. The New American Bible (paperback, 1970)
  2. The New American Bible (1992 with revised New Testament)
  3. Douay/Confraternity Bible (1955, Daughters of St. Paul)
  4. The New English Bible with Apocrypha (1971, Oxford University Press)
  5. The New International Version

Children’s Bibles

  1. Read with me Bible (NIrV Children’s Bible, ZonderKidz, 2000)
  2. The Children’s Bible (Golden Press, 1965)
  3. The Beginners Bible (Zondervan, 1989)
  4. The Book for Children (Tyndale, 2000)

Partial

  1. The Lectionary for Mass, 1970 Edition
  2. Book of Sung Gospels, 3rd Edition, CanticaNova
  3. Christian Prayer, The Liturgy of the Hours, Helicon Press, 1976 (one volume edition)

4. Do you have a preference?

For beautiful reading I love the Douay/Confraternity edition. For study and homily preparation the NAB edition, since it is what is used at Holy Mass in the PNCC. For comparative I use online resources and generally refer to the Revised Standard Version and the NIV. The RSV with Apocrypha is the official study Bible of the PNCC.

5. Nominate an interesting verse:

1 John 4:18

Love has no room for fear;
rather, perfect love casts out all fear.

I pass this on to Edward Yong and Mr. and Mrs. Darwin.

Political

Thou shalt not kill

Laurence Vance provides an interesting perspective on the Fifth Commandment, —You shall not kill.— (NAB, Exodus 20:13).

He writes about the Commandment in relation to his perspective on the war in Iraq.

Here is an excerpt from Is It or Isn’t It? by Laurence M. Vance

“Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13)

There seems to be an inordinate number of Hebrew scholars who support the war in Iraq. It was not until recently, however, that I realized just how many of them are readers of this website. True, I always hear from one or two whenever I write about Christianity and war and happen to reference the above commandment, but the last time I wrote about this subject, the Hebrew scholars came out in droves.

I was told that a more [appropriate, proper, precise, preferred] translation of the sixth commandment, according to the original Hebrew, would be: “Thou shalt not commit murder” or “Thou shalt do no murder.” My rendering of the sixth commandment (actually, it is the rendering found in the Holy Bible) is unjustified and simplistic.

…

Read the whole article and you will see that he makes good sense, although I would disagree only on the level that disengagement would upset the ‘apple cart’.

What do I mean?

I think we have to get to a clear understanding of the reasons for our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I never bought the WMD or nuclear argument.

We’re smart enough and technologically advanced enough to know where that stuff would have been, had it been real. The U.S. or a surrogate (Israel) would have just bombed the locations to dust. This is what will happen if the Iranian threat is real or if North Korea gets any crazier than it is already.

The same goes for terrorism. In a general sense we know where Osama is. If we wish we could just fly in and obliterate whole tracts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. If people actually think the U.S. wouldn’t do this they are deceiving themselves.

And that is the key. That is the why.

We’ve taken self deception in regard to the power and might of the U.S. off the table. Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and many others all know that in order to achieve self preservation they have to bow to the U.S.

The House of Saud will never cut off oil. They know we are crazy enough and strong enough to melt the dessert. We’ll even let our sons and daughters die and burn tons of money, just to drive that point home.

We’ve simply taken the Cold War concept of spheres of influence and changed its paradigm. We’ve allowed Moslem leaders a big enough box to operate in (e.g., letting the Taliban blow up cultural treasures). We can close the box anytime and cut off the air. We can crush the box if we wish, or just leave it alone. The freedom that was obtained for the Christian man being persecuted in Afghanistan testifies to this truth. We will get what we want when we really want it.

Obviously, none of this squares with the commands of God or our life in Christ. None of it is right in the true sense of right. All of it is driven by economics and power politics.

That is the reality. That is why disengagement will not happen, why the ‘apple cart’ will not be upset, and why, as the Bush administration claimed in recent days, Bush’s successor will inherit this ‘war’.

I give Mr. Vance credit for testifying to the truth. I am just sorry that so few are persuaded to embrace not just the facts of the situation but the greater truth which is our life in Christ.

Current Events, Political

Walesa – on Political and Moral Leadership

Lech Walesa, former President of Poland and Nobel Peace Prize winner, is visiting the United States on a speaking tour. The Daily Times carried an article about his speech at Salisbury University in Maryland.

Power, respect, responsibility

SALISBURY — Former Polish president and Democratic activist Lech Walesa gently chided the United States in an address to more than 1,500 people at Salisbury University to think hard about the examples and leadership it is offering the world as the globe’s most powerful nation.

In a largely lighthearted speech, delivered in Polish with the help of an English interpreter, Walesa talked about America with fondness and respect, invariably calling it “the superpower,” and he demurred when a questioner asked if he specifically condemned America’s war in Iraq.

“I’m not saying that you are no longer the hope” for the world’s oppressed people, Walesa said, but he urged the U.S. and Europe to find solutions to world problems that did not involve resorting to violence.

“No longer, the empire of evil exists,” Walesa said, referring to the Soviet Union. “You are the only superpower left on the battlefield. … You have involved yourself in solving other people’s problems. Are you a political and moral leader in the world?”

Walesa, the president of Poland from 1990 to 1995, played a key role in the 1980s in ending that country’s Cold War-era dominion by Communist governments. He was the leader and public face of Solidarity, a Polish labor movement that acted as the opposition to Communism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1983, and spoke at Salisbury University at the invitation of the Center for Conflict Resolution.

…

Homilies

Passion Sunday

My brothers and sisters in Christ,

We all know where the narrative of the Passion is leading. We know because we are the beneficiaries of Jesus’ passion and death upon the cross. For us it is a historical and an ever present reality. Moreover, we are joined to Jesus’ passion and death by our baptism.

As St. Paul tells us, in baptism we died with Christ. We died and were buried with Him in the waters of baptism.

What we must do today, and in this Passiontide, the two weeks leading up to Easter, is to find our place within the passion. As the famous hymn asks: Were you there?

Were you there? Indeed! While you were there, what role did you play?

Three things stand out in the Passion, three things in relation to who we are as followers of Christ.

Are we Judas?

Listen again:

—The man I shall kiss is the one;
arrest him and lead him away securely.—

Do we stand ready to betray the Lord when the Lord’s will does not fit our own? Do we place our expectations of God before the reality of God?

Each week you kiss the Lord. You take Him upon your lips when you received the Holy Eucharist. Are you kissing Him in love or in betrayal?

During this Passiontide recommit yourselves to embracing the Lord’s will for your life. Set aside sinfulness and repent. Live your life at one with God.

Are we Peter?

Listen again:

He began to curse and to swear,

—I do not know this man about whom you are talking.—

You don’t have to have a rooster in your backyard to be Peter.

How often do you compromise your spiritual integrity?

Does it happen every time you walk through the doors at work, every time you enter the mall, every time you go along to get along? That rooster is crowing loud and clear.

During this Passiontide recommit yourselves to professing your faith in the Lord. Not the Lord the world wants to hear about, the Lord the world needs to hear about. Set aside weak faith and the tendency to compromise and justify. Live your life with God in the center and on the throne.

Are you the soldier beneath the cross?

Listen again:

—Truly this man was the Son of God!—

You have to listen carefully. —Truly this man WAS the Son of God!—

Well, to that soldier, and to many of us, He was. He’s dead now. He’s dead in the most real way possible, not just in terms of earthly existence, but in our hearts and minds.

We can believe that Jesus was a great guy, that He never caused anyone any problems, that He is all happy-happy, joy-joy. We can even believe that He was real. What we can’t get our minds around is that He is God. That what he taught is the truth. That as God he humiliated Himself, took on our form, and suffered and died for us. It is even harder to believe that what He said was true: That the temple would be destroyed and rebuilt in three days.

My friends,

Ask yourselves this important question this Passiontide. Who is Jesus? God or not God? Alive or dead? Awaken your faith and proclaim the truth. Jesus Christ, true God and true man. Jesus Christ, who suffered, died, and was buried. Jesus Christ who rose again on the third day. Jesus Christ who took away the sins of the world.

Then you will be ready to see the empty tomb. You will see it clearly this Easter Sunday morning and understand its meaning.

PNCC

Passiontide

This Sunday the PNCC celebrates Passion Sunday and thus begins the Passiontide. For more information on this topic/tradition see the wiki on Passion Sunday. Our parish will also be celebrating our Lenten penitential service at the beginning of all Holy Masses.

Media

The Statistical Validity of Prayer

Statistics are valid to the extent that they measure something measurable.

Case in point is today’s report, which the media is trumping up to say, as today’s headlines say: Prayer does not heal the sick, study finds

Of course those perusing the headline will draw their conclusions from the headline itself. That’s because we assume science can provide all the answers. Certainly, good science can provide a lot of answers. However, bad science and badly designed studies prove nothing.

To wit, those who read the story will see that the study’s authors report that their study proved nothing (except for the fact that they have some money in their pocket):

But the study “did not move us forward or backward” in understanding the effects of prayer, admitted Dr Charles Bethea, one of the co-authors and a cardiologist at the Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City. “Intercessory prayer under our restricted format had a neutral effect,” he said.

From a real simplistic perspective: Were all patients in the study groups equally sick with equal pre-existing lifestyles and habits? Was the prayer genuine? Does God answer prayers to meet our will or to bring about His own will? Hmmmm… gets fuzzier.

If I create a room in which an absolute temperature of zero Celsius is maintained, and I put a glass of pure water in it, it will freeze. I can control the room, the temperature, the water, and all the conditions of the study. As studies become less defined, with fewer and fewer controlled inputs, as this one is, the results become merely speculative.

God is God and faith in Him is our privilege. I continue to pray.

That the Deity is incomprehensible, and that we ought not to pry into and meddle with the things which have not been delivered to us by the holy Prophets, and Apostles, and Evangelists.

No one hath seen God at any time; the Only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him. The Deity, therefore, is ineffable and incomprehensible. For no one knoweth the Father, save the Son, nor the Son, save the Father. And the Holy Spirit, too, so knows the things of God as the spirit of the man knows the things that are in him. Moreover, after the first and blessed nature no one, not of men only, but even of supramundane powers, and the Cherubim, I say, and Seraphim themselves, has ever known God, save he to whom He revealed Himself.

God, however, did not leave us in absolute ignorance. For the knowledge of God’s existence has been implanted by Him in all by nature. This creation, too, and its maintenance, and its government, proclaim the majesty of the Divine nature. Moreover, by the Law and the Prophets in former times and afterwards by His Only-begotten Son, our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ, He disclosed to us the knowledge of Himself as that was possible for us. All things, therefore, that have been delivered to us by Law and Prophets and Apostles and Evangelists we receive, and know, and honour, seeking for nothing beyond these. For God, being good, is the cause of all good, subject neither to envy nor to any passion. For envy is far removed from the Divine nature, which is both passionless and only good. As knowing all things, therefore, and providing for what is profitable for each, He revealed that which it was to our profit to know; but what we were unable to bear He kept secret. With these things let us be satisfied, and let us abide by them, not removing everlasting boundaries, nor overpassing the divine tradition.

An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, John of Damascus, Book I, Chapter I

Saints and Martyrs

March 31 – St. Balbina (Św. Balbina)

O święta Balbino, któraś wiarę Chrystusową nie tylko ustami wyznawała, ale nadto uczynkami stwierdzała, uproś nam u Boga tę łaskę, abyśmy wiarę naszą zawsze gorąco kochali, i kiedyś z Tobą wiecznej chwały zażywać mogli. Przez Chrystusa Pana naszego. Amen

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