As the Deer

We leave today for Crystal Lake, Michigan, where we’ll be counselors at a mini-camp for children.  Crystal Lake is a jewel — I love the different shades of blue on the water.

ADDED:  We arrived home late Tuesday night after three days at mini-camp with a group of 17 eight-year-old girls and boys.  Rain on Monday brought our games and activities indoors, but even so we had a great time.

For anyone interested, here was the final look for the Crocodile Dock set.  The children gathered in front of the dock for singing at the beginning and the end of each session.  We had about ninety children each day.

The set in an earlier stage is here.  (The dock, shack and canvas for the trees are made from styrofoam.)  Check out posts earlier this week for pictures of some of the Bible teaching props — a burning bush, an Israelite house and the Red Sea — which were a slice of the total experience for the children.  They also had crafts, games, snacks, and a video Bible time for the little ones.

It’s over now.  Whew!!  We all had a great time.  A nap is in order.  This week the children learned five good things:

• God is with us.  (Burning Bush)
• God is powerful.  (Plagues on Egypt)
• God does what he says he’ll do.  (Passover)
• God gives us life.  (Jesus dies and comes alive again)
• God cares for us.  (Crossing the Red Sea)

When my last Bible time was done, I thanked the children and told them I hoped they learned as much from the stories as I had.

I devote time each year to children’s ministry by teaching a Bible lesson for older children at our Vacation Bible School.  Not having children of my own, this helps me see life from their level for a few days.

We use Group’s curriculum — it’s experiential, sensory and creative.  This year the theme is Crocodile Dock, and most of the Bible stories come from Exodus.

In Friday’s story the children walk through the Red Sea on dry ground, a wall of water on their right and on their left:

It takes hard work to help children experience a Bible story.  Actually, it can be exhausting, but it’s worth it to see their delighted faces.

The need children have to see and touch things reminds me of the Incarnation.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.  (1 John 1.1 TNIV)

To become children of God, we need to see and touch divine love ourselves and join ourselves to that love by faith.

On Wednesday children in Vacation Bible School heard the story of the Passover.  They painted blood on the door frames of their houses, just as the Israelites did.  The houses were card tables, and the door frames were grocery bags filled with crumpled newspapers.  The ‘blood’ was red paint, which each child applied in turn.

After they crawled inside their house, each group waited for God’s angel to see the blood stains on the door and pass over them.

The Passover story was hard for me to share with children, as was Tuesday’s about the first nine plagues.  These stories raise much moral discomfort.  Even ancient Jewish and Christian interpreters struggled with the moral implausibility of these stories, which fueled their project of interpreting them symbolically so as not to stain God’s hands with blood. For Christians a symbolic reading of the Passover naturally leads to Jesus, the focus of Thursday’s Bible story.

Children think concretely, though, not symbolically.  For them, blood means blood.  Which is good in its own way.  As Kathleen Norris notes, blood imagery in the Bible points our attention to the concrete reality of the Incarnation, the eternal Word made human flesh, bone and blood.

Although dogs can imitate human sounds and give owners an illusion of talking, they’re unable to use their lips and tongues well enough genuinely to talk.  So says Scientific American.

But they can communicate with one another and with humans:

Despite what they may lack in the elocution department, dogs do communicate their feelings to humans as well as read our cues, thanks to domestication, Julia Riedel and colleagues of the Max Planck Institute (M.P.I.) for Evolutionary Anthropology reported in March 2008 in Animal Behavior. Dogs follow people’s pointing, body posture, the direction of their gaze, and touches for cues to find hidden food, notes Mariana Bentosela and colleagues at the University of Buenos Aires in the July 2008 Behavioural Processes. They also gaze at their trainer when they need more information to find their reward.

My dog Jazz and I communicate with one another in non-verbal ways.

What do you think Jazz is communicating here?

Lay a coarse blanket on the floor.  Take larger sticks and place them in a triangle shape on the blanket.  Put a tangle of smaller, brush-like sticks on top of the triangle.  Intertwine two strings of white Christmas tree lights in the brush.  Top it off with plastic greenery, and intertwine this with the rest.  Hide the extension cord under the blanket, and plug it in out of sight behind a curtain.

Our Vacation Bible School began yesterday with 88 children, plus youth and adult volunteers.  The older children heard God’s voice speaking out of this burning bush.  (The voice was on CD behind the curtain.)  They learned that sometimes God asks us to do hard things just like Moses, but God always promises to stay with us and help us finish the task.

The soil in our memorial garden holds the cremains of 24 church members, the latest added only last Friday.  The bright flowers that grow in this rich, sacred earth make this time of year a delight.

It’s a restful place to sit and reflect…

…and listen to the sound of water.

It calls to mind the picture of the original garden:

The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds.  And God saw that it was good.  (Gen. 1.12 TNIV)

If your church doesn’t have a memorial garden, make plans to start one.  It continues the old practice of the churchyard — believers buried where they worshipped God.

I hope my ashes will rest in a place of such beauty and tranquility.

Last night the Adrian Symphony presented a tribute to the Andrews Sisters. Three women sang a medley of their hits in the 30s and 40s, with the orchestra behind them and a thousand toe tapping listeners in the audience.

For two hours the spirits of LaVerne, Maxene and Patty Andrews appeared in the refurbished Dawson Auditorium on the Adrian College campus.

I didn’t know the Andrew Sisters had more hits than Elvis or the Beatles. We heard many — Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree, Bei Mir Bist Du Schön and Rum and Coca-Cola (a favorite with the troops overseas). They also performed other songs from female artists, like Doris Day’s Sentimental Journey. My wife said the best part was hearing hundreds of listeners catch their breath and say “Ahhh” as songs began.

The complexity of the music struck me — all three women last night were accomplished vocalists, and they needed those skills to pull off a credible Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.

I saw only a smattering of people under fifty at the concert.  (At 91, Patty is the only remaining sister.)  I hope the music of the Andrews Sisters lives on after their generation passes.  I trust it will — fine art lingers.

A man I never knew helped change my life.  John Stek, NIV Bible translator, died on June 6th at 84.

In 1979 my family moved to Carson City, Nevada.  At sixteen I was looking to find my way in the world and hungry to read the Bible for myself.  I had an old red covered RSV, but the language felt archaic.  I wanted to pray to a ‘you’ not a ‘thou’.  The New International Version became my Bible.  The pastors at the First Presbyterian Church read from it.

From then on the rich brown hardcover NIV stayed by my bedside.  In college I lugged it around campus in my backpack, like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress making his way book in hand.

At seminary ten years later I dutifully began to use the New RSV, the version my professors favored.  But it was always a step-Bible.  The NIV has continued to hold my affection.  It finds the balance, I think, between faithfulness to the thought of the biblical writers and faithfulness to common English.  I still use the NIV for my devotional reading — given changes in English usage, the TNIV is more suitable now for public worship.

The NIV has taken criticism from fans of the NRSV on the left, and the ESV and NASB on the right.  That puts it more or less in the middle.  It’s the closest thing to a mainstream Protestant Bible.

Translations and their acronyms must confuse people.  I wonder what it was like in England in the sixteenth century when the Bishop’s Bible and the Geneva Bible contested with one another for people’s affection and loyalty.

I doubt there’s a best translation.  These things come down to taste, sentiment and life experience.  All I know is during my formative years the NIV fed my soul.  John Stek helped that happen — he was on the translation committee from the beginning.

So thanks, John Stek.  May he rest in peace.  ‘To live is Christ and to die is gain.’

The presbytery’s Committee on Preparation for Ministry met Wednesday. Though working in a United Methodist congregation, I remain ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA. I serve on this committee as part of my service to the denomination.

Three candidates appeared before us, each on a different segment of the path to ordination.

One began seminary last summer with an intensive Hebrew course, a year’s worth of grammar squeezed into seven weeks. (Biblical languages are required for Presbyterians.) She barely passed, and unfortunately this left her poorly prepared for Old Testament courses. Her GPA sank, and she lost her full scholarship.  Many thousands of dollars gone.  Now she’s scrambling to fund her education.  And the dominoes started falling with the Hebrew requirement.

Her situation reminded me of a poem by Robert Frost, On a Tree Fallen Across the Road:

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
Throws down in front of us is not bar
Our passage to our journey’s end for good,
But just to ask us who we think we are

Insisting always on our own way so.
She likes to halt us in our runner tracks,
And make us get down in a foot of snow
Debating what to do without an ax.

And yet she knows obstruction is in vain:
We will not be put off the final goal
We have it hidden in us to attain,
Not though we have to seize earth by the pole

And, tired of aimless circling in one place,
Steer straight off after something into space.

This student is persistent.  I trust she ‘will not be put off the final goal’ but will find resources to continue her journey.

I took a year of Hebrew in seminary.  Afterward it evaporated. Although it’s essential to scholarship, I question its necessity for parish ministry. If denominations require future ministers to study Hebrew, how much more should they insist on courses in finance or web design? At any rate, putting incoming students in an intensive summer language course seems unwise.

A knowledge of Hebrew will enrich a pastor’s teaching and preaching.  But the absence of such knowledge will not inhibit ministry (and may leave extra room in the brain for other knowledge).

In this student’s case, too, making the language a requirement can all too easily make it a costly hardship, a great tree fallen across the road.