After I read through the chapter, Micah 4, the children told me their first impressions. One student was confused. On the one hand, the Lord was so nice, encouraging all the nations to come to him. On the other hand, he judges and rejects the people. I noted that this contradictory dynamic existed in the…
Category: Micah
Swords to Plowshares
My first question today to the youngest children of Ephesus School was, “How do you know English? Why do you speak English and not Spanish or another language? People who don’t know English think it’s a hard language to learn, so how do you know how to speak it?” Their answers boiled down to, “Our…
Micah’s Zero Sum Game
The difficulty of biblical wisdom is that it imposes the concatenation of words with real world actions, things, and outcomes. In Genesis, male patriarchy is subverted through successive generations plagued by sterility. We call Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob “fathers,” yet which of them was able to produce offspring? (Genesis 21:1-2; 25:21) While our chauvinism presumes…
They Cry “Peace”
In the long litany of excuses given to avoid biblical accountability, my personal favorite goes something like, “the Old Testament is too violent,” or “the Bible is too negative.” Lamenting the many and various examples of scriptural cruelty, abuse, and assorted graphic unpleasantries, biblical detractors suggest that humanity should instead “focus on the positive.” In…
Painful But Necessary
This week, I had the opportunity to fill in for Mrs. Benton’s class with the youngest children. In her absence, we reviewed the first and second chapters of Micah. Our discussion was about God being angry at the people and telling them that he was going to punish them because they didn’t listen to his commandments. To…
Will Israel miss the Lord?
God lets–even makes–people leave so that they’ll miss him. We began today’s lesson recounting a story about Ramona from Beverly Cleary’s books about this young girl. On one occasion, Ramona gets angry with her dad and decides to run away from home. Rather than scold or beg Ramona to stay, her mother surprisingly helps her…
Worse than a Deadbeat Dad
Religious readers often underestimate the centrality of metaphor to the Bible’s genre. Even when we acknowledge metaphor at work, we dismiss it as secondary to an assumed event in time, or contextualize its meaning with our own experience and perspective. In both cases, we ignore a symbol’s natural setting in history and its integration with…
Let’s Preach Rainbows and Unicorns for the Kids!
We don’t like our children to be troubled by difficult news. Especially in America where our children do not face daily struggles of war and famine like they do in other parts of the world, we would rather flip on the Saturday morning cartoons and let the commercials preach rainbows and unicorns. A child’s dream…
Micah’s hard word against Judah
The children’s eyes lit up again this week when I told them more about Israelite history. I recounted King Ahaz’s crime, to call in the Assyrian army to defend Judah against aggression from the northern alliance of Israel and Aram. Just hearing this caused suspicion in the children; how would King Ahaz know that Assyria…
Micah & the Big “I Told You So”
The prophecy of Micah begins with a literary motif that is at once normative and exclusive to the Bible’s genre. In the realm of philosophical religions, it is common to justify suffering via theodicy, the foolish attempt to reconcile rational concepts of God with the existence of evil. When disaster strikes we have come to…