December, 2009:

Peanuts Dead Sea Scrolls – More Christmas Comics

I always had the red fire truck. This isn’t a complete wrap up of Christmas comics, but just a couple that I thought were good enough to share. What is great about the Peanuts strip is that Charles Schultz created this in 1962! The Scrolls were recently discovered and he has a nice drawing of a scroll in the first panel. I am still trying to ID the fragment, I assume it is 1 Sam. (since 1QIsa is a much more complete manuscript) but I do not have my images here and I cannot identify the text clearly. Anyone with better eyes than mine?

The Bizarro strip is entirely too accurate. (more…)

A happy & blessed Christmas to you all!

Dec 25th, 2009

by Christian Brady.

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Fortunately Santa managed to extricate himself from the plane (see the right) and made it to our house with ease. I hope that you all have a wonderful Christmas!

Below is my sermon from Christmas 2008.

Christmas Day (Service on Christmas Eve)
Selection I, RCL
All Years

Isaiah 9:2-7
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14(15-20)
Psalm 96

“To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

I wish you all a very happy and blessed Christmas! The weather today is ugly and cold, but within these walls there is light and warmth. At long last our period of waiting is over! Over this Advent season we have contemplated Christ’s coming again even as we have prepared to remember his first arrival as a small child. Even in these difficult economic times this season fills our lives with business and things. But tonight we take pause and worship God born as a child. This is, after all, Christ’s mass.

It is for many good reasons that Christmas is perhaps the best known of Christian festivals. That may be primarily due to the practice of giving and getting gifts, Christmas is now a major festival in China and its popularity is driven purely by commerce, but all the same Christmas is so familiar that we often forget that at its heart lies perhaps the most challenging and fundamental of Christian beliefs. The birth of Jesus is nothing less than the incarnation of God. This baby Jesus is the “indwelling” of God in the flesh. He is “Emmanuel,” God with us.

The Gospel of John opens with this simple and yet revolutionary assertion about the person and identity of Jesus.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Jesus is God. I spoke of this two Sundays ago and commented then that this is a mystery. It is a mystery in the sense not that it is a problem to be solved, like a murder mystery, but rather it is a truth that is only known through revelation. That we do not fully understand how this happens does not mean that we cannot appreciate and contemplate what the humanity of Jesus means for us tonight.

God becoming human is not just a theological concept for contemplation and debate, the incarnation is about God expressing his will directly to us through his son Jesus. The very notion of God’s humanity is about bringing to humanity those things that words cannot express. You could say that Jesus is God’s response to “don’t tell me, show me.” The fact that Jesus lived and walked among us, that he had friends and followers, that he was a child growing up with hunger and sleeplessness, weariness and pain, temptations and troubles conveys to us the relational aspect of God’s love. He is not only transcendent, completely other and beyond our comprehension, he is at the same time immanent, here with us, feeling and knowing what life is like for us human creatures.

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The Advent of the Apple Tablet

Dec 23rd, 2009

by Christian Brady.

5 comments

These are all still just rumors, but after my post yesterday regarding e-book readers I felt I should pass along the news that various industry observers (I wonder if I could be an industry observer? I mean after all I watch what goes on, I listen to the podcasts, even contribute to a podcast now and then. So, you know what? I would like to officially declare myself an industry observer. There, I have done.) are convinced Apple will have an event this January and that there is a likelihood that they will announce a 10 inch tablet. If it looks anything like the image here, courtesy of The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and functions as a decent word processor I’m likely to be very pleased Apple user.

I will say, however, I’m not sure how I feel about a device that is only going to run iPhone applications. I can do a lot with my iPhone, but if I’m going to have a device as big as a 10 inch screen I want to be able to do real work on it. Being able to connect a Bluetooth keyboard will be a must and a decent word processor whose files I can open in Microsoft Word or, better yet, NisusWriter Pro would be imperative. Also, a way to do presentations from this tablet would be important not to mention (and it should go without mentioning because it should be an assumption) the ability to take notes directly on the screen to my PDFs, presentations, websites, anything I can bring up on the screen. Obviously my expectations for tablet are far more than my expectations for an e-book reader. And I expect the price will be commensurate.

Comic Caption Contest: The Professor’s Office

Dec 23rd, 2009

by Christian Brady.

7 comments

This one might be a little more challenging and is not directly Bible related. So I thought I would specify that this is a professor’s office to keep it somewhat loosely connected to the general themes of my blog.

Genesis 2 – What did God know and when did he know it?

Dec 22nd, 2009

by Christian Brady.

2 comments

Or why didn’t God realize that the sheep weren’t going to do it for the Man?

Gen. 2.18 Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” 19 So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air.

This is a part of my slowly developing series on Genesis. I am skipping, for the moment, God’s command to the Man that he not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil since I will address that when the serpent addresses the Woman.

It is always amazing to me how my students and even parishioners, many of whom think they know this story intimately, have never noticed that God, realizing the Man needs a helper, begins with animals and not with the woman. It doesn’t take long, however, to see why the story moves in the manner that it does. It is not, as I cheekily imply in my sub-title, that God does not realize what the Man’s needs are. Rather it is the Man who does not yet understand his needs.

Non Sequitur by Wiley

The process of learning is one that is best done experientially. There are some, and I am not one of them, who can hear some fact or be told a truth and they immediately internalize and comprehend it. Most of us not only benefit from being told something but also require the experience of it ourselves. For example, you could describe in great detail would be like to parachute out of a plane but until I do it for myself I won’t truly know what that experience is. Or, more relevant to this discussion, and all too true in my own life, you could tell me how beneficial exercise is and how much better I will feel having exercised on a regular basis but until I have tried it myself (and let’s face it, for the day or so after I first begin taking such advice) I won’t really know the truth of such assertions.

So the Man does not yet realize what he is missing by not having a helpmate. By going through the process of becoming familiar with the animals the man begins to understand for himself exactly what a true partner or helper should be like. Each of the animals has its own role and can be a comforter or a helper and even a companion to a certain extent for the men. Yet none are his equal.

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