week 5

\This week, the topic is "Worshipping and Singing in Community: Psalms  Lament and Suffering" 
Here is a slightly different version of this week's presentation, filmed for an online class. It's a  multipart  video (7 parts, but only a half-hour total! Watch it in order) by Dave Wainscott (and a few friends) on Psalms and Lament.  Watch carefully if you need to review and take notes, as you will be responding in Forum 1.

Part 1 is below  Listen to the song which is part 1.  Open the lyrics here, and read  along as it plays.  In a way, treat it like other songs  (and Scriptures) we have used in this class: as a text which calls for context and  your Three Worlds skills of interpretation.  Do your best to discern  the main characters , genre, backstory, storyline etc.  (It's easier than Philemon!).  But also be prepared to process how it made you feel.
part 1:


part 2:
  
part 3:
  
part 4:
  
part 5:
  
part 6

part 7: Finish with this song, which Dave prepared you for in part 6:
  

Here are some notes on the above:

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PSALMS

PSALMS are the Jewish prayer-book   that the early Christians used.  What's wonderful, refreshing, honest...and sometimes disturbing  (to us in the West) is that they cover the whole breadth of life and emotion.  They are all technically songs and prayers..  But note how some weave in and out from a person speaking to God, God speaking to a person, a person speaking to himself.  Somehow, Hebraically, holistically, it all counts as prayer.

...And as "song"  Note in your Bible that several psalms have inscriptions which give the name of the tune they are to be prayed/sung to.  Some seem hilarious, counterintuitive, and contradictory, but again not to a Hebrew mindset and worldview, with room for honesty, fuzzy sets and paradox:

• Psalms  (click) with the line "Destroy my enemies", "break their teeth!!" ... To be sung to the tune of "Do Not Destroy"  !!  (Psalm 58:6)
• Psalm 22, a depressing ditty about someone in the throes of rejection despair and death.  To be sung to the tune of "Doe in the Morning"   ??

• Psalm 137:9  "Blessed is the one who 

• seize yours infants and violently dashes 

• them against the rocks"

Remember the Bono quote:

Click here for the audio (or watch here on Youtube) of this delightful statement by Bono:

"God is interested in truth, and only in truth. And that's why God is more interested in Rock & Roll music than Gospel... Many gospel musicians can't write about what's going on in their life, because it's not allowed .  they can't write about their doubt....If you can't write about what's really going on in the world and your life, because it's all happy-clappy... Is God interested in that? I mean, 'Please, don't patronize Me! I want to go the Nine-Inch-Nails gig, they're talking the truth!
-Bono

From a 2003 discussion with New York Times, more audio here

"The Jewish disciples all worshipped Jesus, and some of those worshippers doubted."  (matthew 28:17)

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There are several ways to categorize the psalms.

The first is the way the Bible itself does: Psalms is broken down into 5 "books"  Hmm, 5...does that sound familiar?  Name another book with 5 sections and suggest an answer for "Whats up with the number 5?"

Note the 5 sections are not comprised of different kinds/genres of psalms..but the styles and kinds are "randomnly"

represented throught the book..

kind of like life..

  Here is one way to categorize the styles and genres:

• lament
• imprecatory
• praise
• thanksgiving
• petition

 Walter Brueggemann  suggests another helpful way to categorize the Psalms. 

 Orientation:

o      Creation - in which we consider the world and our place in it

o      Torah - in which we consider the importance of God's revealed will

o      Wisdom - in which we consider the importance of living well

o      Narrative - in which we consider our past and its influence on our present

o      Psalms of Trust - in which we express our trust in God's care and goodness

q        Disorientation:

o      Lament - in which we/I express anger, frustration, confusion about God's (seeming?) absence

§       Communal

§       Individual

o      Penitential - in which we/I express regret and sorrow over wrongs we have done

§       Communal

§       Individual

q        Reorientation/New Oreientation

o      Thanksgiving - in which we thank God for what God has done for us/me

§       Communal

§       Individual

o      Hymns of Praise - in which we praise God for who God is

o      Zion Psalms- in which we praise God for our home

o      Royal Psalms - in which we consider the role of political leadership

o      Covenant Renewal - in which we renew our relationship with God

                                          -Bruggeman, source Click here.

 note how astonishinglyHONEST the prayer/worship book of the  Jews (and Christians) is!

We'll spend some time on the "three worlds" of Psalm 22, which Jesus quotes  honestly  on the cross:

Here (click title below) 's a sermon on Psalm 22, which is another amazing psalm to use in a worship setting...How often have you heard "My God, My God, Why have You forsaken me?"   Or "God, where were YOU when I needed you!!"

  (see 

Sixpence and God both sneak a smoke  

and 

"Is there such a thing as Christian music?")

  in a church song?

Yet how familiar is the very next psalm: 23.

Life is both Psalm 22 and 23...sometimes on the same day, in the same prayer.

If we think both/and...we think Hebrew.

Here's a link with several of the stories and illustrations I talked about tonight Iike the speaker who said "I almost didn't come tonight",,

 

Click the title: 

"The Lord Be With You...Even When He’s Not!"

Live Cam Jerusalem - Western Wall

]

CHIASMs they can grow larger, and the parallelism can be more general, thematic.

And getting over VERSE-ITIS helps a lot in seeing chiasm in the big sweep.  This is Genesis 6:

Or the tower of Babel in Genesis 11:

link

And we're only in the FIRST book of the Bible (:

Sometimes chiasms  are are so large that they  almost become a genre..or encompass an entire book.

In fact, they can become as large as life,  See
James B. Jordan, “Chiasm and Life” in Biblical Theology Basics:

“Very much of human life is ‘there and back again,’ or chiastic. This is how God has designed human beings to live in the world. It is so obvious that we don’t notice it. But it is everywhere. This shape of human life arises ultimately from the give and take of the three Persons of God, as the Father sends the Spirit to the Son and the Son sends the Spirit back to the Father. We can see that literary chiasm is not a mere curiosity, a mere poetic device to structure the text. It arises from the very life of God, and is played out in the structure of the lives of the images of God in many ways and at many levels. It is because human beings live and move so often chiastically, that poets often find themselves drawn to chiastic writing. God creates chiasms out of His inner life, and so do the images of God.

Biblical chiasms are perfect. That is, they are perfectly matched to the human  chiasms they address and transform. As we become more and more sensitive to Biblical chiasms, we will become more and more sensitive to one aspect of the true nature of human life under God. We will be transformed from bad human chiasms into good human chiasms. In this way, becoming sensitive to chiasm can be of practical transformative value to human life, though in deep ways that probably cannot be explained or preached very well.

One further thought. We saw in our previous essay that chiasms often have a double climax, one in the middle and the greatest at the end. The food we bought at market is put away in the cupboard and refrigerator when we get back home. Moving forward to a final climax is what all literature does, whether it has a middle climax or not. (Shakespeare’s five-act plays always move to a climax in the third and in the fifth acts.) This is just another way that human life matches literary production, in the Bible as well as in uninspired human literature. Becoming familiar with the shape and flow of Biblical texts will have a transforming effect on human life.”

James B. Jordan, “Chiasm and Life” in Biblical Theology Basics.

-link, Michael Bull’s blog: Theology you can eat and drink

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Mike Rinaldi, a Visalian, and filmmaker (and Fresno Pacific grad) told this   story at the first "Gathering to Bless Christians in the Arts":
Blake Snyder, the screenwriter behind the classicSave The Cat"  book became a Christian not long before he died. 

Often at this point in such a story, folks ask "Who led him to Christ?" 

Go ahead and ask. 

The answer is: 

Chiasm. 

It happened in large part because Mike, not even knowing if such a well-known and busy writer would respond to his email,  asked him if he had heard about chiasm. 

Turns out Snyder was fascinated with it all, and Mike was able to point out chiastic structure and shape in scriptwriting....and one thing led to another...and then in Scripture. 

All roads, and all chiasms, lead to the Center and Source. 


Mike, of course, learned chiasm in THIS CLASS.

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TEMPLE TANTRUM

In Matthew 21, Jesus angrily came into the temple and overturned the tables of the moneychangers.  Most people assume he was angry at their overcharging, but your moodle forum this week will make the case that reading this text in context as an apple, and through the Three Worlds, will suggest his anger was for a different reason.  Usually I have another class interrupt class unannounced, yell angrily and overturn a table to illustrate how surprising and subversive this act was.  Here is a video we watched in class of one of these events that you may not be able to rewatch on facebook due to privacy serttings:https://www.facebook.com/juan.rivera.39794/videos/3324559124320/#

It would as surprising as going to the drive-thru and finding David Letterman working there.  We watched the Taco Bell video in class, but not the McDonald's one, which is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tEfMxj4syw

 

NT Wright on the temple:

Jesus as New Temple:

Three thought experiments.

• -Think if I offered you a drivers license, claiming  i had authority to issue it
• -Think if someone destroyed all bank records and evidence of any debt you have owe
• -Think  what would happen if you pointed at something, hoping your dog would look at it.

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SOREQ

Temple Warning Inscription:

 

The Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was surrounded by a fence (balustrade) with a sign (soreq)  that was about 5 ft. [1.5 m.] high.  On this fence were mounted inscriptions in Latin and Greek forbidding Gentiles from entering the temple area proper.

One complete inscription was found in Jerusalem and is now on display on the second floor of the “Archaeological Museum” in Istanbul.

The Greek text has been translated:  “Foreigners must not enter inside the balustrade or into the forecourt around the sanctuary.  Whoever is caught will have himself to blame for his ensuing death.”  Compare the accusation against Paul found in Acts 21:28 and Paul’s comments in Ephesians 2:14—“the dividing wall.”

Translation from Elwell, Walter A., and Yarbrough, Robert W., eds.  Readings from the First–Century World: Primary Sources for New Testament Study.  Encountering Biblical Studies, general editor and New Testament editor Walter A. Elwell.  Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1998, p. 83. Click Here

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