The Bosque Boys

Love him or hate him, George Bush is the most evangelical president of our age. During his run for the nomination, he famously offered Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher.

At the convention in 2000, he explained further:

"I believe in tolerance, not in spite of my faith, but because of it.

"I believe in a God who calls us, not to judge our neighbors, but to love them. I believe in grace, because I have seen it ... In peace, because I have felt it ... In forgiveness, because I have needed it.

"I believe true leadership is a process of addition, not an act of division. I will not attack a part of this country, because I want to lead the whole of it."

May the peace of Christ be with him.

Invisible in his own nature he became visible in ours. Beyond our grasp, he chose to come within our grasp. Existing before time began, he began to exist at a moment in time. Incapable of suffering as God, he did not refuse to be a man, capable of suffering. Immortal, he chose to be subject to the laws of death. Leo the Great

Take thought now, redeemed man, and consider how great and worthy is he who hangs on the cross for you. His death brings the dead to life, but at his passing heaven and earth are plunged into mourning and hard rocks are split asunder. Bonaventure

Out of love the Lord took us to himself; because he loved us and it was God's will, our Lord Jesus Christ gave his life's blood for us--he gave his body for our body, his soul for our soul. Clement of Rome

As through a tree we were made debtors to God, so through a tree we receive cancellation of our debt. Irenaeus

From the French existentialist philospher, social activist, and mystic Simone Weil who died in London while working for the Free French during World War Two. These quotes are from her notebooks, a collection of thoughts (pensees) collected in the volume Gravity and Grace.

Christ healing the sick, raising the dead, etc., that is the humble, human, almost low part of his mission. The supernatural part is the sweat of blood, the unsatisfied longing for human consolation, the supplication that he might be spared, the sense of being abandoned by God.

The abandonment at the supreme moment of the crucifixion, what an abyss of love on both sides!

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine.

Adam and Eve sought for divinity in vital energy. A tree, fruit. But it is prepared for us on dead wood, geometrically squared, where a corpse is hanging. We must look for the secret of our kinship with God in our mortality.

God crosses through the thickness of the world to come to us.

The cross as a balance and as a lever. A going down, the condition of a rising up. Heaven coming down to earth raises earth to heaven.

From the 16th-century Spanish mystic, poet, monk, and reformer, St. John of the Cross.

The Young Shepherd (El Pastorcico)

A young shepherd is alone and grave,
alien to joy and happiness,
and thinking of his shepherdess
his heart is sorely hurt by love.
He doesn't weep at being lost
in love or wakening to pain,
although his heart is sorely maimed;
he weeps thinking he is forgot.

Merely the thought that his sweet friend
forgot him is a painful sword;
letting himself be hurt abroad
his wounds of love can never end.
The shepherd cries: O misery of
her distance from my love, and she
no longer cares to be near me!
My heart is sorely hurt by love!

A long time passed: he climbed the branches of
a tree and spread his lovely arms,
and dead lay hanging from his arms;
his heart was sorely hurt by love.

This past weekend I was invited to attend the prayer meeting of one of the local chapters of the Native American Church.

The Native American Church arose as a movement among Apache, then spread to many tribes in the late nineteenth century. Traditions from various tribes come together in ritual form centered around the religious use of peyote, a hallucinogen. Prayer meetings typically begin on Saturday evening and conclude Sunday morning. The ritual is done by men.

This local chapter is mostly made up of "Jesus Men," that is, Native American Church practitioners who confess Jesus as Lord, and recognize God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So I said yes. The man who invited me told me that he knew I could not stay up all night and preach the next day, so asked me to come to the teepee at sunrise. (more below)

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We tend to look up to the wrong people. Those you would do well to emulate may live next door. Larry Elder writes today's must read essay. From Jewish World Review.

Texas declared its independence from Mexico on this date in 1836. Read the Texas Declaration of Independence here.

Nowhere But Texas:

Texas state motto: "Friendship"

The pledge of allegiance to the Texas state flag:

"Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one and indivisible."

Some background on the flag and the pledge via the Handbook of Texas Online here.

The Texas State song, Texas, Our Texas:




One last symbolic anecdote: As the 1864 Battle of the Wilderness reached its fever pitch, Robert E. Lee watched the Texas Brigade sweep forward to fill a potentially lethal hole in the line. As they moved out, Lee reportedly stood in his stirrups and yelled, "Texans always move them!" And they did.

May wild Bluebonnets bloom in the Lone Star State for as long as the rivers flow.

A giant in New Testament studies died this month. Dr. Metzger was an internationally famous scholar of Greek and of the New Testament. A partial list of his accomplishments is here taken from the tribute on the Princeton Theological Seminary website (link here):

Dr. Bruce Manning Metzger, New Testament professor emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary and one of the preeminent American New Testament critics and biblical translators of the twentieth century, died February 13, 2007, at the University Medical Center at Princeton, at the age of 93.
. . .
He served as Chair of the Committee on Translation of the American Bible Society 1964–70, and as Chair of the Committee of Translators for the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible 1977–90. The impact of this work is incalculable and Bruce Metzger saw it through the press almost single-handedly.
. . .
Bruce Metzger cared about and provided for his students. Generations have been grateful for his Lists of Words Occurring Frequently in the Coptic New Testament, and his Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek (first published in 1946) became a standard study tool. He edited The Oxford Annotated Bible in 1962, and in 1966, along with Kurt Aland, Matthew Black, and Allen Wikgren, edited the United Bible Societies' edition of the Greek New Testament. This text, especially adapted to meet the needs of Bible translators, with its beautiful original font and indication of the relative degree of certainty for each variant adopted in the text, proved to be an enduring landmark. The editors were later joined by Carlo Martini (the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan from 1980 to 2002).
. . .
There were other honors. In 1994, Bruce Metzger was awarded the Burkitt Medal for Biblical Studies by The British Academy in London (of which he had been a Corresponding Fellow since 1978). This is only awarded in recognition of a lifetime of distinguished biblical study. Bruce Metzger was elected president of Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas (1971), the International Society of Biblical Literature (1971), and was the first president of the North American Patristic Society (1972). He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1969 and 1974) and visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge (1974) and Wolfson College, Oxford (1979).

There were many other books, among which the classic studies The Text of the New Testament, Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (1964, and translated into German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian and Russian) and The Early Versions of the New Testament, Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations (1977) have been particularly influential. Bruce Metzger's last publication before his death was Apostolic Letters of Faith, Hope, and Love: Galatians, 1 Peter, and I John (2006).

Dr. Metzger was one of my teachers in seminary and my personal reflections are below.

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Yesterday morning the dogs and I went down to the creek. The sun had risen, but the light still was dim because of clouds. Amid the brown leaves on the ground and the brown leafless trees, the greening willow branches announced that winter slowly was giving way to spring. I almost turned back after a half-mile or so, I had other things to do and my legs were tired from the day before (isn't that what they say of aging athletes, that the legs are the first to go). But, ahead was a stretch of creek we hadn't seen in a while.

The dogs and I had been hearing ahead of us, from time to time, some noises that I thought might be turkeys on the move. After another eighth of a mile or so we saw them, nearly twenty birds on the other side of the creek moving away from us at a fast walk. The dogs jumped in the water and swam across. I called them back when they reached the other bank; they needed the exercise of swimming, the turkeys did not need the exercise of fleeing from two well-fed dogs. Moving on just a bit further, I saw what I took in the dim light to be a duck swimming up the creek. A second look showed me my mistake.

It was a beaver, its head visible on the surface of the water. The last couple of week I had seen fresh beaver sign--gnawn trees and a scent mound a mile back down the creek. Standing behind a tree to hide my silouhette I watched this wild animal circle in the water, and swim back toward me. Then the dogs returned from somewhere in the woods. Hearing them, the beaver smacked the water with its tail and dove.

Why is it more satifying to see wild animals than zoo animals? Perhaps because to see wild animals I must go into their home, be a quiet and observant guest, and "hunt" them. The quest brings its own excitement. And on a deeper level, they are wild animals, uncaged. They live a life independent from me, or from zoo keepers. They are God's creatures.

Do yourself a favor this weekend. Turn off the TV or computer or video game and find a slice of creation to prowl.

I'll try to post on the significance of Ash Wednesday sometime today. For now, I want to respond to Joab's comment on my Fat Tuesday post. He asked what was the value of traditional Lenten discipline: what's the big deal about giving up chocolate or something?

I think there is value in giving up something benign for Lent, be it chocolate, coffee, sweets, violence on television, or whatever.

First, without self-discipline there is no consistent Christian walk nor progress in the spiritual life. We must learn to say no to ourselves. Giving up something for Lent provides practice in self-denial.

Second, when we crave the thing we have given up, we can remind ourselves that Jesus Christ gave up the glory of heaven, emptying himself, and denying himself during his time on earth. In the book The Last Temptation of Christ, (much better than the movie), Jesus is tempted to live a normal life--marriage, home, children. These are all good things that he gave up for his mission.

Third, we all know that our bodily existence can at times be a hinderence to our service of God--the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Abstaining, whether a fast or the giving up of an innocent pleasure, uses the appetites of the body to strengthen the spirit. Our hunger, or our craving, reminds us to pray and to remember our Savior by reminding us that it is the season of Lent.