Non-recreational drug

After a fairly extended dry spell, in the past two weeks I have written:

• eight sermons
• two additions to the AI series
• two more additions to volunteer management
• three more pieces of my memoir

(No I know you haven't seen all of it. Some of it's still in the bin. I don't want to post all of it at once.)

The thing is, two weeks ago the shrink put me on a new antidepressant drug.  So far it has not made any difference to my mood.  My physical energy is still pretty much in the toilet.  Having worked hard to get my sleep back up to seven or eight hours per night, now I'm getting three or four.  And, despite the increase in productivity, I don't have any sense of accomplishment over any of it.

My mental health counselor says that it shows that something is working although we don't know the outcome quite yet.  I would tend to agree with this assessment.  Generally speaking with antidepressants it takes at least a month before you have any kind of an idea whether you're getting a benefit out of it or not.

This is my ninth trial of an antidepressant drug.  I'm not holding my breath.  I have low expectations.  I'm not going to quit yet.  But the weird symptoms are just a little bit disturbing.

Sermon 9 - Opportunities

Sermon 9 - Opportunities

2 Corinthians 1:3-4

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.

2 Corinthians 9:12

This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of the Lord’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God.

Psalm 50:13

Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?

God doesn't need us.  God doesn't need anything from us.  God didn't need the sacrifices that the Israelites brought to the temple or the tabernacle.  God doesn't actually need our belief or our praise.  God does not need our help.  God does not need for us to follow his law.  God does not require anything that we say that we do for Him.  God doesn't need us.

There is nothing that we do that God cannot provide for himself.  God can do everything himself.  In fact probably better than he can do it with us.  Any of you who have children will understand this.  When you are bringing up your children one of the things that you are trying to do is get them ready to perform certain tasks that are normal and essential for normal life.  Like cleaning up your room, picking up your clothes, learning how to cook, learning how to do the laundry, learning how to run the vacuum cleaner.  You know that when children try to help it would often be much easier just to do it yourself.

It is interesting to talk to your children, or grandchildren, and see what they remember from their childhood.  It is often much different than you remember.  I remember taking our grandchildren to see the aquarium.  They remember coming to Grama and Grandpa's house and taking the garbage out to the garbage bin.  They also remember helping out on shopping trips.

I definitely remember them helping out on shopping trips.  We would make a shopping list; then we would go to the store.  The grandchildren would ask what the first thing was on the shopping list and I'd tell them.  We would have to go and get that first item, regardless of where it was in the store.  If it was the furthest item in the store we still had to go and get it first.  Then we would look at the second item on the shopping list and we go and get that.

Shopping trips, which might have taken a total of seven minutes if we were by ourselves, would take about one hour and thirty-four minutes with the grandchildren.  We walked back and forth across the store in a very inefficient path in order to get all the things on the list in the order that they were on the list.

I really enjoyed going shopping with my grandchildren.

We gave them an opportunity to help.  God gives us an opportunity to help.

For the past quarter of a century, I have helped those who work in the field of information security prepare themselves for certification as security professionals.  They have an extremely difficult examination in order to achieve certification.  It used to be written down on paper and consisted of 250 questions.  Nowadays the exam is computer-based and if they are really good they can finish the examination in as few as one hundred questions.  Because it is computer-based, the examination is modified as the examination progresses.  For example, at a certain point in the exam if you fail a question in a certain subject area, the candidates for the exam will find that they are presented with additional questions that relate to that same subject area.  A lot of the candidates for the exam kind of freak out at this point.  They think that the computer is out to get them.  It has found their weak point and is hammering away at it.

In the preparation seminars I try to dispel this idea in advance.  I tell the candidates that if this happens, the computer is not attacking them repeatedly in the same subject area.  The computer is actually giving them multiple chances, multiple opportunities, to prove that they do know something about this subject area.

Some years ago I read a short story that turned on the same theme.  For a mystery story it had quite a profound theological point to make.  One of the characters in the story noted that when we were faced with difficulties it wasn't God jabbing at us with test after test after test.  It was, in fact, God giving us chance after chance after chance to do the right thing.

God gives us chances.  God gives us opportunities.  To help.

God does not need our help.  God could do everything he needs to do, but God gives us opportunities.

And so sometimes when we look at a disaster or when we look at a difficulty that someone is facing, we ask ourselves, why do bad things happen to good people?  Maybe that isn't the right question.  Maybe the right question is, is this an opportunity?

When there is a disaster God does not need our help.  God could provide safety and security and provision for everyone who has been harmed in that disaster.  But maybe it's an opportunity for us to help out.

When there is a person homeless and hungry on the street, God does not need our help.  God could provide that person with shelter and food.  But maybe this is an opportunity for us to go to those places where the homeless congregate, or to that one person alone on the street and see what it is that they need.  Maybe it's an opportunity.

When someone is facing a personal tragedy or trauma, God does not need our help.  God can comfort the afflicted and probably better than we ever could.  We could go and simply sit with them.  We could go and ask how they are doing and really *listen* to the answer.  Maybe it's an opportunity.

When somebody is lonely and isolated, and scurries into our church without greeting anyone, and scurries out again at the end of the service without talking to anyone, God does not need our help.  God can comfort that person.  God can bring that person to salvation if that is what is necessary.  God can help out with that person's financial difficulties, or tragedy, or even loneliness.  God does not need our help.  But maybe it's an opportunity.

At the men's breakfast one morning, we were discussing the opportunity, for the churches, to become important to society once again.  The pandemic has left a great many people wanting some kind of social engagement.  The churches could take this opportunity to provide for different forms of social engagement, and different types of social services, and could possibly become, once again, the social center of the community.  The need is there, and the opportunities are many, if we can only be creative enough, and marshall our existing congregants, to provide a safe social setting, a listening ear, a caring heart, for those who are isolated and in need.

Can we?

The men around the table this morning all agreed that it was a great idea.  But when asked to contribute specifics in terms of what we could do, too often they diverted to stories of miraculous interventions, with no human involvement, wishes that the church would again become important, or complaints that the churches would not band together and agree to do this.  It was extremely difficult to stick to the topic of what we could do, and not a series of complaints of what we couldn't do.

The story goes that when William Carey came up with the idea of foreign missions, he went to the head of (uncomfortably for me) the Baptist Church, and that he was, famously, or infamously, told, "Sit down young man, when God wants to evangelize the heathen he will do it without any help from you or me."   And that statement is, in fact, correct! God doesn't need us.  But William Carey did not listen, and went on to found the modern missions movement, if that statement does not sound presumptive, seeing as how the Catholics had been continually doing foreign missions for many hundreds of years.  Are we faced with making the same mistake?  Are we complaining, and cavelling, and not doing what could be done about addressing the needs that we do see around us, and will we be seen as short-sighted in a few years?

Do you want to do God's work?  Do you want to grow God's kingdom?  Do you want the church to be important in the modern world?

If so, you have to do something.  You cannot simply sit and bemoan the fact that the church is no longer important in the modern world.

You have to start things.  You have to propose, and start, and work at implementing, things, many things, knowing that most of them are probably going to fail.  But you have to try anyways, or nothing will ever get started.

And, right now, the world is eating our lunch.  The world is doing better.  I am starting different things, in different places.  The hospice society is willing to take a chance with me on two separate projects.  I have proposed three other projects to the literacy society, and gotten a positive reaction.  I am helping with emergency services, and they are allowing me to assist in a number of areas.  All of these worldly societies, volunteer-based and charitable though they may be, are doing better than the church.  It is quite possible that soon they will eat me up too, and that I will be working, more or less, full-time for them, and will not have time to assist the church in any projects.

They don't have to be my projects.  One that came up at breakfast this morning was the idea of a men's breakfast that invites the homeless.  It's a good idea.  It fills a need.  It could be used as a conduit to the churches.  It has a number of benefits, both to the world, and to the church.  And, undoubtedly, to God's kingdom.  It just has to have some agreement behind it to do it, and a rather small amount of funding.  It's doable, it's a good idea, and I don't know why it's not being done.  But it isn't.  There are objections.  The churches won't agree to come together and help out with it.  Why not?

It's an opportunity.  Will we take it?

Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

Bruce Waltke

Bruce Waltke taught me systematic theology.

About a decade later, I'm not sure whether it was Gloria or Carl that told Bruce Waltke that I knew something about computers.  I'm pretty sure that Bruce was writing yet another commentary on one of the books of the Bible.  His publishers knew that he needed a fairly specialized word processor; one that could handle the Greek and Hebrew alphabet.  And possibly some others.  At that time this kind of specialized word processor cost about $20,000, and required you to add an extension onto your house to add a room to hold the word processor.  I'm pretty sure that it was Bruce's publishers who were paying for the word processor.  (I have no idea who was paying for the extra extension.)

So we went off to visit one of the only vendors in town who had one of these specialized monstrosities.  We discussed his needs and the machine's capabilities.

During that afternoon he admitted to me that the year that he had taught me systematic theology was not his finest ever year of teaching.  (Which I thought was pretty decent of him to admit.)

AI - 2.06 - genAI - what not taught

AI - 2.06 - genAI - what not taught

I have, elsewhere, noted that, inherent in the process by which we have built large language models, and therefore generative artificial intelligence, is the fact that we have taught these systems rhetoric, but not the other, fundamental, classical fields of philosophy: that of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.  This points out one of the many possible things that we can do to address our own use of artificial intelligence.  We can press for research and exploration into the areas of artificial intelligence that we have not yet explored.

I was the one with the formal qualification in education, but Gloria had a greater and deeper native understanding of the way children viewed the world then anyone that I have ever met.  Gloria always insisted that, at every possible opportunity, we pay attention to children, particularly young children, to see how they see the world.  She said that this would be the only way in which we could get a new perspective on the world, a new viewpoint.  This is an absolutely salient position to take with regard to artificial intelligence.

When you pay attention to it, the way that children learn is nothing short of miraculous.  Some of us like learning: I do.  A great many of the human species do not enjoy learning.  We make every possible excuse to continue to do what we have been doing, without changing either what we do, or the way we do it.  A great many of us try to avoid learning at all costs.

Babies are learning all the time.

Human babies, interestingly, are born with a number of capabilities, which they very quickly lose.  If you have access to a newborn child, you can verify this for yourself.  A newborn human infant has, almost immediately, a grasping response.  If you put your finger in a newborn babies hand, it will grasp your finger.  It will grasp it hard enough that you can lift the child using only your finger.  (I must warn you that, should you make this experiment in order to verify what I have said, that you do so extremely carefully, and make sure that you have the full and informed permission of the parent, particularly the mother, of the child.  I am not responsible for any injuries you may incur if you fail to follow this advice.)  This grasping response is found in other primates, but in humans usually disappears after a day or so.

Newborns do have other capabilities, which they, generally, very quickly lose.  I was able to see one grandson within a few hours after he was born.  At that point, I was able, allowing his hands to grasp my fingers, to have him stand upright, with me really only providing balance, and not lifting force.  He was also, at that point, able to hold his head erect, and to turn his face to different sounds in the room.  Once again, this capability disappeared within a couple of days.

Newborn infants are unable to focus their eyes.  They seem to be drawn to the shape of a face, even if they can't fully focus that image.  Within weeks, newborn infants learn what focus is, and how to focus, and then start to focus on objects in their field of vision, moving their eyes, and eventually their head, to focus on, and study, certain objects within their visual field.

How do they do that?  How do they learn to do that?  Even knowing what focus was, knowing what optics were, knowing the importance of vision in identifying objects, it has taken us more than seven decades to figure out how to get computers to do it.  It still takes up an enormous amount of computing power, and we can't yet do it anything like as usefully, or as reliably, as any human child learns to do it, without assistance, in about six months.

So, here are a few things that we should start to teach our artificial intelligence systems, in order to make them actually intelligent.  We need to teach them the eighty percent of philosophy that doesn't involve rhetoric.  We need to teach them how to learn.  And so we should probably put it to the enormous tech giants, and the massively expensive generative artificial intelligence corporations, that these are some areas they should look into.

When recruiting for an artificial intelligence company, don't just look for the latest bright spark who can code really quickly.  Make sure that that bright spark, as well as a number of computer courses, has taken some courses in philosophy.  Have ongoing education within your corporation, that teaches these fields.

You're probably going to be hiring young people.  They will probably be a marriageable age.  They may even be married.  They may be having kids.  If so, make sure they have time to spend with their kids.  Do you provide daycare?

There are enormous amounts of money invested in artificial intelligence companies these days.  Yes, there are a great many demands upon that money.  There is a bidding war, going on in order to poach talented individuals from one company to another.  There is massive investment in data centers.  There is even enormous investment in power plants to power the data centers to run the computing necessary to build large language models, and then to run them.  But amongst all those billions, do you have a daycare?  Do you have a daycare for your employees?  On site, within your company campus?  So that your employees, your young married employees, who may have small children, can occasionally drop by and spend time with their children.  And observe their children.  Observe how their children start to learn.

(They may also spend more time at work, in that case.)

Do you take any of that massive investment, in power plants, and data centers, and high-priced talent, and invest it in education?  In education in general, in terms of supporting schools in the areas around you, so that you can recruit educated employees.  But also invest in educational research.  Particularly, and probably unusually, in the area of early childhood education.  Fund research into how infants and children actually learn.  Infant psychology.

Yes, these areas of research are going on.  But they don't get anywhere near the funding, the billions, and even trillions, of dollars that are going into artificial intelligence.  Yes, they promise of artificial intelligence is a big one.  And, if we ever *do* get actual and genuine and reliable artificial intelligence, then it is likely that the artificial intelligence will repay that investment.  But aren't we more likely to achieve artificial intelligence that much sooner, if we are using educational, and psychological, and philosophical research and study in order to direct our own search for, and production of, artificial intelligence?

While isolated visionaries have idly speculated about emotion in computers, the vast majority of the computer using, and non computer using, populace sees technology as cold, mathematical, and ultimately objective (if occasionally in error).  The fact that this assessment is an emotional one gets conveniently forgotten.

One of the possible divisions in the study of artificial intelligence is in the approach taken.  The brute coding approach simply strives to make programs more and more intelligent, the definition of "intelligent" being left as a problem to be dealt with once we have something that is at least marginally useful.  This strategy has been demonstrably successful in producing entities like Deep Blue, genAI, and techniques such as expert systems.  The alternative route is to observe that we already have at least one agreed upon model of intelligence, and to seek to apply what we know of the human mind to some form of programming.  While that course suggests interesting tactics like neural networks, spectacular triumphs have not been forthcoming.

Pursuing this modelling approach Rosalind Picard divined a potentially revolutionary concept in computing in producing the book "Affective Computing."  Even those who praise Picard and the book tend to see affective computing as only a means to a superior user interface, and miss the proposal that affect is key to intelligence itself.

It has been proposed that the AI goal of reproducing human intelligence is a chimera and a false trail.  Machine intelligence, so the thesis suggests, is different in kind from human intelligence, and the attempt to make one copy the other would be better directed to finding the differences between them and assigning work appropriately.  If this latter hypothesis is true then Picard's recommended line of enquiry would be futile in terms of producing better machine intellect--but would still be valuable in determining the dividing line.

AI topic and series

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/03/ai-203-genai-hallucinations.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/01/ai-000-intro-table-of-contents.html

Next: TBA

Outlander

I am watching the final season of the "Outlander" television series.  I don't particularly like it.  Why am I watching a television series that I don't particularly like?  Because Gloria really liked it.

I didn't watch the series during the years between the time that Gloria died and now.  Like I said, I don't particularly like the show.  I think it's overly sexualized, improbable, and I really can't tell what the point of it all is.

But Gloria really liked it, and this is the final season, so I figured that I can watch eight shows or so, for this last season.

I suppose that it's also a bit like watching the show with Gloria again.  Watching it on Gloria's behalf in a sense.

Happy birthday, Carl!

Gloria, at the time that we got married, was secretary to the principal at Regent College, Carl Armerding.  Gloria certainly enjoyed her time at Regent more than she enjoyed any other job, and her relationship with Carl was the closest with any of her bosses.  Gloria very frequently said that, coming from a somewhat anti-intellectual, and fairly provincial, denomination, being at Regent, and listening to, and sometimes discussing with, some of the greatest theological minds of our age, was like coming up out of the valleys to a mountaintop with, quite suddenly, a huge broad vista spread before her.

Carl is turning 90 years old.  Regent College is making a big deal out of it and is having a birthday party.  I am invited and I would like to try to go.

I actually knew Carl before I met Gloria.  I have known Carl for more than fifty years.  I suppose that means that I am one of Carl's oldest friends!  (I got that honour primarily because most of the rest of the candidates are dead.)  I'm pretty sure that I first met Carl when he taught a seminar on the book of Habakkuk on a weekend retreat at Keats Island Baptist Camp.  Then (based on Carl's description of Regent that weekend) I went to Regent and attended for a year, taking their Diploma of Christian studies.  Carl taught us Biblical Theology.  (One of my fellow students that year, who also got the "Dipsy S," on the basis of the diploma as his theological training, later became the BC Area Minister for the Convention Baptists.)  Then I got on to the Regent Senate, and before the Senate meetings I would hang out in Carl's secretary's office.  Then I married Carl's secretary.

(While Gloria was Carl's secretary, Carl was working on a commentary on the book of Judges.  Infamously, he was always late with it and constantly missing deadlines for the publisher.  Since Gloria died, I have been sporadically looking to buy a copy of it.  When I talked to Carl on the phone yesterday, he admitted that he never did finish that commentary  :-)

Gloria and I enjoyed attending the Laing Lectures and other public lectures provided by Regent.  Regent was important to Gloria, and I guess it was pretty important to me over the years as well. 

Sermon 75 - Bibliodivergent

Sermon 75 - Bibliodivergent

Jeremiah 33:3

Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.

I know that I am supposed to present you with a problem, and then present you with a nice, Christian answer, and tie it up neatly with a bow by the end of the sermon.

Sorry.  I'm not going to do that.  I'm going to present you with a bunch of questions, and a bunch of problems, and I'm not going to give you any answers.  This sermon is about ambiguity and living with ambiguity.  Deal with it.

Okay, possibly a little bit of a smile for you to begin with, since an awful lot of the latter part of this sermon is going to get pretty heavy.  I originally titled this sermon "Disturbance."  And then I changed it to "Bibliodivergent" because of the connection with neurodivergent, and also because I realized that the use of the word disturbance that most of you would be most familiar with would be from the Star Wars movie, the one that was shot first, but has subsequently been retitled Episode IV, where Alec Guinness pretends to stumble and look distressed, and when the others query him about this he says, "I felt a disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices had cried out in pain and then were silenced."

And, actually, "silenced" is kind of appropriate to what I'm going to talk about here.  We don't like disturbances.  We don't like to be disturbed.  We like our life to go on steady, and placid, and we don't care or worry too much if it's not terribly exciting, as long as it doesn't get too dangerous.  We don't like distress.  We don't like disturbances.  We don't like to be alerted to danger.  And, really, that's what pain and distress are.  They are alerting us to danger.

But we don't *want* to be alerted.  To be alerted means we have to pay attention.  The "pay" part, in the phrase "pay attention," is probably deliberate.  Paying attention means that we have to expend energy.  It's not restful if we have to pay attention.  And we definitely like restful.

Our world is anything but restful, if you are actually paying attention.  Our world is incredibly complex, and there are dangers around every corner.  New dangers arise so fast that we can't even learn effectively about the old ones, before we are presented with new difficulties.  It's not restful.  It's disturbing.

People allied with Chinese culture, and particularly those who are active on the Internet, have recently come up with a new saying for it: "Life is hard already, please don’t burst my bubbles."

In other words, they don't want you to burst their bubble.  They don't want you to take off their rose-coloured glasses.  They don't want to be alerted to the dangers, even if that means that they are, in fact, in danger!  They'd rather not know.  As long as not knowing also means that they're not going to be disturbed.

And there's yet another way to put that: (aka Isaiah 30:10-11)

They say to the seers, "See no more visions!" and to the prophets, "Give us no more visions of what is right!  Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions.  Leave this way, get off this path, and stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel!"

He was throwing out anti-religious statements.  Not necessarily because they were a firm commitment for him but because, in the full flower of twelve-year-old rebellion, he knew that it would upset us.  I put it to him: God, the God who has created the entire universe and any other universes that there may be, if there are other universes, loves you and wants to be your best friend.  Given that fact, is there anything, anything at all in the world, that is more important?

He immediately fired back, "Money."

I said, "God invented money."

You could practically *see* the wheels going around in his head.  He was coming up with all kinds of ideas for every idea he came up with, but he was also clever, and you could tell that he knew what the answer was going to be.  Finally he simply said to me, "You're messing with my head, aren't you?" Yes, I said.

Somebody once observed to Gloria that I had a tendency to think outside the box.  Gloria replied, "I don't think that Rob knows that there *is* a box."

On another occasion, in some exasperation with me, Gloria noted, "Rob, not only are you weird, but you like it that way!"  I thought that that was funny and I noted it to a friend.  My friend immediately fired back, "Not only that, but I suspect that you *practice!*"

I think differently from other people.  I see the world very often from a different angle.  An awful lot of people think that I'm around the bend.  But maybe I get a better view from there.   I have to admit that I rather enjoy seeing the world differently.  Sometimes it's very useful.

There was one time that my father presented to me a problem that had been troubling the church board for several months.  He presented it to me as an intractable problem.  He didn't expect a solution.  Before he had fully even fully explained the problem, I had the solution.  As soon as he did finish explaining the problem, I presented the solution to him.  My father was very good at finding problems in anything you presented to him, and I could see that he examined my proposed solution from every possible angle and couldn't find anything wrong with it.  Finally, and still looking somewhat surprised, he asked me, "How did you come up with that?"

My father had never appreciated the fact that I see the world differently and particularly the weird sense of humour that it gives me.  I thought about it for a couple of seconds, and then replied, "You know all those jokes of mine that you don't like?  It comes from the same place."

However, as much as I like talking about myself, this sermon isn't about me.  It is about disturbing people.  Or, rather, it is about people being disturbed.  Generally speaking, people do not like to be disturbed.  But it's rather important that, at least from time to time, people are presented with things that disturb them.  That is how we fix things.  That is, very often, how we learn.  That is how we improve things.

Jesus knew this.  Jesus knew this very well, in fact.  An awful lot of the content of the Gospels is about Jesus disturbing people.

We are so used to the stories about the places where Jesus was disturbing people that we have mentally sanitized them.  Very often they no longer disturb us because we need to go back to the originals and look at how disturbing they are.

One more story about Gloria.  Gloria had this really intuitive and unique sense of how children, and particularly infants, viewed the world.  She always said that you should try, as often and as much as you possibly could, to see the world the way children saw the world.  Seeing the world the way children saw the world was your only opportunity to see the world in a new way.  (She was right.)

Now, I'm not going to give you any answers to the problems in the way Jesus turns the world upside down present to us.  So why am I even raising this issue?  Well, there's this smart guy.  You might have heard of him.  His name's Einstein.  And one of the many things that he said that we should listen to is that doing the same thing, over and over and over again, and expecting to get a different result, is the very definition of insanity.  We are facing a uniquely complex and challenging world.  And we keep on using our tried and true methods to solve the problems that we see.  And, lo and behold, we find that the methods are possibly tried, but they definitely aren't true.  We keep on doing the same thing, and failing, and every time we expect a new and glorious result.  That's just crazy.

I really like the song "Clouds" by Joni Mitchell.  Pete Seeger added an extra verse to it.  And one of the lines that he added to this extra verse strikes me is really profound, and appropriate for this situation.  It reads, we've all been living upside down and turned around with love unfound, until we turn and face the sun, yes, all of us, every one.  (And I'm deliberately not going to tell you how "sun" is spelled.)

I really think that Jesus was very deliberately messing with us when he spoke some of these difficult passages.  I really think that he intended us, every once in awhile, and possibly even more than every once in awhile, to look at things differently.  I think he wanted his disciples to look at the world differently.  Well, actually I know that he wanted his disciples to look at the world differently.  Paul makes that pretty explicit in the book of Romans.  The wisdom of God is foolishness to men.  We grow up in the natural world.  We learn to view the world the world's way.  And we need to start trying, possibly trying desperately, to see the world a different way.  So here are a few of the difficult viewpoints that Jesus gave to us.

Well, right off there is the Good Shepherd.  Jesus called himself the good shepherd.  We call Jesus the good shepherd.  We have an image of gentle Jesus, meek and mild, leading his flock of sheep.  All of us there as sheep following the Good Shepherd.  In the image that we have, there's probably one struggling, possibly injured, lamb that the Good Shepherd is carrying on his shoulders.  That's the image we have.

That's not the image his listeners in the first century would have had.  Good shepherd?  The original listeners to this statement would have had one reaction: ba-a-a-a-a-ah!

Shepherds were not good.  Shepherds were considered to be pretty much second class citizens.  Don't worry about the fact that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob were all shepherds.  Don't worry about the fact that an awful lot of Jews owned sheep.  Owning sheep was one thing.  Being a shepherd was another.  Shepherds were considered untrustworthy.  Shepherds couldn't give evidence in a Jewish court.  They were considered to untrustworthy to be acceptable as witnesses.  Of anything.

Does that make you look at some of these stories a different way?

Okay as long as we're focusing on the good, how about the Good Samaritan?  Good Samaritan?  The reaction to that statement, from Jewish listeners of the first century, would have been that it was a contradiction in terms.  There's no such thing as a good Samaritan!  You will remember that one of King David's grandsons, one of King Solomon's sons, who took over the throne after Solomon died, lost ten of the original twelve tribes.  Only Judah and Benjamin stayed together, ruled by the house of David.  The other ten tribes deserted, and were ruled by a different dynasty.  And that king decided that, if he allowed his people to worship at the temple in Jerusalem, that they would desert him, eventually.  So he set up two idols golden calves, two places of worship in his territory.  Idols.  Oh, and what was his territory?  Samaria.

So, what were Samaritans?  A bunch of apostate idol worshipers.  From the perspective of the Jews, there is no such thing as a good Samaritan.

How about the Cleansing of the Temple?

Well, I mean, it wasn't a cleansing, it was a criminal act, wasn't it?  The temple was private property, and, while he was had a right to be there, he was trespassing if he was going to cause trouble.

Okay, yes, that business about the temple should be a house of prayer and you have made it a den of thieves is a direct quote from the prophets in the Old Testament.  And Nehemiah and Ezra specifically refer to people who are misusing the temple premises for their own purposes (and possibly business), instead of the proper worship functions.

But that must have seemed very, very close to blasphemy. Although, of course, he wasn't actually impeding worship, was he? Well, yes, I guess he was. After all, the stuff was to be conducted in a certain way and the business depended on the worship, but the worship also depended upon the business. After all, you were supposed to have the right pigeon, or the right dove, or the right lambs. And, well, I mean if they were a bit more expensive, I mean they were here, and your lambs or pigeons or doves were in Tyre or Damascus or Galilee or someplace that wasn't the temple. 

So, at the very least, it was definitely disturbing.

Then there is the image of the kingdom of God as yeast.  Now, what, in Heaven's name, is wrong with yeast?  It's a perfectly valid image!  Here's the yeast, working its way through a whole pile of flour, and making it all into bread!  Great stuff!

Except that that was not the image of yeast that the Jews had.  Even today, if you go into a reasonably orthodox Jewish home, at Passover, you will see all the kids dispatched throughout the house to make sure that they find, and eliminate, any traces of yeast.  That's because the image that yeast presents to the Jewish mind is that of corruption.  Yes, yeast is necessary for making bread (as long as you are not eating unleavened bread during Passover).  But yeast is kind of a necessary evil.  Yeast is a tool which you have better very carefully control.  Because it's an infection.

And that, by the way, is quite literally true.  Yeast is bacteria.  Now it's a helpful kind of bacteria, and, used carefully and properly, it gives us some very tasty comestibles.  But it's still bacteria.  It's still an infection.  And if you get it in certain places in your body it can be a very nasty infection indeed!  So, to the Jewish mind, yeast stands for corruption and infection.  Yeast is bad.  When Jesus is saying that the kingdom of God is like yeast, it's almost as if Jesus is saying that the kingdom of God is bad.

But wait.  Actually, I think it was Amos who said that.  Said why do you long for the day of the Lord?  The day of the Lord is going to be pretty dangerous!  Maybe we should look at this a bit more carefully.  Or, at least, from a different perspective.

There are a couple more stories along the same line. There is, for example, the story of the unjust judge. You may not be as familiar with this story in sermons because it's a little bit troublesome.

Basically there is this widow, who has a valid case.  She takes it to a judge and the judge refuses to do anything about it.  The judge is waiting for the widow to offer him a bribe in order to get what is rightfully hers.  Eventually even though she doesn't offer him a bribe, he finally decides that she's going to keep on coming and asking for her rights no matter what.  He might as well give her her valid judgment.

The thing is Jesus, when he uses this parable, is saying that God is like that.  Now when we use this parable, very infrequently, in a sermon, we are saying, as Jesus said, that you should pray and keep praying and not give up because eventually God will give you what you need.

But is Jesus *also* saying that God is unjust?  Is Jesus also saying that God is corrupt?  Is Jesus saying that we need to bribe God?

Maybe we need to look at this in a different way.

And then there's the parable, again, one that we don't hear very often used in sermons, comparing us to an untrustworthy manager and saying that we should be like that untrustworthy manager.  Basically this manager has already been caught out, being corrupt, and decides, in order to protect himself, that he is going to be even *more* untrustworthy.  He is going to prove that he is not responsible enough for the position that he holds and rip off his employer so that when he gets fired he will have something to live on.

Again usually we use this illustration to say that the kingdom of heaven is worth absolutely anything and everything and you should give everything you possibly can in order to get into the kingdom of heaven.  But we've got other parables that make the same point and make it without being quite so problematic.

Maybe we should look at this a bit differently?

Then there was a woman.  Well, I mean, that's bad enough right?  And she was a foreigner.  She was Greek, probably by birth or parentage.  She had previously lived in Syro-phoenicia.  She begged Jesus to drive a demon out of her daughter.  Her daughter was suffering.  A suffering child.  Now, I know she's a foreigner, and Jews didn't have much truck with foreigners.  But here she is, a mother, with a suffering sick child.

And what does Jesus do?  He refuses!  He calls the woman a dog!  He calls the child, the suffering child, a dog!  Unworthy of being healed!

(I'm using this story in a sermon and I'm trying to make a point.  Every time that I get to this point in editing the sermon, I start crying!

It's very inconvenient.

Why on earth am I crying about this?  Well possibly because I am suffering at the moment, and God is not doing anything about it.  Am *I* unworthy of being healed?  Or even comforted?

I'm trying not to take this personally.  I am trying to remember that everything will be all right in the end and that if it is not yet all right then it is not yet the end.

But, it's hard, you know?)

Now, you all know the ending of the story.  But let's just forget, if we can, for a second, that you know the ending of the story.  Let's just look at the story so far.  Here is Jesus, saying to a distraught mother, that she and her sick child are dogs, and because he has been sent to feed the children of Israel, he can't do anything for her.  As a matter of fact, the way he puts it, it's kind of a moral obligation that he should only help the Jews, and not help her and her daughter.

Now we know that that's not right.  As a matter of fact, even though we know the ending of the story, and we know that Jesus knows, and is probably just waiting for the famous statement of faith about picking up the crumbs that fall from the table, even so!  The cruelty of that statement to a mother with a sick child!  Why did he say that?  Why did he *have* to say that?  We should probably think about that.  Yes, okay, you know the end of the story.  Crumbs from the table, daughter gets healed, everybody goes away happy.

But why the cruelty of that statement, even just temporarily?

Then there's the faith of the centurion.  That's maybe a little bit easier to understand.  But it's still must have really sounded strange to that first century Jewish audience.  Jesus says he hasn't seen faith like that in all of Israel.  All of Israel!  He's making a statement about the faith of a centurion, a representative, and even an *instrument*, of Roman tyranny over the Jewish people!  That's a pretty strong statement, and it's completely upside down from anything that his listeners would have expected.  Including, I imagine, the centurion!

The death of Lazarus is pretty similar to the woman with the sick child.  A messenger comes and tells Jesus that Lazarus is sick.  Jesus messes around with his disciples.  He dithers around for a couple of days.  And then he tells the disciples that Lazarus is sleeping!  And then finally he explains that Lazarus has, in fact, died.  And that this is to the glory of God.

How do you take that?  Even as one of the disciples?  It's got to sound pretty weird, overall!

Again, we know the ending of the story.  So it's really difficult to *not* remember the ending of the story, and put yourself in the middle of the story.  Being messed around.  Being misled.  All to a good purpose eventually, but it must have felt really strange right in the middle there.

It's definitely something you've got to look at from a different angle.

That these passages exist in the Bible is a fact.  That they mean something is a matter of belief.  So is the belief that they mean something *to us* and should be considered *by us*.

Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

Mark 7:26-30

The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia.  She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.  "First let the children eat all they want," he told her, "for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs."  "Lord," she replied, "even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs."  Then he told her, "For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.  She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Matthew 8:5-13

When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help.  "Lord," he said, "my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly."  Jesus said to him, "Shall I come and heal him?"  The centurion replied, "Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof.  But just say the word, and my servant will be healed.  For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, 'Go,' and he goes; and that one, 'Come,' and he comes.  I say to my servant, 'Do this,' and he does it."

When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, "Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.  I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.  But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

Then Jesus said to the centurion, "Go!  Let it be done just as you believed it would."  And his servant was healed at that moment.

John 11:1-4

Now a man named Lazarus was sick.  He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.  (This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.)  So the sisters sent word to Jesus, "Lord, the one you love is sick.  When he heard this, Jesus said, "This sickness will not end in death.  No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it."

Luke 18:2-5

He said: "In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought.  And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, 'Grant me justice against my adversary.'

"For some time he refused.  But finally he said to himself, 'Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!'"

Luke 16:1-8

Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. 2 So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’

3 “The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg— 4 I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’

5 “So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’

6 “‘Nine hundred gallons[a] of olive oil,’ he replied.

“The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.’

7 “Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’

“‘A thousand bushels of wheat,’ he replied.

“He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’

8 “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.

Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html