Introducing the Psalms 

The Psalms are the Bible’s model prayers. About half of them are written by the famous king David, as well known as a musician and worshipper as he was as a warrior and giant-slayer. There’s a psalm for almost every occasion we’re likely to experience in life. In the Psalms, we find beautiful songs of praise, testimonies to God’s goodness, pleas for help, and questions asked when things don’t work out as they’re supposed to. The Psalms are really meant to be prayed—sung even—rather than just read. I find that I get the most out of them when I adopt them as my own, praying them as my own prayers. I tend to pray them verbatim—doing so aloud and with gusto whenever possible seems to improve the experience immensely—but I know other people who use them as jumping off points into further prayer in their own words. If you’re like me, praying two common types of psalms might initially make you a bit uncomfortable:

• Extravagant claims of righteousness—occasionally, I find myself gulping when, aloud and with gusto, I end up praying something like, ‘I have led a blameless life; I have trusted in the Lord and have not faltered’ (Psalm 26:1). I wonder if the proverbial lightning will strike me down. Despite the fears of divine punishment, a few things have kept me praying these absurd boasts:
  • First of all, I’ve noticed that my praying of these psalms take on a tone of aspiration: it makes me want to be the kind of person who can pray those things without blushing. That seems like a pretty good result to me;
  • Secondly, I get the feeling that the psalmist doesn’t mean that he has never made any mistakes. I think what he’s saying is that he has never abandoned God. That’s still a pretty gutsy thing to say, but it’s not quite a claim to perfection. While the ‘not faltering’ thing still kind of trips me up, I think I can honestly say that ever since I met God I’ve taken my relationship with God seriously;
  • Thirdly, I have a growing suspicion that these extravagant claims to righteousness have less to do with my moral report card, as it were, and more to do with how God sees me. I noticed that sometimes in the same psalm the author will ask for God’s forgiveness and will make one of these audacious claims to utter blamelessness. Once he’s confessed and been forgiven, it’s as if he never even took a mis-step. Perhaps these psalms are saying that, because of God’s goodness, we can be certain that God likes us, sees the best in us, and wants the best for us. If that’s the case—and I’m beginning to believe it is—then we can pray those crazy things with confidence and excitement.
• Calls for violent retribution—some of the psalms seem like they’re more suited to a Quentin Tarantino movie than to the Bible. While I sometimes still find myself a little squeamish at the sheer bloodthirstiness of some of these ‘crush my enemy’ psalms, I’ve been surprised to find them among the most helpful psalms to pray, for a few reasons:

• I primarily focus the prayers on my true enemies—the New Testament author Paul tells us that our real enemies aren’t other people, but destructive spiritual forces whose entire purpose is to do us harm (Ephesians 6:12). I have no problem praying that these enemies die a gruesome death.

Introducing Exodus and Leviticus

Most of our Old Testament reading during this season will be from the books of Exodus and Leviticus. Both Exodus and Leviticus are written by Moses, the great leader who, by God’s power, rescues the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, introduces them to God, and leads them to the land God gives them. We began reading Exodus during the previous season, Lent. During the Easter season, we pick up the story toward the end of a major show-down between God and Pharaoh: God wants Pharaoh to let the Israelites go; Pharaoh continually refuses; and God shows his power and his determination by punishing the Egyptians with plagues of ever-increasing severity. God has just promised Pharaoh that he is about to do something so awful that the Egyptians will finally not just allow the Israelites, but beg them, to leave Egypt.

The rest of the book of Exodus is about God and the Israelites getting to know one another. God agrees to be the Israelites’ protector and provider, and they agree to be his followers. Using Moses as his messenger, God gives the Israelites a series of laws meant to make them distinctive from other people and to reflect God’s own character. We get a significant taste of those laws in Leviticus, and we read the story of the Israelites trying—and failing—to live them out in Exodus. We also see in Moses a model of a faithful follower and a godly leader.

By the way, if you’re interested, I’ve already written a Daily Guide to the life of Moses.  You can find it on our Leap of Faith page.  The dates are from a previous year, and the passage selections are a bit different from our current ones, but you might still find some helpful information and interesting thoughts about God, Moses, and the Israelites.Introducing Paul’s Letters

Besides 1 Peter, which we’ll talk about in the accompanying Daily Guide, our New Testament readings for this season are several letters from Paul, one of the church’s early leaders, to a number of churches he started.  We’ll finish Paul’s letters to the Corinthians—which we started during Lent—and also read his letters to the Colossians, Thessalonians, and Ephesians. 

As we read these passages, it’s helpful to keep in mind that we are, in fact, reading letters—actually, we’re reading one half of an exchange of letters. Paul and his team would start new churches in new cities, and then rather quickly move on to other new cities.   They would leave each newly started church with the task of living out their newfound faith within the culture and circumstances of their city.  Inevitably, these new churches would encounter situations they didn’t know how to respond to, hear teachings that they didn’t know how to mesh with what they’d heard from Paul and his team, and run into other unexpected problems.  They would send messengers and letters to Paul asking for his guidance; and he would respond with the letters we now have in the Bible.  We don’t have a record of the letters and messages to Paul from these churches, but usually Paul’s responses gives us a pretty good idea of what’s going on; it’s sort of like overhearing one half of a phone conversation.

Ephesus and Colossae were both cities in the Roman province of Asia (modern-day Turkey).  Ephesus was one of the largest and most important cities in the whole Roman Empire.  It was a significant Aegean port and a center of trade, commerce, culture, and religion.  Paul spent an atypical amount of time in Ephesus, preaching there for more than two years.  Colossae was sort of a small rust-belt city along the interstate.  As far as we know, Paul never himself visited Colossae.  A Colossian named Epaphras became a follower of Jesus through Paul’s preaching in Ephesus and spread the message to his hometown and some neighboring towns in the Asian hinterland.

Apparently, the Colossians had been influenced by an esoteric sect out of Judaism with some interesting ideas about angels.  These ideas have gotten in the way of the Colossians getting everything they could out of following Jesus; so Paul writes them to clarify his understanding of the relationships among Jesus, the angels, and human beings.  What Paul wants for the Colossians is more freedom than they are currently experiencing.
In the letter to the Ephesians, Paul expands upon some of the theological ideas he first wrote in Colossians.  He takes those ideas and expands them into more of a general statement of his beliefs, with a special emphasis on the theological implications of being a community of people following Jesus together.

Thessalonica was (and is) an important city in the Greek region of Macedon.  Paul was rather quickly forced out of Thessalonica by disruptions caused by a mob (Acts 17:1-10).  So, he wrote the two letters to the Thessalonians shortly after his departure, to give some of the basic teaching he never had a chance to tell them in person.  For some reason, death and the end of the world are topics of particular interest to the Thessalonians.  Paul addresses them somewhat in the first letter, and spends a significant amount of the second letter further clarifying his understanding of the topics.

In applying the lessons of these letters to our lives, it’s helpful to recognize that Paul is writing to specific groups of people with specific questions and problems.  It’s not always possible or beneficial to apply Paul’s instructions without some interpretation.  A helpful sequence of questions for me is,
1. What problem or question is Paul addressing?
2. What is his answer to his audience?
3. What’s the general principle behind his answer?
4. Are there circumstances in my life where that principle would apply?
5. What would it look like for me to take Paul’s advice?

Introducing the gospel readings and the Gospel of Matthew

The first two weeks of our gospel readings are Easter-related.  We read the resurrection and post-resurrection episodes from Mark, Luke, and Matthew.  Then, we spend a week reading John’s presentation of Jesus’ teaching at the Last Supper; this teaching is Jesus’ attempt to prepare his followers for what life will be like when he is no longer with them in bodily form.

After that, we move on to the Gospel of Matthew.  Matthew, also known as Levi, was one of Jesus’ twelve apostles.  Before becoming a follower of Jesus, Matthew was a collector of taxes for the Romans.  It’s hard for us to understand just how unpopular that would have made him: first of all, he was collecting taxes; secondly, it was taxes for an unpopular foreign government; and thirdly, tax collectors at the time were famously corrupt.  Perhaps the closest thing we have nowadays is a mobster running a protection racket.  So, Matthew goes from being completely outside of ‘decent society,’ to being one of the closest disciples of the new rabbi Jesus, to writing one of Jesus’ biographies.

Matthew uses the earlier and shorter Gospel of Mark as a sort of outline for his story: the plot of the gospel of Matthew follows Mark very closely, and often they even have very similar wording for a story.  But Matthew then supplements Mark’s story with significant additions.  Matthew includes a far greater amount of Jesus’ teaching, and—interestingly for someone who would have spent much of his life on the outs with his fellow Jews—a particular emphasis on Jesus as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecies.  Matthew, like Mark, places a lot of attention on the theme of the kingdom of God (although Matthew calls it ‘the kingdom of heaven,’ following the Jewish tradition of avoiding saying ‘God’ as much as possible).  Whereas Mark demonstrates the kingdom of God through Jesus’ actions, Matthew illustrates the kingdom of heaven through Jesus’ teaching, and particularly his parables.  It’s worth paying attention to the way Matthew fills out the picture of the kingdom of heaven over the course of his story.