Buzz King: Grace & Joy thru Scripture

I once sat with a woman in her nineties who was on comfort care.  Her adult children could not be there because they were out of the country, so I was with her.  She ended up telling me why she had no fear whatsoever of death - and it had to do with Easter.  We take a bit of a biblical survey, looking at both the literal version of the Easter story, and at the more personal side of the resurrection story.  We see that getting caught up in defending the resurrection from a scientific perspective misses the true gift of Easter to each of us personally.

Luke tells us that Jesus died at a place called The Skull, from which we derive the Latin word Calvary.  I once saw a skull of a Pueblo Indian.  The goal of the display was to show us that the Pueblos ground corn with sandstone, and so when they ate cornmeal, they also chewed on grit, thus wearing down their molars.  But to me, the skull reminded me that real people - long dead - once lived in those cave dwellings.  Jesus chose his death at The Skull to tell give us the most important advice ever offered humanity, and he backed it up with Old Testament references.

We look at the two times in my life that I have encountered donkeys, once as a boy on the edge of town, and once in Santorini, Greece.  These incidents remind me of the two biblical qualities of donkeys, and why this makes the donkey the perfect animal for Jesus to ride into Jerusalem.  We also look at why Jesus was not the savior that many people in Jerusalem were hoping for, and this reinforces why he was indeed on a donkey.  We look, as well, at the Old Testament prediction of a king on a donkey...

I taught 3D modeling and animation at my university.  I had a student who apparently was on the autism spectrum, and one day I knocked his notebook computer off his desk onto the floor - and he did not react.  We look at a figure from the Old Testament, one of the fathers of the Israelite people, Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his brothers.  There is a theory that he was also on the spectrum.  We look at what we can learn about faith, forgiveness, and achieving all we can as we strive to serve God and God's people.

We look at the construction of the Tabernacle in Exodus - and at a man whom I once drove behind as he bounced along on three wheels and a broken rim.  His determination to make his journey, to get to his meeting place, reminds us of where God is truly located, where God lives.  We also see that although history has assumed that the Israelites and Jews thought that they had to be in the Temple to be with God, their beliefs were not so different than ours, or of that man throwing up sparks as he drove down Venice Boulevard.

When I was 15, there was an Earthquake that did a lot of damage in Southern California.  A fish store that I frequented had all its aquariums land on the cement floor.  It was a huge failure, a loss for the owner.  We talk about one of the biggest failures in the Bible, Peter denying Jesus after Jesus had wanted him to serve as the rock upon which he would build his church.  Peter did rise up, however, and do just that.  He overcame his failure.  But he was also executed, we believe, for his trouble.  We talk about letting God take our failures and turn them into successes - and about letting God decide just what sort of success we will achieve.

We look at the long-standing mystery of whether Paul the evangelist ever made it all the way to Spain - and we look at Buzz making it to Spain, but hardly behaving the way Jesus would have.  We consider the historical data that supports the theory that Paul spread the Word in Spain.  We look at what Paul had to say about forgiveness in Romans, the letter to the church he wanted to visit on his way to Spain...

We look at Noah's ark - the story that is eerily similar to older, polytheistic flood stories.  We consider the act of God destroying all of humanity, due to its total corruption, but showing enough mercy to allow a remnant to survive.  We look at a natural disaster, a much smaller flood, that happened in Colorado, and how such natural phenomena remind us of our vulnerability, our dependency on God.  We note that in the flood story, the Ark is engineered by God to very specific details: height, length, width, the number of decks, and what it is to be made out of.  But nowhere does God provide what would seemingly be very critical information when making a boat that humans are going to occupy.  Why was this information left out?

My mother identified strongly as French.  Thus, when my best friend's mother lent me Voyage to the Center of the Earth to read, she immediately took me to get the real version: the original French.  We look at the story of these adventurers and their naivety.  We also look at Proverbs, Chapter 2, and a speech to a son by a father, who is trying to teach the son about the importance of gaining wisdom and living the way God wants us to.  We see the hidden relationship, as detailed by my friend's mother, between Voyage au centre de la Terre and Proverbs.

When I was a boy, my father ran a car shop with a buddy of his I called Uncle John.  One day Uncle John taught me about torque wrenches and - more importantly - leverage.  We talk in this episode about the reasons that a Christian gives, and the constrains on our practice of giving.  We also talk about why giving is very much like the leverage we get from a torque wrench with a very long handle.

Wendy and I were once in Istanbul.  We were pursued aggressively by a Turkish carpet salesman who was desperate to make a sale, given their terrible economy.  We look at Psalm 23, traditionally used at funerals and memorial services by Christians.  But this Psalm is not about saying goodbye to a loved one.  We look at what Psalm 23 is truly about - and why it reminds us of this relentless carpet salesman.

I once had dinner with Sony Bono.  I did not write about this dinner contemporaneously and am only now talking about it more than forty years after this occurred.  So, I might have some of the details wrong.  The Bible is also not a contemporaneous document.  There were also some reasons for the authors to twist or exaggerate parts of the story - they were telling us about faith, not about the literal details of ancient history.  So what do we make of this?  How does this impact our understanding of the Bible and our belief in God?

I have had both my corneas replaced with transplants.  My left eye was repaired successfully with one graft, but my right eye proved very problematic.  We look at the Israelites returning from exile in Babylon, only to find their farmlands in very poor shape and one oppressor (the Babylonians) replaced with another (the Persians).  Malachi tells the People of God that they must be patient, that they must put their full trust in God.  I had to live with only one eye working for some time.  The Israelites had to live in far greater doubt...

When I was a grad student at USC years ago, I came across a man lying on his back.  He appeared to have been killed with a shotgun blast to his chest.  We look at the mistake this man made in his life, how he did not learn the lesson of Augustine and of Solomon, and that is to make sure that what we create in life is only good.  This leads us to understand why there appears to be a paradox that a good God would somehow create evil.

We look at the heavy duty use of numerical symbolism in the Old and New Testaments.  We examine specific numbers and what they meant.  Then we address the bigger question: why the preoccupation with numbers?  What about our preoccupation with things like mathematics, art, and literature?  What about our preoccupation with video games and social media?  What of this is good?  What did God intend?  Where do we find safety?