Suicide

THE MOST FAMOUS SUICIDE in the Old Testament is King Saul's. He was doing battle with the Philistines. The Philistines won the day. They killed his three sons, and he himself was wounded by archers. Fearing that he would be captured by the enemy and made a mockery of if he survived, he asked his armor-bearer to put him out of his misery. When the armor-bearer refused, he fell on his own sword (1 Samuel 31:4).

Judas Iscariot's is of course the most famous one in the New Testament. When Jesus was led off to Pilate and condemned to death, Judas took his thirty pieces of silver and tried to return them to the Jewish authorities on the grounds that Jesus was innocent  and he had betrayed him. The authorities refused to take them. They said that was his problem, and Judas, throwing the silver to the ground, went off and hanged himself (Matthew 27:3-5).

Taking your own life is not mentioned as a sin in the Bible. There's no suggestion that it was considered either shameful or cowardly. When, as in the case of Saul and Judas, pain, horror, and despair reach a certain point, suicide is perhaps less a voluntary act than a reflex action. If you're being burned alive with a loaded pistol in your hand, it's hard to see how anyone can seriously hold it against you for pulling the trigger. 

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words 

Story

IT IS WELL TO REMEMBER what the ancient creeds of the Christian faith declare credence in.

"God of God, Light of Light... for us and for our salvation came down from heaven... born of the Virgin Mary... suffered ... crucified... dead... buried... rose again... sitteth on the right hand of God... shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead." That is not a theological idea or a religious system. It is a series of largely flesh-and-blood events that happened, are happening, will happen in time and space. For better or worse, it is a story.

It is well to remember because it keeps our eyes on the central fact that the Christian faith always has to do with flesh and blood, time and space, more specifically with your flesh and blood and mine, with the time and space that day by day we are all of us involved with, stub our toes on, flounder around in trying to look as if we have good sense. In other words, the truth that Christianity claims to be true is ultimately to be found, if it's to be found at all, not in the Bible, or the church, or theology—the best they can do is point to the truth—but in our own stories.

If the God you believe in as an idea doesn't start showing up in what happens to you in your own life, you have as much cause for concern as if the God you don't believe in as an idea does start showing up.

It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to keep in constant touch with what is going on in your own life's story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others' lives. If God is present anywhere, it is in those stories that God is present. If God is not present in those stories, then they are scarcely worth telling.

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Stephen

AFTER JESUS DIED, it took a while for his followers to settle down and get organized, and the process was no easier then than it has been ever since. One problem that came up early in the game was how to take care of the poor, especially the widows who couldn't support themselves. The apostles decided to appoint a group to handle this side of things, and one of the ones they appointed was Stephen.

His career was a short one. In addition to doing what he could for the poor, he also did what he could to spread the word about Jesus, the one who'd gotten him interested in the poor in the first place. He healed, and he preached, and he talked about how his own life had been changed, and it wasn't long before the Jewish authorities called him on the mat to defend his far-out views as best he could. As far as they were concerned, he was a bad apple.

Stephen made them a long speech, the gist of which was that from year one the Jews had always been an ornery lot, "stiff-necked," he said, and circumcised as all get-out in one department, but as cussed and mean as everybody else in all the others (Acts 7:51). They'd given Moses a hard time in the wilderness, he said, and there hadn't been a saint or prophet since whom they hadn't had it in for. The way they'd treated Jesus was the last and worst example of how they were always not just missing the boat, but doing their damnedest to sink it. The authorities were naturally enraged and illustrated the accuracy of Stephen's analysis of them by taking him out and stoning him to death.

Stoning somebody to death, especially somebody as young and healthy as Stephen, isn't easy. You don't get the job done with the first few rocks and broken bottles, and even after you've got the person down, it's a long, hot business. To prepare themselves for the workout, they stripped to the waist and got somebody to keep an eye on their things till they were through. The one they got was a young fire-breathing arch-conservative Jew named Saul, who was there because he thoroughly approved of what they were doing.

It was a scene that Saul never forgot. Years later when he'd become a Christian himself and was under arrest much as Stephen had been, he spoke of it. He wasn't called Saul anymore by then, but Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, the great letter-writing saint, and he still remembered how it had been that day when he'd stood guard over the pile of coats and ties and watched a young man's death.

Stephen was the first person to shed blood for the new faith he loved more than his life, and as Saul-who-was-to-become-Paul watched the grim process, it never occurred to him that by the grace of God the time was not far off when he himself would be another.

Acts 6-7; 22:20

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words 

Spirit

THE WORD spirit has come to mean something pale and shapeless, like an unmade bed. School spirit, the American spirit, the Christmas spirit, the spirit of '76, the Holy Spirit—each of these points to something that you know is supposed to get you to your feet cheering, but that you somehow can't rise to. The adjective spiritual has become downright offensive. If somebody recommends a person as spiritual you tend to avoid that person, and usually with good reason.  Inspiring is even worse. Inspirational is worse still. Inspirational books are almost invariably for the birds.

Like its counterparts in Hebrew and Greek, the Latin word spiritus originally meant "breath" (as in expire, respiratory, and so on), and breath is what you have when you're alive and don't have when you're dead. Thus spirit = breath = life, the aliveness and power of your life, and to speak of your spirit (or soul) is to speak of the power of life that is in you. When your spirit is unusually strong, the life in you unusually alive, you can breathe it out into other lives, become literally in-spiring.

Spirit is highly contagious. When people are very excited, very happy, or very sad, you can catch it from them as easily as measles or a yawn. You can catch it from what they say or from what they do or just from what happens to the air of a room when they enter it without saying or doing anything. Groups also have a spirit, as anybody can testify who has ever been caught up in the spirit of a football game, a political rally, or a lynch mob. Spirit can be good or bad, healing or destructive. Spirit can be transmitted across great distances of time and space. For better or worse, you can catch the spirit of people long dead (Saint Therese of Lisieux or the Marquis de Sade), of people whose faces you have never seen and whose languages you cannot speak.

God also has a spirit—is Spirit, says the apostle John (4:24). Thus God is the power of the power of life itself, has breathed and continues to breathe life into his creation. In-spires it. The spirit of God, Holy Spirit, Holy Ghost, is highly contagious. When Peter and his friends were caught up in it at Jerusalem on Pentecost, everybody thought they were drunk even though the sun wasn't yet over the yardarm (Acts 2). They were.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Soloman

KING SOLOMAN WAS A PRODUCT of the scandalous liaison between King David and Uriah's wife, Bathsheba. It was not an auspicious beginning. He was then brought up in that hotbed of intrigue and ostentation that was his father's court, and that was less than conducive to the development of sound moral character. He also spent his formative years under the thumb of his beautiful but conniving mother, who had browbeaten David on his deathbed into giving him the throne in the first place. It is a wonder he turned out as well as he did.

He was the first of the big-time spenders, and the menu that he and his retinue consumed per diem reads like the inventory of General Foods: a thousand measures of flour and meal plus ten oxen, twenty steers, and one hundred sheep, not to mention a garnishing of harts, gazelles, roebucks, and butterball chickens for when their jaded palates were in need of reupholstering. He had forty thousand horses with twelve thousand horsemen to keep them in shape, and recent excavations of his stables indicate that these figures aren't as far out of line as they might seem. His building program isn't to be overlooked either.

He put up a temple in Jerusalem that had to be seen to be believed. It stood three stories high, and you entered it through a soaring porch of Egyptian design that was flanked by two thirty-foot free-standing bronze columns with carved lilies on top. It had cedar ceilings, cypress floors, and olive-wood doors, and the amount of gold they used to trim it inside and out would have bankrupted Fort Knox. Seven years was what it took him to finish this job for God, and he then proceeded to build a palace for himself, which took thirteen. It was composed of the House of the Forest of Lebanon, the Hall of Pillars, the Hall of the Throne, and the Hall of Judgment. These were for show. He also had them knock together a nice little place for his personal use and another for his wife, the daughter of Pharaoh.

The daughter of Pharaoh was not his only wife. Perhaps the reason they preferred separate bedrooms was that he had six hundred and ninety-nine more. Just in case they all happened to be busy at the same time some evening, he also had three hundred other ladies who were ready to drop everything for him at a moment's notice. Some of these were Moabites or Ammonites, some were Edomites or Sidonians, and there were five or six dozen Hittites thrown in to round things out. It was a regular smorgasbord.

Somehow he found time to run the country too, and in some ways he didn't make too bad a job of it. His reign lasted forty years, and Israel was at peace the whole time. He made advantageous treaties with both Egypt and Tyre, and in partnership with Hiram, king of Tyre, maintained a fleet of oceangoing ships that did a brisk export-import business with a number of Mediterranean ports, dealing in things like gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks. He also made a killing as a horse trader.

Unfortunately the price for all this ran pretty high, and it was his subjects who had to pick up the tab. In order to finance his building program he had to bleed them white with tolls and taxes. In order to get people to run the bulldozers and bench saws, he had to press them into forced labor gangs. You don't keep seven hundred wives and three hundred lady friends happy on peanuts either, and it was the people who had to foot that bill too. When some of them revolted in the north under the leadership of Jeroboam, he managed to quash it successfully, but instead of solving the problem, that just postponed it.

Furthermore, his taste for foreign ladies got him into more kinds of trouble than just financial. They worshiped a whole carnival of fancy foreign gods, and in his old age Solomon decided to play it safe by seeing to it that not one of them went neglected. He put up expensive altars to Ashtoreth of the Sidonians, Milcom of the Ammonites, and Chemoth of the Moabites, to name just a few, and Yahweh was so furious he said it was only for the sake of his father, David, that he didn't settle Israel's hash right then and there. As it was, he said he'd wait a few years.

In spite of everything, Solomon was famous for his great wisdom. There wasn't a riddle he couldn't crack with one hand tied behind him, and he tossed off so many bon mots in the course of a day that it reached the point where people figured that if anything clever was said anywhere, it must have been Solomon who originally said it, and the whole book of Proverbs was ascribed to his hand. His judgments in court were also praised to the skies, the most famous of them involving a couple of women each of whom claimed to be the mother of the same child, to which Solomon proposed the simple solution of slicing the child down the middle and giving each one half. When the first girl said that was fine by her and the second girl said she'd rather lose the case, Solomon awarded the child to the second girl, and it was all over Jerusalem within the hour.

But wisdom is more than riddles and wisecracks and courtroom coups, and in most things that mattered King Solomon was among the wisest fools who ever wore a crown. He didn't even have the wit to say "Apres moi, le deluge" in Hebrew and was hardly cold in his grave when revolution split the country in two. From there on out the history of Israel was an almost unbroken series of disasters.

1 Kings 3-11

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words