Yesterday was Sunday, and I was impressed more than is usual by the time of Confession in the liturgy. I was raised in a tradition where this is not included in church meetings, the argument being that no biblical text can be named that commands its inclusion. No one seemed to notice that the order of service we followed was as I see things now, painfully human-centric, nor that the historic liturgy we rejected was shaped by the demands of the gospel. So, Confession usually catches my attention but yesterday it did so rather sharply. “We are a mess,” the pastor said, “and making a mess,” and then drew our attention to Titus 3:2. There we are told, “to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all people.” Surely the apostle didn’t mean for us to apply that during a presidential primary season.

A friend mentioned that he has taken to asking a question before meetings, discussions, and classes begin: “What will you do in order to be fully present while we are together?” Recently I have noticed elders FaceBooking during a worship service, friends checking email on iPhones during conversations, people Tweeting during discussions, and others surfing the Internet on laptops that were supposedly there in order to take notes. In each case their actions had an effect on me, convincing me that they were intentionally only partially present though each would insist, I am certain, that they be taken fully seriously as a participant.

I turned on the car radio only to discover NPR was in a membership drive, which is fine, except that it makes for poor listening, which is, I suppose, the point. The commentator, needing to fill airtime, had repeated the phone number to call with our pledge several times and clearly needed to say something else, so mentioned, “NPR news is your compass in a world of information.” I thought that a bit weak and wondered if telling jokes wouldn’t raise more money, but then got to wondering what served as a compass in my life. What helped me sort out fact from fiction, the important from the merely urgent, the deeper things from the ubiquitously loud. I decided the answer was Creation, Fall, Redemption & Restoration—the four part melody in the great orchestral suite of life that grounds us in the grand story of reality. Without it acting like a GPS to point to the hope of home, I am lost in the cosmos.

I’d like to be a better listener. (Reasons are obvious.)

I’d like to pay more attention to creation. (Ignoring fellow creatures is rude.)

I’d like to not change the world. (Can’t anyway.)

I’d like to read more poetry. (Stupid not to.)

I’d like to see more tattoos. (Stories are fascinating.)

I’d like to get art I don’t like. (Understanding cultural conversation is good.)

I’d like to have meals take more time. (It’s actually the point.)

Are there things you’d like? Please let me know by posting them in a comment.

This is my final blog in 2011, time running out as it is, and I can think of no better post than to let Walker Percy have the final word. I could say that Percy is one of my heroes, which is true, but the way the word “hero” is overused today makes that comment feel like I’m in some way trivializing his memory, which is something I refuse to do. Walker Percy (1916-1990) was a novelist and essayist who lived in Louisiana, and if you have not read him you need to make a resolution this year to correct that error. Begin with The Second Coming (1980), then read The Moviegoer (1961), and then… well, if you begin with those two novels you’ll read the rest on your own.

In Signposts in a Strange Land (1991) a number of Percy’s essays were collected, edited by Patrick Samway. The essays fall into three categories: Life in the South, Science, Language, Literature, and Morality and Religion. As an Epilogue Samway wisely included “Questions They Never Asked Me,” a witty, wide-ranging, and insightful interview in which Percy both posed the questions and provided the answers. It is from this interview (pp. 416-417) that I take the following excerpt.

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Do you regard yourself as a Catholic novelist?

            Since I am a Catholic and a novelist, it would seem to follow that I am a Catholic novelist.

What kind of Catholic are you?

            Bad.

No. I mean, are you liberal or conservative?

            I no longer know what those words mean.

Are you a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?

            I don’t know what that means, either. Do you mean do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?

Yes.

            Yes.

How is such a belief possible in this day and age?

            What else is there?

What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadanism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.

            That’s what I mean.

To say nothing of Judaism and Protestantism.

            Well, I would include them along with the Catholic Church in the whole peculiar Jewish-Christian thing.

I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific hu­manism as a rational and honorable alternative?

            Yes

Why?

            It’s not good enough.

Why not?

            This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight; i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and wouldn’t let go until God identified himself and blessed him.

Grabbed aholt?

            A Louisiana expression.

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Happy New Year—may 2012 be rich in evidences of grace and glimmers of glory for you.

It was always part of my understanding of the Christmas story that Jesus was born in a stable because all the available rooms in the local “hotels” of the day were occupied. This, in turn, has been taken to mean that in his birth Jesus was marginalized, unwanted, excluded, unwelcomed by those in the City of David that should have recognized the arrival of their rightful King.

In Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey suggests this take on the Christmas story may in fact be erroneous. Bailey has lived for over 40 years in Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, and Cyprus, and is professor emeritus of Middle Eastern New Testament studies at Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem.

Most English translations state that after the child was born, he was laid in a manger “because there was no room for them in the inn.” This sounds as if they were rejected by the people of Bethlehem. Was that really the case?

There is a trap in traditional language. “No room in the inn” has taken on the meaning of “the inn had a number of rooms and all were occupied.” The “no vacancy sign” was already “switched on” when Joseph and Mary arrived in Bethlehem. But the Greek word does not refer to “a room in an inn” but rather to “space” (topos) as in “There is no space on my desk for my new computer.” It is important to keep this correction in mind as we turn to the word we have been told was an “inn.”

The Greek word in Luke 2:7 that is commonly translated “inn” is katalyma. This is not the ordinary word for a commercial inn. In the parable of the good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37) the Samaritan takes the wounded man to an inn. The Greek word in that text is pandocheion. The first part of this word means “all.” The second part, as a verb, means “to receive.” The pandocheion is the place that receives all, namely a commercial inn. This common Greek term for an inn was so widely known across the Middle East that over the centuries it was absorbed as a Greek loan word into Armenian, Coptic, Arabic and Turkish with the same meaning—a commercial inn.

If Luke expected his readers to think Joseph was turned away from an “inn” he would have used the word pandocheion, which clearly meant a commercial inn. But in Luke 2:7 it is a katalyma that is crowded. What then does this word mean?

Literally, a katalyma is simply “a place to stay” and can refer to many types of shelters. The three that are options for this story are inn (the English translation tradition), house (the Arabic biblical tradition of more than one thousand years), and guest room (Luke’s choice). Indeed, Luke used this key term on one other occasion in his Gospel, where it is defined in the text itself. In Luke 22 Jesus tells his disciples:

“Behold, when you have entered the city, a man carrying ajar of water will meet you; follow him into the house which he enters, and tell the householder, ‘The Teacher says to you, Where is the guest room [katalyma] where. I am to eat the passover with my disciples?’ And he will show you a large upper room furnished; there make ready.” (Lk 22:10-12)

Here, the key word, katalyma, is defined; it is “an upper room,” which is clearly a guest room in a private home. This precise meaning makes perfect sense when applied to the birth story. In Luke 2:7 Luke tells his readers that Jesus was placed in a manger (in the family room) because in that home the guest room was already full.

If at the end of Luke’s Gospel, the word katalyma means a guest room attached to a private home (22:11), why would it not have the same meaning near the beginning of his Gospel? The family room, with an attached guest room, would have looked something like the diagram below:

…To summarize, a part of what Luke tells us about the birth of Jesus is that the holy family traveled to Bethlehem, where they were received into a private home. The child was born, wrapped and (literally) “put to bed” (anaklino) in the living room in the manger that was either built into the floor or made of wood and moved into the family living space. Why weren’t they invited into the family guest room, the reader might naturally ask? The answer is that the guest room was already occupied by other guests. The host family graciously accepted Mary and Joseph into the family room of their house.

Source: Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels by Kenneth E. Bailey (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press; 2008) p. 32-34.

Kenneth Bailey has spend four decades living in Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, and Cyprus, most recently serving as professor of Middle Eastern New Testament studies at Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem. In the early chapters of Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, Bailey sheds understanding on some of the details in the story of Christ’s birth as recorded in the Gospels.

[I]t is evident that the story of the birth of Jesus (in Luke) is authentic to the geography and history of the Holy Land. The text records that Mary and Joseph “went up” from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Bethlehem is built on a ridge which is considerably higher than Nazareth. Second, the title “City of David” was probably a local name to which Luke adds “which is called Bethlehem” for the benefit of nonlocal readers. Third, the text informs the reader that Joseph was “of the house and lineage of David.” In the Middle East, “the house of so-and-so” means “the family of so-and-so.” Greek readers of this account could have visualized a building when they read “house of David.” Luke may have added the term lineage to be sure his readers understood him. He did not change the text, which was apparently already fixed in the tradition when he received it (Lk 1:2). But he was free to add a few explanatory notes. Fourth, Luke mentions that the child was wrapped with swaddling cloths. This ancient custom is referred to in Ezekiel 16:4 and is still practiced among village people in Syria and Palestine. Finally, a Davidic Christology surfaces in the account. These five points emphasize that the story was composed by a messianic Jew at a very early stage in the life of the church.

For the Western mind the word manger invokes the words stable or barn. But in traditional Middle Eastern villages this is not the case. In the parable of the rich fool (Lk 12:13-21) there is mention of “storehouses” but not barns. People of great wealth would naturally have had separate quarters for animals. But simple village homes in Palestine often had but two rooms. One was exclusively for guests. That room could be attached to the end of the house or be a “prophet’s chamber” on the roof, as in the story of Elijah (1 Kings 17:19). The main room was a “family room” where the entire family cooked, ate, slept and lived. The end of the room next to the door, was either a few feet lower than the rest of the floor or blocked off with heavy timbers. Each night into that designated area, the family cow, donkey and a few sheep would be driven. And every morning those same animals were taken out and tied up in the courtyard of the house. The animal stall would then be cleaned for the day. Such simple homes can be traced from the time of David up to the middle of the twentieth century. I have seen them both in Upper Galilee and in Bethlehem. Figure 1.1 illustrates such a house from the side.

The roof is flat and can have a guest room built on it, or a guest room can be attached to the end of the house. The door on the lower level serves as an entrance for people and animals. The farmer wants the animals in the house each night because they provide heat in winter and are safe from theft.

The same house viewed from above is illustrated in figure 1.2

The elongated circles represent mangers dug out of the lower end of the living room. The “family living room” has a slight slope in the direction of the animal stall, which aids in sweeping and washing. Dirt and water naturally move downhill into the space for the animals and can be swept out the door. If the family cow is hungry during the night, she can stand up and eat from mangers cut out of the floor of the living room. Mangers for sheep can be of wood and placed on the floor of the lower level.

Source: Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels by Kenneth E. Bailey (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press; 2008) p. 28-30