Session Twelve – Held on Sunday, January 8, 2012

Review of Session Eleven:

What would life be like if there weren’t differences among us? Well pretty boring; yet when differences are basic and in the area of faith, those differences are challenging. To rise to the level of our times is to find a way to bridge the gap. One way is when the gap occurs in the same person. This twelfth session offered a couple of examples of that. Tina commented how she had tried to read Genesis before but simply couldn’t wrap her head around the account that Adam lived to be 930 years old; maybe part of her struggle comes from the fact that she is an account and numbers matter. It made much more sense to me when I learned that these are stories from which we are to learn their meaning and not necessarily actual historical events.

Later on in our session Tim pointed out that studying Genesis was much more difficult than studying the Gospel of John which we focused on in our previous study. Carol mentioned that listening to and hearing other possibly meanings to the Genesis account were easier than when she attempted to read it by herself. Rosemarie brought up that Genesis brings out the issues between science and religion too. What would be your input to our discussion?

Genesis 6:1 – 4: Origin of the Nephilim

I would strongly urge you to read the notes to the passages we are discussing. http://www.usccb.org/bible/genesis/6. Keep in mind as you read these four verses that the ancient Israelites did not live in a vacuum but rather were surrounded by other peoples and that they shared many common stories. Thus the Israelites had memories and drew on them to tell their stories. Again God always takes us as we are. So God accepts ancient people as they were but he also takes us as we are. Our journey is to discover the meaning that the stories had for the ancient people and to live that meaning in our own times; that is what it means to rise to the level of our times. Every generation of Christians are invited to do that for their times. Your grandparents lived in a different world and your grandchildren will live in a different world but the biblical stories are the same stories. What is different is our understanding of them because we are different. We can ask different questions and must respond in different circumstances, the concrete circumstances and history that surround and constitute us as individuals, as a community, as a nation, and now as a global presence.

A concrete example of this struggle emerged when Rosemarie asked what does it mean in Gen. 6:2b that “… so they took for their wives as many of them as they chose.” Heber wondered if this was the source of the one time tradition of the Mormons. If you listen carefully, you can hear among other things that this account occurs in a patriarchal society; it is men that take wives. It occurs in a polygamous setting; as many of them [wives] as they chose. If we move into our contemporary times things aren’t really all that different, we recognize the existence of polygamous societies. For example, Kara, my daughter, as a Peace Corp volunteer, taught in Sumve, a small village in Tanzania, Africa. There, if you were Muslim you were permitted to have more than one wife but, if you were Christian, you were permitted to have only one wife. The country attempted to formulate its laws to respect the different religious beliefs of its citizens. Whereas in the US, you can have more than one wife or husband as long as you do it sequentially and go through the proper legal proceedings to divorces one and marry the other. Finally, this one verse plus the practice of ancient Israelites means that God accepts us as we are. For Christians Christ, whom we believe is the very Son of God, saw in marriage a sign and symbol of his Father’s unconditional love of human beings. Thus for Christians, at least in aspiration if not in achievement, marriage is a one time commitment for life. But even that presented Matthew and Paul, and the Church ever after a struggle both to understand and to live what Christ said.

Noah and the Flood – two stories woven into one.

Let’s begin by reading the J account in the first column and then the P account in the second column, noting the bolded words in each account which will focus your attention on some of the differences in the two accounts. http://rjr.richardross.annaerossi.com/?p=307. There are differences in the accounts because the stories are told by different authors to different people living in different places and perhaps at different times. Later in time, however, the final editor sees fit to weave the two different accounts into one story. Why? Well by the time the editor does this there are people in his times that are familiar with both accounts. If he leaves one or the other out, they would be asking, hey where is my story? In a way, the editor was being politically correct for his time. We live at a time when we notice these differences, ask different questions, etc., but it isn’t like God doesn’t know all of this. My remark to the adult learner, God is inviting you to deal with it. This type of scholarship provides evidence of why I understand the scripture as I do. For me it is a historical perspective that illuminates the meaning of the biblical texts and presents us the challenge of rising to the level of our times.

Our group did more but this enough for anyone who would take the time to follow all I have written above. As always, your questions, comments, observations are welcomed.