Sermonizing

I preached at Mercy Seat tonight. That's my teaching parish. It is a super-supportive congregation. The texts today were Psalm 98, Luke 21:5-19, and two hymns that I selected. You can see all of those here. My sermon is here. I'd love to hear any thoughts or feedback that anyone has.

Winnie-the-Pooh

The theory that we were learning about is in Pentateuch class is about the authorship of the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch). Tradition holds that these books were written by Moses, but there are some problems with that tradition. For example, the author writes an account of the death of Moses, which would be admittedly hard, even for someone who was a favorite of God. By our beliefs, on Jesus could write an account of his own death. Another problem, the names keep changing: is it Mt. Sinai or Mt. Horeb? is Moses' father-in-law's name Jethro or Ruel? The most obvious and most famous is that the name of God keeps changing - in your English translation you'll see it appear as God and as LORD. There's lots more in that vein, but I won't bore you. The upshot is that there is a theory that the Pentateuch was in fact written over the course of centuries, drawing from tradition that dates back to Moses and beyond, by 4 authors or groups of authors, known to scholars as J (the Yahwist because he called God Yahweh), E (the Elohist because he called God Elohim), D (the Deuteronomist - guess which book he wrote) and P (the Priestly writer, who is thought to have edited all of it together). So my professor had us read a parody of this called "New Directions in Pooh Studies" in which the author breaks down the Winnie the Pooh stories using the same methods as Biblical scholars. It's pretty silly. Here's a link to his work http://winnie-the-pooh.ru/online/lib/stud.html. After you read that you can read my response by clicking here.