Some may remember, from my earlier posts, my colleague D. D is about to retire and is an outspoken member and critic of a Very Large Southern Denomination.

A while back, on a teacher work day, D wandered into my classroom and said, “I’m reading a book by a guy with really fuzzy theology.”

It turned out he was talking about Brian McLaren. “Oh,” I said. “I’m reading a book by him, too, one called A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN, for my Sunday school class.”

“Yep, I’ve read that one, too,” he said. (Actually, it sounded like he’d read most of McLaren’s books.) “And they haven’t thrown your class out of the church yet?” He quoted the bumper sticker motto of his denomination: “‘The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.’ Not much room for fuzziness there.”

He talked more, about the dogmatism of his fellow Very Large Southern Denomination-ists, specifically a missions group concerned with feeding the poorest of the poor in Africa, who, in a spirit of grave concern, were tied up in knots because the miller who offered to grind for free the corn to be given away was, alas, not Christian. “Jesus didn’t say anything about that, did he?” D said. “No. He just said, ‘Feed the hungry.'”

Several weeks later D popped in again. “Kicked out of church yet?”

“No,” I said, chuckling. “But whenever we talk in Sunday school about what we don’t believe, we talk about your denomination.”

“Aw, that’s OK,” he replied. “We’re so confident in our beliefs, that won’t hurt our feelings at all.”

NPR’s story “A Victim Treats His Mugger Right” highlights Julio Diaz’s response to a teenager with a knife. “It’s as simple as it gets in this complicated world,” he says.

(Please note: Since I am no Bible scholar, this post may open a Pandora’s box of controversy and dis-accreditation, all at my expense.)

It is said that behind every good man is a good woman. Behind Jesus, however, were quite a few good women.

First, there’s the water-into-wine miracle in John 2, quoted here from oremus Bible Browser‘s New Revised Standard Version: On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. ²Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. ³When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” ⁴And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” ⁵His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” ⁶Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. ⁷Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. ⁸He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. ⁹When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom ¹⁰and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” ¹¹Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

Who effectively pushed Jesus into his active Godliness? His mother, a woman.

And then there’s the challenge in John 4: ⁵So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. ⁶Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. ⁷A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” ⁸(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) ⁹The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) ¹⁰Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

Jesus begins by acting like a male in a male-dominated society–he demands a drink. The woman is no back-bender-over, though, and she challenges his assuming request, which leads to Jesus’ verbal clarification of his own purpose, to give “living water” to everyone.

A more blatantly stark point on Jesus’ learning curve appears in Mark 7, where ²⁵…a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. ²⁶Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. ²⁷He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” ²⁸But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” ²⁹Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” ³⁰So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

The Syrophoenician woman insisted that Jesus share his love beyond his own personal boundaries. Lucky for so many of us, he listened.

And finally, there’s the whole raising-Lazarus-from-the-dead incident, in which Martha puts things into her own terms, in John 11: ¹⁷When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. ¹⁸Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, ¹⁹and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. ²⁰When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. ²¹Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. ²²But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” ²³Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” ²⁴Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” ²⁵Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, ²⁶and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” ²⁷She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” ²⁸When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” ²⁹And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. ³⁰Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. ³¹The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. ³²When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Martha does more than Jesus bids: she basically tells him it’s his fault Lazarus has died, and she tells him to use his God connection to perform a miracle. A bit later, when Jesus asks her for a statement of faith, she does not answer his question but, instead, states her own perspective. Still later, Martha tells Mary that Jesus was calling her–which may not be true, since it’s not in the text. Why would Martha want Mary present? Perhaps to lay on guilt trip pressure for a miracle, which Mary does obligingly, and Jesus ends up raising Lazarus from the dead.

Even God’s got to admit that women rock!

I have a student with the name “Faith.” As is customary, prior to my team’s meeting with her parents to work out a plan for her scholastic achievement, I emailed the entire school staff to invite other comments. As I had just emailed about another student’s parent conference, I wrote in the email subject line, “Faith, too.” I received one reply, from my colleague D, who wrote, “I have that, too.” My response was brief: “And hope, and love?”

Faith. It takes many forms.

The middle school students I saw this week on morning bus duty had faith, faith that made the last school bus step not a step only but a platform from which to leap into the new day.

In a classroom game of “form words using index cards with random base words and affixes,” I watched as members of both the boy and girl teams, full of faith that the last minutes of playing time would determine their personal success, jumped up and down excitedly while awaiting their turn to add a word to the list.

Not to be outdone by my students, I, too, have faith. On my school-wide announcement about a special activity for a group of select students, I wrote, “Prize options will include an outdated Napoleon Dynamite calendar, and piece of Styrofoam, and much more,” in faith that eccentricity will beat out practicality any twelve-year-old’s day.

And it did. The colleague who assisted with the activity, when I initially told her about the prizes, seemed unimpressed by my selection of trinkets and otherwise useless objects. “I’ll bring some prizes, too,” she said, and she did–really good candy bars, one of which I pilfered to give to my dear wife.

In the introduction to the activity–the students were to map out a road trip and could earn points for each city, state, national park, etc.–I told the contestants about the prizes.

“First, we have these candy bars,” I said. I could just sense the students’ ears perking up.

Then, holding up the objects, I said, “And we also have an outdated Napoleon Dynamite calendar, a piece of Styrofoam–” but was interrupted by at least two students calling out, “Oooh, I want that!” My colleague was floored.

At the end of the contest, the winners who chose candy seemed pleased, but not as excited as the boy who chose the Napoleon Dynamite calendar (“I’m going to give it to my dad,” he said), or the girl who chose the Styrofoam (“Yes!”), or even the boy who picked out a rock with some fossil impressions in it.

“What am I going to do with a rock?” he asked.