{"product_id":"as-kingfishers-catch-fire-isbn-9781601429674","title":"As Kingfishers Catch Fire","description":"\u003cb\u003eLiving Out the Word Made Flesh\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Sixty years ago I found myself distracted,” Eugene Peterson wrote. “A chasm had developed between the way I was preaching from the pulpit and my deepest convictions on what it meant to be a pastor.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e And so began Peterson’s journey to live and teach a life of congruence\u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003econgruence between preaching and living, between what we do and the way we do it, between what is written in Scripture and how we live out that truth.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Nothing captures the biblical foundation for this journey better than Peterson’s teachings over his twenty-nine years as a pastor. \u003ci\u003eAs Kingfishers Catch Fire \u003c\/i\u003eoffers a never-before-published collection of these teachings to anyone longing for a richer, truer spirituality.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Peterson’s strikingly beautiful prose and deeply grounded insights usher us into a new understanding of how to live out the good news of the Word made flesh. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is one man’s compelling quest to discover not only how to be a pastor but how to be a human being.“\u003ci\u003eAs Kingfishers Catch Fire\u003c\/i\u003e covers it all, the A to Z of Christian spirituality. It is filled with the kind of wisdom that can only come from long obedience in the same direction! It’s more than a book; it’s a gift. Thank you, Eugene!”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Mark Batterson, New York Times best-selling author of The Circle Maker and lead pastor of National Community Church, Washington, DC\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“There is no one who has done more to shape my ‘pastoral imagination’ than Eugene Peterson. Now, through this extraordinary collection, we see how words become pastoral work. An exegete and a poet, Peterson opens up to us not only the text but its world, welcoming us to walk with Moses, David, Isaiah, Solomon, Peter, Paul, and John. And as we do, we find ourselves keeping company with Jesus. Read it devotionally; read it as a study in sacred storytelling; read it to come alive along the Jesus Way.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Glenn Packiam, associate senior pastor, New Life Church, Colorado Springs\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Eugene Peterson is brilliant and the gift he has given the church is huge. This is a man who has the mind of a scholar paired with the heart of a grace-filled pastor. The main thing is that he loves God’s word and that is so apparent in every word that he writes.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Liz Curtis Higgs, best-selling author of \"The Women of Easter\" and Bad Girls of the Bible series\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I can hear Eugene Peterson’s warm and gravelly voice in each well-crafted chapter of As Kingfishers Catch Fire. I wish I could have been in a pew listening to the Word spoken for a particular time, place, and people, but reading this collection is the next best thing. Peterson’s attention to biblical texts, theological concerns, and earthy applications for real people are the same threads we find in his many books. Reading just the introduction to each section is time well spent, but I promise you won’t stop there.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Dan Baumgartner, senior pastor, First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eAs Kingfishers Catch Fire\u003c\/i\u003e is a collection of 49 sermons Peterson first preached at Christ Our King Presbyterian Church during nearly 30 years of ministry there (1962–1991). The sermons are divided into seven groups, each grouped together with the formula, “Preaching in the Company of _____,” where the fill-in-the-blank is Moses (the Law), David (Psalms), Isaiah (the Prophets), Solomon (Wisdom literature), Peter (the Gospels), Paul (the Epistles), and John (the Johannine literature). Throughout, Peterson strives to \"enter into the biblical company of prototypical preachers and work out of the traditions they had developed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.\" The result is a master class in what Scripture says about the pastoral care of souls. Peterson eschews the notions that spirituality can be pursued apart from everyday life or that it can be sought without the company of others. Instead, as he writes in a characteristic passage:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"It is somewhat common among people who get interested in religion or God to get proportionately disinterested in their jobs and families, their communities and their colleagues. The more of God, the less of the human. But that is not the way God intends it. Wisdom [literature] counters this tendency by giving witness to the precious nature of human experience in all its forms, whether or not it feels or appears ‘spiritual’” (emphasis in original). This isn’t to deny that spiritual disciplines such as prayer, Scripture reading, and corporate worship are vital. But, Peterson is saying, unless those disciplines make us better workers, family members, neighbors and friends, we haven’t yet achieved the congruence of life to which Scripture bears witness: persons who act in God’s eye what in God’s eye we are, that is, “Christ who lives in [us]” (Gal. 2:20).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is not a book I would recommend to some pastors. For example, if you’re looking for a book that gives you a fool-proof three-step process to ______ (whatever it is that you’re trying to do), skip this one. Or if you’re looking on Saturday night for a three-point sermon you can preach the next morning, don’t read this. Peterson’s sermons are ongoing conversations, not plug-and-play outlines. However, if you’re tossed about by the winds of the times or you’re tired of slapping Bible verses on business principles or if your ministry lacks congruence between the means of discipleship and the ends of Christlikeness, please read this book. It will feed your soul, and through you, the souls of your congregation. Then read it again.\"  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—George O. Wood, Influence Magazine\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Unlike many sermons that barely make it out of the pulpit, Peterson’s soar out and draw in throughout this fantastic book. His words, written for speaking, are sure, intimate, and trustworthy. Peterson (\u003ci\u003eThe Message\u003c\/i\u003e) admits that preaching is a “corporate act” that requires a congregation in common worship. For 29 years, he preached at the church he founded, Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Md., and this anthology of sermons welcomes readers to join that company. He intends these 49 sermons, undated but for one, to be used in conjunction with communion. Following his gracefully instructive introductions to each chapter, Peterson preaches “in the company” of Moses, David, Isaiah, Solomon, Peter, Paul, and John of Patmos. What he says about Paul applies to him, too: he’s “totally at ease in this richly expansive narrative of God’s Word.” Peterson mixes storytelling with exegeses, the rare sermon (on Psalm 110) with the annual, history with geography, language lessons with a skosh of mathematics, and wisdom with wit—all in tuneful, God-fed language. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Publishers Weekly\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"For nearly three decades, members of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Md., enjoyed a rare privilege. Week by week, they listened to wordsmith Eugene Peterson preach. Over his 29 years as the congregation’s founding pastor, those worshippers undoubtedly heard some of the most skillfully crafted sermons delivered in the past generation. In the process, they learned what God had to say to them as a specific group of Christ-followers in their unique context. Peterson has described the sermons as a collaborative effort—an ongoing conversation between the pastor and his people, as they collectively listened for a word from God.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThose of us who did not have the opportunity to hear the sermons delivered now have access to the next-best thing. \u003ci\u003eAs Kingfishers Catch Fire\u003c\/i\u003e collects 49 sermons—seven each grouped under the names of Moses, David, Isaiah, Solomon, Peter, Paul and John. By Peterson’s reckoning, each biblical personality offers a distinctive approach, and sermons preached in their company together help to constitute “the whole counsel of God.” The sermons span his three decades at the Maryland congregation, and glimmers of the congregation’s personality appear.\u003cbr\u003eAfter all, Peterson consistently refused to accept God’s self-revelation simply as a set of high-flown propositions. Rather, he insisted on the Mystery of Incarnation—God taking on flesh and blood and moving into the neighborhood. And that means the church, the Body of Christ, likewise must live out its faith in the common day-to-day routines of the workplace, the home and the streets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo, the sermons seem simultaneously directed to a specific congregation in Bel Air and universally applicable to all God’s people, wherever they live. And they do it with poetic sensitivity. Peterson writes: “Poetry is not the language of objective explanation but the language of imagination. It makes an image of reality in such a way as to invite our participation in it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs any reader of \u003ci\u003eThe Message\u003c\/i\u003e translation of Scripture knows, Peterson has a love affair with well-chosen words. Few use language with the grace and skill he exhibits. At the same time, the sermons collected here make it clear Peterson’s preaching was not mere performance art. Instead, they grew out of a pastoral sensitivity to the people in the pews. The book takes its title from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which Peterson reads as a series of metaphors about congruence. The poem describes the rightness and wholeness found when what one is and what one does are seamless. This collection of sermons by pastor-poet Peterson has that sense of congruence.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—The Baptist Standard\u003c\/b\u003eEugene H. Peterson, translator of \u003ci\u003eThe Message\u003c\/i\u003e Bible, authored more than thirty books, including the spiritual classics \u003ci\u003eRun with the Horses\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eA Long Obedience in the Same Direction\u003c\/i\u003e. He earned a degree in philosophy from Seattle Pacific University, a graduate degree in theology from New York Theological Seminary, and a master’s degree in Semitic languages from John Hopkins University. He also received several honorary doctoral degrees. He was founding pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, where he and his wife, Jan, served for twenty-nine years. Peterson held the title of professor emeritus of spiritual theology at Regent College, British Columbia from 1998 until his death in 2018.LETTER TO THE READER\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEugene Peterson. The brilliant pastor-poet behind the wildly successful The Message Bible and spiritual classics like Running with the Horses and A Long Obediencein the Same Direction. A detail you may not know is that he spent twenty-nine years as pastor of the same church in Bel Air, Maryland, faithfully sharing his heart with his congregation Sunday after Sunday and all the days in between.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWouldn’t it have been amazing to have been a fly on the wall or a person in the pew those twenty-nine years, listening to Peterson unpack “the whole counsel ofGod” (Acts 20:27)? What you have in your hands — As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God — is our attempt to make that happen.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThroughout this definitive collection of teachings, Peterson is intentional in keeping the main idea the main idea: that we, as Christians, live lives of congruence. Put another way, that the inside matches the outside. Or as we used to hear, that we indeed practice what we preach.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith the exception of small editorial polishes here and there, these teachings are presented in their original form, without any anxiety to update. In other words, there will be references to the moon landing, nods now and then to places specific to Peterson’s congregation, and phrases like “My text for today is . . .” We believe they add a charming integrity to this work, more responsible than relevant, each page honoring real time, revealing how we can “find ourselves living, almost in spite of ourselves, the Christ life in the Christ way.” We hope you agree.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSincerely,\u003cbr\u003eThe WaterBrook Multnomah editorial team\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePREFACE\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSixty years ago I found myself distracted. I was being tossed about by “every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14), except it was not winds of doctrines that were distracting me but the winds of the times. It was the sixties, and there was a lot going on: charismatic personalities like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights revolution in the South, Timothy Leary and the drug culture, Earth Day and the flower children, Vietnam . . . There was so much going on — in the world, in the culture, in the church — so many important things to do, urgent voices telling me what had to be done. There was no one thing needful. There were many things needful, all clamoring for my attention.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was living in a small town twenty miles from Baltimore, a sleepy colonial town that was fast becoming a suburb. I had been assigned by my denomination to gather and organize a congregation. I started out with a fair amount of confidence and much energy. I was well supported organizationally and financially. The personal encouragement was strong. The mission I had been called to lead was clearly articulated.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut as time went on, I found myself increasingly at odds with my advisors on matters of means, the methods proposed for ensuring the numerical and financial viability of the congregation but without even a footnote regarding the nurturing of souls. I was given books to read on demographics and sociology. I was sent to seminars on programming strategies for appealing to the secular suburban mind-set. Leadership was interpreted almost entirely from business and consumer models.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt wasn’t long before I was in crisis: a chasm had developed between the way I was preaching from the pulpit and my deepest convictions on what it meant to be a pastor. I sensed my attitude toward the men and women I was gathering into a congregation was silently shaped by how I was planning to use them to succeed as a pastor developing a new congregation with little thought to serving these souls with the bread of life. I found myself thinking competitively about other churches in town, calculating ways in which I could beat them in the numbers game.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen three things happened about the same time that brought me to the realization I didn’t know what I was doing. It began in my pulpit. I realized I didn’t know how to preach. I was not a preacher. What I was doing from the pulpit each Sundaywas not preaching; in fact, it had nothing to do with preaching. I was whipping up enthusiasm. I was explaining the nature of what we had to do, while arbitrarily fitting Bible texts into key places. I was using the place of worship as a bully pulpit. I had become very American in all matters of ways and means. I never wavered in my theological convictions, but I had a job to do — get a congregation up and running — and I was ready to use any means at hand to do it: appeal to the consumer instincts of people, use abstract principles to unify enthusiasm, shape goals by using catchy slogans, create publicity images that provided ego enhancement.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd then, almost at the same time, two more things happened: I heard a lecture and read a poem. The combination of lecture and poem changed everything. The two events taught me what I needed to know to become a pastor of the gospel. The lecture was given in person by Paul Tournier, a Swiss physician; the poem was written by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, long dead.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePaul Tournier in midlife had shifted the location of his medical practice froma consulting room, with its examining table and supporting laboratories and surgeries, to his living room, before a fireplace, with him holding a pipe in his hand instead of hanging a stethoscope from his neck. For the rest of his life he used words — listened to and spoken — in a setting of personal relationship as the primary means for carrying out his healing vocation. He left a way of medical practice that was primarily focused on the body and embraced a medical practice that dealt primarily with the whole person, an integrated being of body, soul, and spirit. He wrote many books and I read them all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDriving the twenty miles home from Johns Hopkins Hospital, the site of the lecture, my wife and I commented appreciatively on Tournier’s words, in the courseof which she said, “Wasn’t that translator great?” And I said, “What translator? There wasn’t any translator.” To which she said, “Eugene, he was lecturing in French. You don’t know twenty words of French. Of course there was a translator.” And then I remembered her: a woman about his age, standing to the side and a little behind him, translating his French into English. She was so unobtrusive, so self-effacing, so modest in what she was doing that I forgot she was there, and ten minutes after the lecture, I didn’t even remember she had been there.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut there was something else: Paul Tournier himself. During the lecture I had the growing feeling that who he was and what he was saying were completely congruent. He had been living for a long time in Switzerland. Precisely the way he lived and what he was now saying in Baltimore came across as an accurate and mature expression of all he had been living and writing. Just as the translator assimilated to the lecturer, her English words carrying not just the meaning but also the spirit of his French words, so his words were one with his life — not just what he knew and what he had done, but who he was.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was a memorable experience, the transparency of that man. No dissonance between word and spirit, no pretense. And the corresponding transparency of the woman. No ego, no self-consciousness in either one of them. Later I remembered T. S. Eliot’s comments on Charles Williams: “Some men are less than their works, some are more. Charles Williams cannot be placed in either class. To have known the man would have been enough; to know his books is enough. . . . [He was] the same man in his life and in his writings.” 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat’s the sense I had that day about Paul Tournier: he wrote what he lived and he lived what he wrote. In the lecture that day in Baltimore, he was the same manas in his books written in Switzerland. A life of congruence, with no slippage between what he was saying and the way he was living. Congruence. It is the best word I can come up with to designate what I realized I needed in my pastoral work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI recalled Herman Melville’s comment: “Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.” 2 The prow and the ship, not two different things but the same thing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd then, not two weeks later, this poem:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;\u003cbr\u003eAs tumbled over rim in roundy wells\u003cbr\u003eStones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s\u003cbr\u003eBow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEach mortal thing does one thing and the same:\u003cbr\u003eDeals out that being indoors each one dwells;\u003cbr\u003eSelves — goesitself; myself it speaks and spells,\u003cbr\u003eCrying What I do is me: for that I came.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI say more: the just man justices;\u003cbr\u003eKeeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;\u003cbr\u003eActs in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — \u003cbr\u003eChrist.For Christ plays in ten thousand places,\u003cbr\u003eLovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his\u003cbr\u003eTo the Father through the features of men’s faces.3\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Christian life is the lifelong practice of attending to the details of congruence—congruence between ends and means, congruence between what we do and the way we do it, congruence between what is written in Scripture and our living out what is written, congruence between a ship and its prow, congruence between preaching and living, congruence between the sermon and what is lived in both preacher and congregation, the congruence of the Word made flesh in Jesus with what is lived in our flesh.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is what we admire in an athlete whose body is accurately and gracefully responsive and totally submissive to the conditions of the event: Michael Jordan at one with the court, the game, the basketball, and his fellow players. Or a musical performance in which Mozart, a Stradivarius, and Itzhak Perlman fuse and are indistinguishable from one another in the music. Congruence also occurs often enough in more modest venues: a child unself-consciously at play; a conversation in which words become as movements in a ballet, revealing all manner of beauty and truth and goodness; a meal bringing friends into a quiet awareness of affection and celebration in a mingling of senses and spirits that provides something like a Eucharistic dimension to the evening.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd congruence is what we participate in as we read “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” the sonnet that gave me metaphors to identify the distinctive heart of pastoral work. Hopkins piles up a dazzling assemblage of images to fix our attention on this sense of rightness, of wholeness, that comes together when we realize the utter congruence between what a thing is and what it does: kingfisher and dragonfly catching and reflecting sun brightness, a stone tumbling over the rim of a well, a plucked violin string, the clapper of a bell sounding. What happens and the way it happens are seamless. Hopkins then proceeds to the congruence of “each mortal thing” bodying forth who and what we are. But what kingfishers and falling stones and chiming bells do without effort requires development on our part, a formation into who we truly are, a becoming in which the means by which we live are congruent with the ends for which we live. But Hopkins’s final image is not of us finally achieving what the dragonfly and plucked string do simply because they are determined by biology and physics. His final image is Christ, who lives and acts in us in such ways that our lives express the congruence of inside and outside, this congruence of ends and means, Christ as both the means and the end playing through our limbs and eyes to the Father through the features of our faces so that we find ourselves living, almost in spite of ourselves, the Christ life in the Christ way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith Tournier’s witness and Hopkins’s metaphors working together, I finally started to get it: preaching is the weekly verbal witness to this essential congruence of what Christ is with his work that “plays” in us. Not just the preaching but prayers at a hospital bed, conversations with the elderly, small talk on a street corner — all the circumstances and relationships that make up the pastor’s life. Not ideas, not goals, not principles, nothing abstract or disembodied, but the good news of the “Word . . . made flesh” ( John 1:14, kjv) becoming our flesh, our limbs and eyes. I still had a long way to go, but at least now I was being a pastor and not staying awake at night laying out a strategy or “casting a vision.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e---\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of the unintended consequences of this (I noticed it only in retrospect) was that I was beginning to treat my congregation with far more dignity than I had been treating them. Impatience began to diminish; condescension slowly faded out. I was learning to embrace the congregation just as they were, not how I wanted them to be. They became an integral part of the sermon. Preaching became a corporate act. Common worship was the context: singing and praying, baptisms and Eucharist, silence and blessings. But I soon realized our common worship on Sundays was also developing tendrils that reached into homes and workplaces, casual conversations and chance meetings on the street.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was discovering an imagination for developing a sense of narrative that kept our lives relationally together in something deeper and wider than anything we were individually. I began to weed out the depersonalizing stereotypes that identified the souls in my care as either problems to be fixed or resources to be exploited. I developed conversations that grew into stories that in turn developed into something akin to a novel in which all these people who were worshiping together were involved with one another, whether they knew it or not or even wanted to be. Congregation was not a collection of individuals but something more like a body with distinctive parts, but all the parts working organically with Christ as the head.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e---\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe sermons gathered here document this collaboration of pastor and congregation in acts of worship and a life together for twenty-nine years (1962–91) at Christ Our King Presbyterian Church (UPCUSA) in Harford County, Maryland. They are not selected because of any merit as my “best” sermons but becauseI have come to think of them as three decades of representative collaboration with my congregation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA friend who had been a student of Karl Barth told me that Barth often spoke of the impossibility of conveying with accuracy in a book what was proclaimed from a pulpit, like attempting to sketch a kingfisher in flight or to describe a lightning strike when all we have to go on is what is left after the storm. Sermons copied into a book are like that. Much, maybe most, of what is involved in a sermon is left out of the book: the voice of the preacher, the congregation listening to the sermon, the worship in song and prayer and silence, the architecture of the sanctuary. That is why I am naming what is written here “kingfisher sermons.” But maybe a prayerful imagination in the reading can supply at least some of what is lost in the book.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI have organized the sermons in seven groupings under the names of Moses, David, Isaiah, Solomon, Peter, Paul, and John of Patmos. Each name identifies a distinctive approach that needs to be included in the “whole counsel of God” (Acts20:27) that I wanted my congregation to be on familiar terms with. To give added emphasis to the “whole” counsel, I placed seven sermons in each group: seven sermons in each of the seven groupings, forty-nine sermons in all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI wanted to enter into the biblical company of prototypical preachers and work out of the traditions they had developed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. When I prepare and preach a sermon, I need constant reminding that I am part of a company that has a rich and varied genealogy. I do not start from scratch. I do not make up something new. I want to develop a coherent and connected biblical imagination with my congregation, not live out of a suitcase full of cast-off items from various yard sales and secondhand stores.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePart 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“HE SPOKE AND IT CAME TO BE”\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePREACHING IN THE COMPANY OF MOSES\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eIntroduction\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn enormous authority and dignity have, through the centuries, developed around the first five books of the Bible, traditionally designated the Books of Moses. Over the course of many centuries, they account for a truly astonishing amount of reading and writing, study and prayer, teaching and preaching.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGod is the primary concern of these books. That accounts for the authority and the dignity. But it is not only God; we get included. That accounts for the widespread and intense human interest. We want to know what’s going on. We want to know how we fit into things. We don’t want to miss out.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Books of Moses are made up mostly of stories and signposts. The stories show us God working with and speaking to men and women in a rich variety of circumstances. God is presented to us not in ideas and arguments but in events and actions that involve each of us personally. The signposts provide immediate and practical directions to guide us into behavior that is appropriate to our humanity in the particular place and time in which we live, and that is honoring to God.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe artless simplicity of the storytelling and signposting in these books makes what is written here as accessible to children as to adults, but the simplicity (as in somany simple things) is also profound, inviting us into a lifetime of growing participation in God’s saving ways with us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePreaching requires that we develop a Moses imagination, with stories and signposts. Using the name of Moses to identify these books does not mean he wrote them, for many unnamed Hebrew prophetic minds told and wrote what was eventually gathered and copied here. Moses, rather, represents the way of life and the way of using language that sets the tone for everything else that makes up Holy Scripture. The five books are foundational for the subsequent sixty-one. Preaching in the company of Moses keeps proclamation personal and local while at the same time breathing the clean air of creation (what God does) and the air of covenant (how God brings us into participation).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMoses is mentioned in the New Testament more frequently than any other Old Testament person — seventy-eight times. His influence is everywhere. It is impossibleto exaggerate his importance. A giant in the land. The first Christians (and preachers!), living by faith in Jesus Christ and teaching others to do the same, had Moses constantly on their tongues and his example always in their vision.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eElie Wiesel, retelling the Moses story with a blend of biblical and Talmudic materials, wrote, “Moses [was] the most solitary and most powerful hero in Biblical history. The immensity of his task and the scope of his experience command our admiration, our reverence, our awe. Moses, the man who changed the course of history . . . his emergence became the decisive turning point. After him, nothing was the same again.” 4\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe way of language in which Moses is our first teacher is most accurately described, I think, as a storytelling language, a language textured by the give-and-take of a life under the formative influence of God’s Word, language that develops in a worshiping congregation, language that invokes God and then listens and prays. It is the language of a mixed company of struggling sinners and faltering saints, preachers and teachers, homemakers and business people — people on pilgrimage, telling their family stories, passing on the counsels and promises of God. Preaching in the company of Moses develops precisely this storytelling imagination that keeps our sermons grounded in the everyday realities of the people to whom we are preaching.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e---\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut during the last three hundred years, the name of Moses, so long identified with the Five Books, the Torah, has for many been gradually effaced from the spine of his books, much as names disappear from centuries-old, weather-scoured cemetery markers. In this case the weather did not consist of wind and rain, snow and sleet, but of historical criticism, a new way of reading the Bible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo for many of our pastor colleagues, the long practice of reading the Bible as a book of faith has played second fiddle to reading it strictly as history. The story—the narrative of a lived faith in God — has been obscured if not lost altogether.Those who read the Bible this way (but not all) ignore the literary context of the Bible and take it apart, looking for development and historical change. They challenge the historicity of foundational events and traditional ideas of authorship and then reconstruct the history, but they leave the Bible itself as a pile of disjointed fragments from various times and places. They have no interest in the literary and theological coherence of the text. These critics suppose that by digging underneath the Moses books they can serve us a better or truer truth. But most writers are highly offended when people get more interested in the contents of their wastebaskets and filing cabinets than the books they write. “Read the book!” The meaning is in the book, not in the information","brand":"WaterBrook","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300698935525,"sku":"NP9781601429674","price":24.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781601429674.jpg?v=1742921105","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/as-kingfishers-catch-fire-isbn-9781601429674","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}