Finally, the great day has arrived—I’m roughly three and a half hours away from my vacation! Yes, my dear friends… David and I are heading out late this morning to fly to Washington for my sister’s graduation. We’re all very proud of her. Not only did she get a $1000 scholarship for community college next year (where she can join our NNPCW ranks if she so chooses), but her softball teammates voted her team captain and outstanding player of the year! A very nice end to our family’s high school softball watching. While I'm gone, Brianne will continue as the guest blogger.

So I’m typing this over my usual breakfast of oatmeal, trying to get out the door as soon as possible. In other words, today’s post will be a short reflection. Right now I’m branching out in my biblical reading to include the Apocrypha, which is included in the awesome Harper Collins Study Bible I got for Christmas. Let me say this about the Apocrypha—I see why some of these books didn’t make the cut. It was almost impossible to get through the Wisdom of Solomon… ugh. Judith and Tobit were all right, though, especially since Judith depicts a female heroine.

What are these texts, you might ask? They are generally texts that didn’t make it into the Protestant Bible for one reason or another. Many are included in Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Bibles. From my limited understanding, the reason many of them failed to make the cut is because of problems with finding reliable source texts. Remember that our humanistic Reformation forebears were all about reading and translating the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek. If they found unreliable or contradictory sources, then they questioned the book’s scriptural authority. Many of the books, though, depict Jewish history during the exile or the Hellenistic period, before the birth of Christ. So they’re definitely worthwhile reading.

I’m reading Sirach right now, a wisdom text kind of like Proverbs that was written between 200 and 180 BCE. This guy has pretty good stuff to say, particularly about social relationships. Many of the sayings deal particularly with class relations—you can get a sense of what he thinks about that with the following: “Humility is an abomination to the proud; likewise the poor are an abomination to the rich” (Sirach 13:20).

Strange to think, with all our advances in technology and learning, the accumulation of all our scholarship and deeper theological understanding of the divine, that we’ve changed that little over the past 2000 years when it comes to our relationships with one another.

“Whoever fears the Lord will do this, and whoever holds to the law will obtain wisdom. She will come to meet him like a mother, and like a young bride she will welcome him.” --Sirach 15:1-2

Kelsey