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Notes for Meeting

Notes for Meeting

Written by: David Brunton
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 Notes for our family's Meeting on Sunday night, for anyone who wasn't able to join us in person.

notesformeeting.substack.comDavid Brunton Christianity Ministry & Evangelism Philosophy Social Sciences Spirituality
Episodes
  • Old Testament Tour: Poetry, Continued

    Old Testament Tour: Poetry, Continued
    Apr 20 2026
    My darlings, I’m so enjoying our whirlwind tour through the Bible. As a reminder, we’re currently talking about the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, which we divide into three chunks: the law, the prophets, and the writings. We started our tour in the very middle, with three of the writing books that are written in poetry, Job, Psalms, and Proverbs. And this week, you all read Job chapters 1, 2, and 42 in preparation for diving into the characters a little bit.We’re not doing a quiz or anything, but you should all remember by now that Job, Psalms, and Proverbs are smack in the middle of the sixty-six books of the Bible that most Christians consider canon. Psalms is filled with psalms, Proverbs is filled with proverbs, but Job is not filled with jobs, instead it’s filled with the character Job, along with other characters who fill very different roles. From your pre-reading, you’ll all recall that Satan is one of the main characters, and due to some conversations between Satan and the Lord, Job is rather badly smitten at the outset of our story.By the very end of chapter two, the five main characters are introduced: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite, of course Job, and the Lord. What follows is a back-and-forth between these five characters, and you already know how it ends, because you read chapter 42, but let’s dig in to some of the meaty bits of the poetry.After the introduction in the first two chapters, Job opens the poetry with a lament. It’s the saddest of sad poems, and it’s beautifully constructed. Job’s lament ends with these lines:What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me.I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil.”When I was in college, I took a class called Job and the Joban Tradition, it was taught by Peter Machinist, and one of the things we learned in that class is that Job is a theodicy. It grapples with the question of why do bad things happen to good people?This term, theodicy, incidentally, was coined by Gottfried von Leibniz, the inventor of calculus, who in addition to being interested in infinitesimals, was also interested in the problem of evil. How can there be evil if God is all powerful.The first response to Job is by Eliphaz the Temanite, whom I will remind you, sat on the ground without eating or speaking for a week, just to be with his friend Job. None of these characters are slouches as friends. The overall structure of Job is that Eliphaz speaks and then Job responds, then Bildad the Shuhite, then Job, then Zophar the Naamathite, then Job. This repeats three times, and for the most part the friends are pretty supportive, although Eliphaz does get a bit grumpy toward the end. Even though the whole plot is that Job never sins, Eliphaz feels the need to judge. Here’s a snippet of it:“Submit to God and be at peace with him; in this way prosperity will come to you.Accept instruction from his mouth and lay up his words in your heart.If you return to the Almighty, you will be restored: If you remove wickedness far from your tentWe don’t have time to read all of the back and forth, but what we find is that everyone who starts out consoling Job eventually does the same thing as Eliphaz. Bildad and Zophar both get a bit accusatory, and then Job is forced to respond.“As surely as God lives, who has denied me justice, the Almighty, who has made my life bitter,as long as I have life within me, the breath of God in my nostrils,my lips will not say anything wicked, and my tongue will not utter lies.I will never admit you are in the right; till I die, I will not deny my integrity.I will maintain my innocence and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.You get the point here. Job is like, nah bro, it’s not like that. There’s a somewhat strange interlude in chapter 28, which almost feels like a standalone song or poem, but that is also beautiful. It’s not attributed to any of the characters, and it’s asking a question:Where then does wisdom come from? Where does understanding dwell?It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing, concealed even from the birds in the sky.Following this is another long poem by Job, and then we get a surprise! A character who wasn’t introduced in the beginning steps out of the crowd, and he gives a rousing speech that begins like this:“I am young in years, and you are old;that is why I was fearful, not daring to tell you what I know.I thought, ‘Age should speak; advanced years should teach wisdom.’But it is the spirit in a person, the breath of the Almighty, that gives them understanding.It is not only the old who are wise, not only the aged who understand what is right.He makes a good point, but he also brings it home in a way that’s like ten times more judgmental than the three friends, which is looking pretty grim for Job. But don’t worry, the Lord arrives on stage now, and I’m going to switch to ...
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    10 mins
  • Tour of the Old Testament: Poetry Books

    Tour of the Old Testament: Poetry Books
    Apr 13 2026
    After some discussion with everyone during Lent, we’re going to start a tour of the Old Testament in Meeting today. There seemed to be some general agreement among all the Bruntons-east that having an overall sense of it could be fun and interesting. Today we’re going to do a quick orientation, and then we’re going to start exactly in the middle with the poetic books, mostly because I like them and I think they’re a fun starting place.So first it’s worth noting that when Jesus talked about scripture, and when he quoted from scripture, what he was quoting was what we call the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that it was all written in Hebrew, whereas the New Testament was written mostly in Greek.Remember that Jesus grew up in Second Temple Judaism, which we’ll come back to later, but one way you can think of the Christian religion is that it’s an offshoot of Second Temple Judaism, and the reason we say “Old Testament” and “New Testament” is that we inherited the Old Testament from our Jewish roots, and the New Testament was all written after the time of Jesus.There are some theological implications about calling the two parts of the Bible the Old Testament and New Testament, but it’s still a convenient way to group the books, and it’s been a grouping for a long time. In Judaism, the grouping is called the Miqra, or the Tanakh. The Tanakh is a convenient name because it’s actually an initialism of three words, Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim. The Torah is the first five books, the Nevi’im are the prophets, and the Ketuvim are the writings. We’re going to come back to the writings in a minute.But get that in your head for a minute. There are five books at the beginning that we group together called the Torah or the Pentateuch, or the Law. The story of the creation of the world is there, and the flood, and the story of Moses leading the Hebrew children out of Egypt. The story of Moses receiving the ten commandments on stone tablets is in there, and a lot of additional rules that weren’t on the tablets, but cropped up along the way.You might remember that Jesus says “Do not think that I have come to destroy the law and the prophets” - when he says “the law” there, he’s talking at least in part about the Torah, and when he says “the prophets” he’s talking about the next broad division of books. When you think about prophets, you might think about Jonah who got swallowed by a whale and barfed out in Ninevah, or Isaiah who unknowingly wrote most of Handel’s Messiah a few thousand years before Handel was born, or you might think about Elijah who fasted for forty days and who at the end of his life ascended into heaven in a chariot of fire.We’re going to talk about the prophets later, but that’s another broad division of the Old Testament, you’ve got the law and the prophets. When we talk about the prophets, we’re going to talk mostly about characters, because that’s how I think of them, but we’ll also talk a bit about what prophecy means.The third and final broad category is called the writings, or the Ketuvim, and this is eleven books that are all wonderful. The eleven books include many of my favorite parts of the Bible, in part because we sing them and recite them more than other parts. In particular, there are three books in the middle of the writings that are books of poetry and that’s where we’re going to look today.But first, one more quick recap. Law, that’s the first five books. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. The Torah and the Pentateuch are two other names for it. Prophets, that’s a big chunk of the Old Testament, and when we come back to talk about the prophets, we’re going to talk about a lot of individual characters like Jonah and Elijah. And the writings.In the Christian Bible, the poetry is exactly in the middle, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, those three books, and because of that they’re also easy to find. My recollection is that if you calculate the exact center of the Christian Bible that Protestants use, it’s in Psalm number 117.There are 150 psalms, and every single one is a beautiful poem or series of poems. In many Christian denominations, it’s traditional to have a psalm sung or spoken in every single service. You might remember that the very first book published in North America was the Bay Psalm Book, which you can think of as kind of a hymnal. Psalms have been set to music many thousands of times throughout the past several millenia, and many of my own favorite hymns are Psalms translated into English and set to music.Some Psalms are long, some are short, and they’re surprisingly varied as poetry, and they’re the part of the Hebrew scriptures that has most made me want to learn more Hebrew.Proverbs is the book right after Psalms. Since Psalms is full of psalms, you won’t be surprised to hear that Proverbs is full of proverbs. Aphorisms for living, and you have ...
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    9 mins
  • Palm Sunday

    Palm Sunday
    Mar 30 2026
    We’re going to keep reading about the final days of Jesus from the Gospel of John today. One of the reasons I like reading the Gospels is that they each have a different take on what happened that week, but the accounts of Palm Sunday and the events of that week are all reasonably well synched up - unlike the dinner we were reading about last week where three accounts are about the wine and the bread but the account in John is about dirty feet.The rough sketch of the story is that Jesus and his friends are in Bethany, which is a couple miles outside of Jerusalem. A side note, the Tomb of Lazarus in Bethany is still a place of pilgrimage for Christians and Muslims. There are at least two churches and a mosque there, and it’s the place where Jesus went from hometown hero to seriously famous miracle worker just before his crucifixion.We’ve talked about the story of Lazarus a few times. The story in the book of John assumes we know about it - “Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.” The premise of John’s story that this is what catapulted Jesus to fame, and to the attention of the authorities.If you’ve ever looked closely at a depiction of Jesus on the cross, there will sometimes be a sign above it that says I-N-R-I, which is an initialism for “Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum” - Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. This is a reference from the Gospel of John:Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. Many read this sign, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and the sign was written in Aramaic, Latin and Greek.There’s a whole argument depicted there in the Gospel of John, where Pilate seemingly would rather not crucify Jesus, but the religious authorities insist on the crucifixion because Jesus claimed to be both the King and the Son of God. They tell him, “We have no king but Caesar.” Pilate didn’t have jurisdiction over their religious objections, but they kind of paint him into a corner over the political point.An interesting little side note that relates to a conversation Dan’l and I had earlier in the week - this is actually the only mention of Latin in the whole Bible. Lots of Aramaic, lots of Greek, but Latin occurs only in this notice.Okay, so back to the story of Palm SundayThe next day the great crowd that had come for the festival heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting,“Hosanna!”“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”“Blessed is the king of Israel!”Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written:“Do not be afraid, Daughter Zion; see, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.”At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that these things had been done to him.It’s worth noting at this point that Jesus doesn’t claim to be a king during his discussion with Pontius Pilate. The crowd had called him king of the Jews, and of course we have the much earlier record in the Gospel of Matthew where the Magi ask where they can find the King of the Jews, but during the discussion with Pilate Jesus doesn’t actually cop to it. When Pilate asks him about it, his response is ““Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?”As depicted in the Gospel of John, it’s a bad week for Jesus, and it includes a lot of people wanting him dead for either claiming to be the Son of God or claiming to be the rightful king.But I like to think that the message Jesus preached was actually quite a bit more radical than the things they accused him of. And this way of reading it makes a lot of sense in the story.Saying “I’m the Son of God” or “I’m the rightful king” is one thing, but saying “Every one of you is the child of God and there is no such thing as a rightful King” is a whole nother thing.We have lots and lots of records of Jesus preaching about the Kingdom of Heaven, in fact the word kingdom occurs fifty-four times in Matthew alone, and not once does he say, “it’s mine.” Instead, he says over and over and over, “it’s for the poor” or “it’s for the persecuted.”He doesn’t usually answer when they ask him if he’s God, but when they ask him about the kingdom of heaven, oh, then he has words and words and words for them. Usually it’s parable beginning with “the kingdom of heaven is like…”But getting back to the story of Palm Sunday again, we’ve been skipping around a little bit, and I want to end with something that Jesus tells the disciples at the outset of this story of the bad week that we now call Holy Week:Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces ...
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    7 mins
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