A Watermelon for anyone who Memorises the Beatitudes!

I know some others are currently in a sermon series on Matt 5-7.  Here are some thoughts as I go along; others may be able to sharpen my understanding and praxis.

Memorisation

I am offering a watermelon as a prize for anyone who can recite the Beatitudes from memory in Behdini Kurdish.  Maybe next week it'll be a bunch of grapes... then a punnet of peaches... and then a plain old apple.
I plan to produce flashcards and cut them up more and more each week, so people's memorisation deepens each week.  We sometimes forget that memorisation is not a black and white matter.  A good start would be to see two columns of flashcards and be able to match up mourn with ...comforted and hunger & thirst with ...be filled.  In reality, many mature Christians have memorised around 10% of the Scriptures.  Hard to quantify, of course, but just because we can't recite Isaiah from beginning to end doesn't mean that we haven't memorised a lot of it.  Some of us can have a fair shot at telling you some of the contents of any given chapter in Isaiah.  We should aim for memorisation in a whole range of ways; perhaps get people to memorise the contents of Mark, for example, or in the case of the Beatitudes, to know it word-perfectly, because it's kind of poetic: it's recorded in such a way as to make it easy to remember.

I used to know the Beatitudes a bit like a cricket line-up, (I always think of Hunger & Thirst as a solid No.4 Batsman :-) ), although it only gets up to batsman no.8!  Better, I suggest, to line up each Beatitude with a day of the week, with Persecution squeezed in to the events of a Friday evening, which frankly might be quite apt since people here sometimes get fired up to do dastardly things after hearing some chap get hot under the collar midday on Friday.  So, here it is with Saturday is the first working day of the week:

Sat Poor in Spirit

Sun Mourn

Mon Meek

Tues H&T for Righteousness

Wed Merciful

Thurs Pure in Heart

Fri Peacemakers

Fri night! Persecuted

Resources

Kent Hughes- Free mp3s of his sermons that became the Preaching the Word book on the Sermon on the Mount.  All of his books of expositions seem to be available in their original sermonic form.  As ever, good exegetical insight, some good illustrations and examples from Christian history, despite the messages being quite short.

One verse--and a world of difference

I've got to Isaiah 12 in my OT devotions and I recommend v6 as an incisive summary of how a the church differs from the majority faith all around us:
Isaiah 12:6 CSB
Cry out and sing, citizen of Zion, for the Holy One of Israel is among you in his greatness.”

Firstly, we love to sing passionately : Cry out and sing, citizen of Zion

and secondly, the reason why we express our doctrine in song: our God is GREAT, but he is great AMONG us. Our neighbours here loudly proclaim that God is great, but generally deny that he can be among us. They might object that this damages our reverence for the awesome transcendent God, and sometimes churches lose their trembling in order to make worship entertaining, but even here in this one verse there is an answer to that objection. Who exactly is AMONG us? The Holy One of Israel. Ultimately our Christian celebration, especially our weekly gatherings, centres on the jaw-dropping wonder that the Holy God in Christ has come to dwell among us, satisfying both his holiness by paying the price of our sin and his love by being willing to accept us as his people, dwelling among us and comforting us step by step as we make our way painfully to our destination where
"God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them." Revelation 21:3 CSB

Baptism & Baptism Certificates

What should we do about baptism certificates?

If you have wisdom you'd like to share with other readers that is not sensitive, you're welcome to comment rather than emailing me alone

1. Be honest with GodIt is disappointing when people ask for a piece of paper proving their baptism, as they seek emigration to a foreign country.  We should pray "Lord, raise up people whose baptism makes them all the more determined to serve amongst their own people.  May they have as their heart's desire and prayer to God that their fellow-countrymen be saved.  May they be determined, like Paul, to run the race and testify, even if prison and hardship awaits them"
2. Be understandingIn my situation, I have had to dispel my naivety and understand why emigration is an attractive prospect.  Firstly, these two guys are already displaced people.  We think of them as 'nationals', but they are somewhat foreign to mainstream society already.  Our city is especially discriminatory to people from the country west of here.  And secondly, would I want to give up my British passport and confine my kids to marriage and work in this Middle-Eastern country? 
3. Be thankfulTo seek legal emigration to the West is better than lying and colluding with wicked people-smugglers.  Good can be done in the West, especially if these dearly loved brothers of ours go and challenge the pluralism of the West and make disciples wherever they go.
4. Be faith-full
   Remember God is in control.  He is building his church.  No plan of his can be thwarted (Job 42:2)
5. Encourage locals to baptise one another, within the life of the indigenous churchHowever, sometimes they won't and I don't think it makes sense to delay active participation in the fellowship of the church because there is no one willing to baptise others.  We can feel guilty that we have 'tainted' the life of the local church by being the expat who does the baptising.  But Paul didn't seem bothered who did the baptising.  He was more concerned about preaching than baptising, but neither did he refuse to baptise according to a hard and fast rule that 'it must be a Corinthian who does the baptising'
6. Resist black and white methodologiesSome might say 'you shouldn't have baptised them'.  But they might have gone to someone else's ministry - this was a real possibility in one case - and had a much less biblically-instructive baptism service
7. Continue to teach baptism as a 'church thing'In other words, highlight 1 Cor 12:13- "For we were all baptised by one Spirit into one body"  In our case, we don't have a fully formed church.  This is the nature of baptisms on the cutting edge of mission.  But we should keep praying against baptism being seen as an individual attainment.  It is clearly a statement about an individual having come into the kingdom, but it is more than that: it is a sign by which the body of Christ welcomes a new individual believer into the family.  May that brotherly love abound in us and make it a sweet thing to join our fellowship!
8. Take note of this line from IOM RSC (Resettlement Support Center)
   Those "who can establish persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion may be considered for admission to the United States as refugees."  This is why baptism certificates might be eagerly sought after
9. We may prefer to write a letter to specific officials than issue a baptism certificate that could be used in who knows what kind of scenario
   However, this does seem to disappoint believers who feel a letter doesn't provide as much weight.
   I considered adding this as smallprint on any baptism certificate I issue:
   
   Baptism is not sure proof that the baptised is a genuine Christian.  The evidence that someone is a Christian is their changed character and ongoing, sacrificial participation in the life of the church.  If anyone would like to enquire whether someone baptised in this fellowship is continuing to live as a committed Christian, they are welcome to contact us.

Jesus' paralysis

Jesus the Paralytic

This is a very familiar passage for many of us - Luke 5:17-26 & parallels - but I wanted to share fresh insights I have received this week.  Perhaps it might help others to preach the cross from this passage.

What does it meant that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins?

We typically think like this: that Jesus is God, so he can forgive sins.  And we don’t go much further than that.

But, we must ponder this more carefully: actually, not even God the Father has authority to forgive sins, if by that cancelling of debts he is acting unjustly.  Remember “righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne” (Ps 89 & 97).  He cannot sweep sin under the carpet.

“The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).  If Jesus had come to earth and said ‘I wipe away sins’ - without paying the price for sin - he would have been rebelling against his Father’s just government of the universe.

So, he came to die, to pay the full penalty for the world’s sin.  And by means of the cross he gained the right to cancel sins, and to remove the consequences of sin in our lives.  It actually would have been unjust for Jesus to cure the man’s paralysis, because all of us deserve death and sickness.

Think of it this way: Jesus gained the authority to heal and to forgive sins the man who was stuck on that stretcher by being himself stretched out in a kind of paralysis.  Not carried on wooden poles with a cloth between to lie on in some sort of comfort but nailed to two Roman poles and lifted up to die in excruciating pain.

And...one of the criminals next to him said effectively ‘go on, get up and walk’.  Free yourself of this paralysis you’re stuck in! (Luke 23:39).  And he could have called on twelve legions of angels to save him.  But he refused to ‘get up and walk’.  He endured the cross, scorning its shame.  He drained the cup of God’s wrath to the end, crying “It is finished!”

TPR Lab - Total Physical Response

How it Works: 

1. Walk round the office, and the coach gives you instructions in the target language: Knock on the door, Shuffle the Cards.  In English OR Kurdish.  He marks you out of, say 100, for how many actions you correctly performed first time.
2. Watch the video of these actions, and repeat after the video.
3. You walk round with your coach and tell him what to do.  He marks you out of 200; you score 1 point for getting it roughly right, 2 if you get it spot-on
4. You and your coach retrace your steps and he talks in the past tense about what you did.  I knocked on the door, I shuffled the Cards.
5. You now walk round and talk in the past tense about what you did.
6. You now use the future tense, by going round and telling a partner what he will do.  eg You will knock on the door, you'll shuffle the cards.

The Niche in the Market: There are many people in Duhok who have a decent academic grasp of English, but very little experience speaking it.  And they are prepared to pay good money to get practice.  But I can only provide IELTS preparation courses in the evenings.  Some are asking for Saturday classes.  That's the opening for a whole-day experience.  No one amongst the hundreds of expat English teachers in Kurdistan seems to have offered this kind of immersion experience.

A local partner: Imagine a shopkeeper in a village.  He speaks his own language crisply, slowly -- frankly, like the kind of guy Blue Peter would snap up as a TV presenter.  He has no idea that he has a God-given gift that can help him provide well for his family.  He has land nearby, perfect for recreation - a short mountain bike's ride away -- and a sizeable house with a room where you could play table-tennis and darts.  

Who would be the coaches? Yes, this is a potential bottleneck, because expats don't want to give a whole Saturday to being an English coach.  But there are lots of Kurds who are fairly fluent English speakers, eg English students or returnees--they could be very adequate as coaches when they follow the TPR script.

Does TPR work, or is this just a bright idea?  TPR has been widely advocated and practised.  It really does work, because all five senses can be engaged, not just the eyes looking at letters on a page.  After all,  this is how we learnt our mother tongue as children.  And often, more complex vocabulary is rooted in basic everyday actions: eg in Kurdish 'complicated' is a metaphor - têkvedayî - and it comes from the literal world of shuffling cards and stirring tea. So...drink tea and play cards, and then you'll be able to move on to talk about 'shuffled' international relations!

Despite the acclaim TPR has received, I failed to find anyone who had developed a TPR lab syllabus that could be used in a particular location.  If successful, this syllabus could be sold to others.

To view the syllabus of actions as we develop it, look here

The Simpler Psalms

The Simpler Psalms

Maybe others find themselves wanting to encourage people either:

- to translate bits of the Bible into a dialect or language

- to be better at reading anything in public.

I hope my meditation on this little selection of Psalms might help others in some way.

Ps 8
Ps 23
Ps 1
Ps 2
Ps 3&4
Psalm 100
Ps 93
Ps 32
Ps 42&43
Psalm 46
Psalm 63
Psalm 67
Psalm 103
Psalm 120
Psalm 127
Psalm 130
Psalm 134
Psalm 137

I have called them the Simpler Psalms because they're short and more straightforward to read or to translate.

But look with me at 

Psalm 8

It sounds quite simple.  The sort of thing children can sing along to.  Try Jamie Soles' very simple and uplifting modern rendition.

But to meditate on this Psalm is rather more complex.  Because Hebrews 2 calls on us to think about how this Psalm is not true of our experience!  Isn't that strange?  God wants us to sing Scripture, and as we do it, to cry out in our hearts BUT THIS ISN'T TRUE! Or rather, it isn't true yet.

Man does not rule over the beasts of the field.  Example: I have had terrible trouble with mice in our house.  They seem to ruling over us!  They choose what they want to eat and leave me with the toil of clearing up after their feast.

Hebrews 2:8  "Yet at present we do not see everything subject to him."

So, it should pain us to sing Psalm 8.  But, we should read the Psalm with its fulfilment in view too.  There is a Son of Man who has come, Mark 1- the wild animals were with him.  He commanded cancer cells and they obeyed him.

He has come to put everything right.  And we will rule with him, a truth that so often gets forgotten in evangelical spirituality.

So, let's rejoice in these 'Simpler Psalms'.  But let's also meditate on them day and night.  There's often more there than at first meets the eye.

Research into Kurdish Idiom: My Initial Thoughts

8.1 What is it that you wish to research? – Please state this in the form of a research question as you begin

your essay.  How effective is the use of metaphorical language with its origins in traditional Kurdish village life

for effective communication among the urban youth who are speakers of Behdini Kurdish?

8.2 Why is this research important to you, or to others? – Tell us how your topic is connected to literature and

other research you have done. How do you expect this research to make a contribution to the wider body of

knowledge in your discipline?

-1. The Behdini dialect has been sparsely documented, so it is useful at that level to learners of Behdini.

It will also be a contribution to the debate about what makes 'good Kurdish'.  See below.

8.3 What motivates you to do this research? – If your research is practitioner based explain how that is

relevant to your study.  To preach the gospel aptly, and to take captive every thought. 

Whether or not this comes to be stated explicitly - and I would prefer to make my thesis acceptable as a secular linguistic study in its own right- my thinking springs from a conviction about how

the kingdom of God grows.  It does not grow through violence, neither does it grow

through Western money or clever strategy, but rather through speaking the word of God.  But the

gospel must be spoken with aptness, accuracy and flavour.  "Sweetness of speech increases

persuasiveness" Prov 16:21.     Kurdish believers are poorly equipped to use the weapon of the word

skilfully.  Their language has not been well developed.  Kurdish culture has for centuries been suppressed, because its language has been despised as unworthy of use in education and worship.  And yet, even within this

ideological straightjacket, the richness of the Kurdish language has been preserved within an oral

tradition.  Kurdish proverbs and idiom are honoured as almost sacred scripture.  

So, I propose four avenues that could be explored for research topics:

A) Kurdish Proverbs.  This seems to be the safe option.  There are a number of books of Kurdish

proverbs.  A first step would be to translate Omer Salihi's Gotinet Peshiyan or one particular author's work

Kurdish Wisdom.  The latter is a neighbour, fluent in English, retired and keen to help.  The research

question could be to test familiarity and comprehension, with different regions and age groups.  

B) A Comparative Study of English idiom.  When I listen to preachers who have an exceptional

command of colloquial English I am awed at how they keep you listening because they are constantly

painting pictures.  I long to be able to communicate with cogency statements like – to pull a couple out

at random -"how will your wealth help you when old age comes knocking?", or "this verse is the death

blow to Western individualism".  How will a new generation of Kurdish preachers be raised up who

can preach winsomely, holding people's attention in the same way that the revered story-tellers of old

used to? I could use a book of English idiom and document Kurdish equivalents.  For example, a wild

goose chase has a Kurdish equivalent: "khew jee choo u kew jee choo": 'missed my lie-in and missed

the partridge too!'  

C) An Analytical Collection of Behdini Idiom

I have been documenting a lot of colourful Kurdish language in this past year.  This is not in itself an

academic exercise, more the labour of love of one who is at heart a Kurdish folklorist.  But I am sure

there is ground-breaking work here somewhere.  For example, I have not seen anyone try to document

the huge amount of rhyming and alliterative language in Kurdish.  We have bits and bobs, they have jil

u mil.  We like things spick and span, they like things ser u ber.  Or take animal idiom: I wonder

whether I could beaver away at documenting and then testing this huge lexis.  If I were to ferret around

for long enough, or even just swan around the chaykhanes as a sort of 'idiom squirrel' there would be

enough animal metaphor and simile to keep you reading til the cows come home.  The analysis could

look at how effectively an older generation's idiom connects with the Facebook urban generation.

D) Public Speaking

A different approach would be to analyse a selection of speeches, perhaps from political congresses, 

festivals, mosques or TV chat shows. Here the aim would be exploring how far renowned Kurdish

public speakers are using their language metaphorically in order to connect with a society whose roots

are in mountain villages.  I would want a substantial reading list on sociolinguistics, and some

typologies of language development, perhaps from the English language example.  Britain's seafaring

heritage still provides us with a huge catalogue of colourful idiom, from the tide turning to marriages

on the rocks to nailing your colours to the mast, even though we forget the roots of many of the

phrases.  Landlocked Kurdistan no doubt has a whole range of idiom that endures from its nomadic,

pastoralist heritage.

Many Kurdish linguists have a reductionist typology of language development, which is centred

around a hostility to loan words.   In English, of course, a purist approach would not appreciate the way

in which foreign words have been adopted but infused with a different meaning,  the shift from French

demander (to ask) to the English 'to demand' being a famous example. Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure

of English has whetted my appetite for the study of language development.

I look forward to bringing to the research a background in Kurdish history, but to shift a gear into more

purely linguistic research.  I have a lot to learn in the field of linguistics, but I am happy to expand my

historian's mind with some new linguistics tools.  Because I love this people and see many of them

suffering terribly in the current crisis, I am all the more motivated to immerse myself in their thoughts. 

To top and tail this essay with a Christian worldview, I want to "take captive every thought to make it

obedient to Christ".  People think using words.  And it would be a privilege for me to devote some

years of my life to analysing their words.  Of the above topics that I have introduced, a study of animal

idiom would be my preferred choice.  This essay has been of necessity a hurried work, but I hope that

it demonstrates an alertness to the wealth of unexplored territory in the Kurdish language, and a

willingness to listen to supervisors' guidance on what would be most suitable.