Becoming the Neighbor

Did you know that San Ignacio (Belize’s 2nd largest “city” that we are only 7 miles from) is translated into Saint Ignatius, who was a saint that believed that Christ's death and resurrection paved the way for his (Ignatius) being martyred. Ignatius was a man who essentially held to much of the New Testament writings and teachings, and also taught about the virgin birth of Jesus. Saint Ignatius was believed to have been martyred in about C.E. 107, and was born about C.E. 50. He was believed to have known some of the apostles. He’s also thought to have succeeded Peter as the Bishop of Antioch, Syria. Scholars refer to Ignatius as the "God-Bearer" or Theophorus.

This exciting fun fact about the place we live and how it relates to Theology was told to us by our wonderful Professor, Michael Lodahl, who joined us from Point Loma Nazarene University to teach the first week of class, God and Nature I.Almost every class this week was started with a prayer from the book of Psalms and ended with a Bible ABC’s (written by the talented Michael Lodahl himself)with a whole lot of scripture reading, deep discussions, and new, exciting ideas in between.

G is for Goliath, who turned Israel’s face red.
Til David confirmed he had rocks in his head!

J is for Jonah, stiff-necked missionary.
God had to whale him ‘fore bias he’d bury.

M is for Moses, the one called lawgiver.
His distaste for idols made Aaron’s knees quiver.

Y is the question that Job asked of God.
He thought all his siff’ring was a little bit odd.

One of the many profound topics we discussed was the idea of becoming the neighbor. We discovered that Leviticus 19 is the only place in the Hebrew bible that we are told to not only “love your neighbors as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), but also to “love your strangers as yourself”! (Leviticus 19:33). This biblical vision we learned about in Leviticus is teaching us to love all of God’s creation; neighbors and stranger, animals and plants. We then looked at the Gospel of Luke, which brings the two greatest commands from the Hebrew Bible together and says, " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind' (also found in Duet. 6:5); and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself."(Luke 10:27) . In the New Testament we are clearly being called to become the neighbor, by drawing near to others and being active in our faith. But once again we are reminded in Psalm 145:9(“The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made”) that we cannot draw the line at becoming neighbors to only humans, our responsibility as ‘image bearers’ (Our calling and vocation introduced to us in Genesis 1) is to become neighbors to all of God’s creation. This does not mean to simply “celebrate the beauty”, but rather to love it, tend to it, and serve it because we are in an everlasting covenant with God and with all living creatures!

Before God and Nature I, we got to know some of our Belizean neighbors during a trip to the Belize Zoo! The photos throughout this entry are from that experience, which was a lot of fun and a great way to get to know Belize a little more.This is just a glimpse of some of the in depth scripture studies and the discussions based around the book by Ellen Davis “Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture- An agrarian reading of the Bible” which was the focus book of the week. Only the first week of class and we are already diving into deep topics of theology and creation care!