The Holies

 

The Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls (Rome)

The final section of Paul’s letter to the Philippians (Phil 4:21-23) contains some greetings:

“Greet every saint in Christ Jesus” 

“The brethren with me greet you”

“All the saints greet you, especially those of Caesar’s house”

This seems rather standard in a group letter: to send out vague greetings and blessings. But Paul is not satisfied with a normal “goodbye.” He adds religious language like “Jesus,” “saints,” and “brothers.”  Is he trying to make his goodbye contain a more religious tone? Like the written form of what would now be an emoji with a halo on top of a happy face? Or is Paul trying to say something important here about God and the identity of his friends? If we look at the words Paul uses, that may help us know more of what he is getting at.

When talking about his Christian friends in Rome, several nameless, some who visit, and some who usually work there in what serves as Paul’s house arrest, Paul calls them “saints.” This word may be confusing, so let’s look back to where Paul got the word he used in Greek, “hagios.” One interesting place we find this word is in Paul’s Bible, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures known as the Septuagint. 

Isaiah 6 is a well-known passage, where Isaiah sees a vision of God in his magnificence filling the temple, with heavenly beings flying and calling out: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts.” Isaiah is overwhelmed with the glory and responds in worship, submission, and awe. 

Paul’s Greek Bible uses the word “hagios” for “holy” in Isaiah 6. The word that describes that amazing, set-apart, pure, refined, perfect, incomprehensible, overwhelming, infinitely good nature of God. And when Paul describes his friends, he uses that same word: hagios. Your Bible probably is similar to mine, and translates it “saint.” But don’t be fooled, this is not something that someone grew into, something that these people tried really hard to achieve, or the like. This was something Paul knew in them, saw in them, realized in them. That God himself, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, by his Holy Spirit, entered these people, and Paul saw them as amazing, set-apart, pure, refined, perfect, incomprehensible, overwhelming, with that infinitely good nature of God. Despite their lowly state financially, emotionally, physically, morally, or otherwise, Paul called them holy with the angelic word that described God. He said, “The HOLIES greet you!” 

On this All Saints Day, 2025 (All Holies Day?), let us remember the amazing gift we have in ourselves and in each other, all those who have faith in Jesus. The Holy of God that He chose to put in us when he sent his son to this world. May we see this today and every day.

Silhouette

de Paul Bunge, Sept 2025

 

Je voix les arbres à silhouette

Le monde est different

Mon place la même exactement

Qui a fait le changement encore?

 

Les palmiers tropicaux se profilent

Dans le brefs instants 

Le soleil laisse son art par le papier

Rapidement comme il s'en va

 

S’attander longtemps, sapins du Nord

En le croustillant du matin

Est’il possible que je cherche plus de temps

Avec les années qui deviennent moins?

 

Enfin Dieu m’a donné

Et tout le monde bien sûr

L’illustration de sa gloire

Par les changements des arbres

A Wow from Science

If you have lost the sense of amazement at the way the world is and how God made everything to be discovered and enjoyed and fathomed, and you have lost your "wow," you might look at this paper from the New England Journal of Medicine (looks like you can see it for free if you make an account with them). From the microscopic to the light-years, there are amazing discoveries all the time, which remind us that God is a creative creator who loves it when his children figure something out. And that the things we see every day are so much more amazing than we know and feel. 

If the science is challenging to digest, my everyday doctor's interpretation is as follows: 

 Researchers previously viewed a whole category of protein segments as overly simplistic and of little use in the body, disdainfully labelling them "Intrinsically disordered protein regions." However, further studies have revealed that these segments are very useful indeed and not at all disordered. Rather than having a singular shape, they fold into functional structures depending on their environment, serving many important roles in the body. With simple repeated units, they make superstructures that we could not live without. Imagine a kind of simple-looking metal that, if you pile it up in a city, forms itself into a skyscraper. Or if you dump it in a field, turns into a plow. And if you carry a little of it on your walk and it starts raining, an umbrella appears. That is what several of these chemical chains do in your body, depending on where they find themselves. And we had no idea until Dr. Gorlich and Dr. McKnight watched and listened and wrote and taught and went to conferences and sat at benches pouring chemicals back and forth year after year and discovered what was happening. 

Truly Solomon was correct when he said: "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, to search out a matter is the glory of kings."  (Prov 25:2) Paul B

Reference: Tanja Mittag, "Surprisingly Complex Assemblies from Low-Complexity Domains," NEJM, Sept 11, 20205, DOI: 10.1056/NEJMcibr2509676

Truth

 

I appreciate this Wikipedia summary:

Truth or verity is the property of being in accord with fact or reality. In everyday language, it is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences. True statements are usually held to be the opposite of false statements. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in various contexts, including philosophy, art, theology, law, and science. Most human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion, including journalism and everyday life. 

Thinking and Responding

(Christ and the Woman of Samaria at the Well, 1640)

Art can be a way of thinking, especially when the thoughts cannot keep up with the input. When the words and the theories don't fit the experience. You know you want to say something, but you can't even think it properly.

Many people feel that in the current American experience. I know I do. 

I especially appreciate Jon Guerra, whose art (song, poetry) has captured and coalesced some of my swirling ideas. He is a thoughtful Christian artist wrestling with the words of Jesus as well as the culture and politics of today. Thank you, Jon!

Some of Jon's Songs: 

The American Gospel  (Spotify)  (Youtube Music)

Citizens  (Spotify)  (Youtube Music)

In the Beginning Was Love  (Spotify)  (Youtube Music)

Nothing to Say to the New York Times  (Spotify)  (Youtube Music)

And Russell Moore's podcast interview with Jon is also very good: (Russel Moore's site)   (Youtube Music)

Standing Up

 Standing up to the abuse of power is inherently difficult. It can also be inspiring. People who do so often look back proudly on their actions and are justly celebrated for it after a crisis has passed. But crises usually do not end on their own. Resolving them requires courage and action.

-NYT editorial board

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/opinion/trump-law-firms-universities.html

Of Specialists

I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.

                            -  Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

An Amazing Time in Kenya

 

Tuberculosis and HIV. Various-colored glasses. Baboons. Time with my daughter. Rice and beans and fried tomatoes. I wanted to reflect a few amazing things from our time at Kijabe Mission hospital in Kenya last month. It was a wonderful opportunity to serve, along with my med-student daughter Erika. We worked on the general inpatient wards, along with awesome local and expatriate staff, interns, and medical students. 

Despite countless voyages at over 30,000 feet to get over oceans and around the globe, I remain amazed at safe transport and God's protection. Getting in one of those massive Boeing or Airbus tubes is magical, like C.S. Lewis or Stargate, where you wake up a little foggy and with indigestion, but in another world altogether.

I am amazed at my daughter, her hard work and determination means that she will graduate med school in May. She worked hard on the wards, amazing the interns who kept asking her to pull night call with them, knowing her hard work would benefit the patients and help them get more priceless minutes of shut-eye. It is a great blessing to share the field of medicine with her, bouncing cases off each other and commiserating when people don’t make it, such as her young woman patient with end-stage AIDS who we couldn’t save. 

The faith and hard work of the doctors and nurses at Kijabe hospital was amazing to see. In America, we get so used to a medical environment efficiently cleansed of anything spiritual. In comparison, Kijabe felt like a feast: weekly chapel services rich with life-giving music, daily prayers before rounds, and colleagues who look to God for help, as well as to quality evidence-based resources. 

Being in Kenya with Erika was amazing. Her Kenya memories were limited to milking cows and walking country roads from her last visit at age 6 with our friends the Kibaritas. That did not stop her from jumping into the current cultural challenge with creativity.

Seeing Erika and how she remembered her time in rural Kenya as a child, I thought it was amazing how differently we translate the world into our mind and memories at different ages. It is like we are wearing different pairs of glasses that emphasize different shapes and colors. 

 

How we see the world depends so much on the glasses we are wearing. It is so easy to put on the glasses of pessimism and negativity. We can defensively wear glasses that look down others. The Bible mentions glasses Jesus wore: "have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus...who emptied himself..." These are humility glasses. Jesus purposefully looked at people asking himself: how can I serve them? Not as better than them, but seeing them first before himself. These glasses keep slipping off my face.

We saw an amazing array of diseases at the hospital in the few weeks we were there. TB, various cancers, malaria, HIV, diabetes and its complications, strokes and heart attacks. But people are not diseases, they are people. Whether their bodies improve or not, healthy connections between caregivers and patients is a good thing. Those who suffer need those who are blessed with health and resources. Erika was especially amazed by the selfless service of Dr Lapore, one of the Kenyan doctors working at the hospital. She trained in Russia, feeling a call to medicine, pushing through to learn enough Russian not only to pass but to excel.

 

Dr Lapore on the right. Medicine Chief Dr. Tony Nguyen on the left.

The pathway to humility is through the humble valley. Having to ask for help interpreting, finding which meds are available, how to make things happen in a new culture, is humbling. Hopefully we grew through this process, and can keep those Jesus glasses on, like the decorations on the bus below.

Chapel on Wednesday Mornings

Christian Bus Culture? And "Stay Humble!"

Erika and I had a day to see some of the animals which East Africa is famous for. Kijabe is on the steep edge of the Rift valley. A drive to the bottom brings you to Lake Naivasha, where you can walk around with zebras, gazelles, giraffes, ostriches, hippos and endless varieties of birds large and small. No lions or Elephants there—but you don’t want to be walking with those anyway. It was an amazing opportunity. Back at the hospital grounds, there were plenty of monkeys and baboons showing off, but we were told to keep our doors and windows locked lest they gain entrance, steal our food, and make a mess.

 

monkey on the hospital roof

Baboon at the hospital

John and Esther

It was so amazing to see old friends! Especially Pastor John and his wife Pastor Esther. A short visit but such a blessing.

In summary, it was an amazing time in Kenya. Thank you so much for praying for us. If you are interested in supporting the work there, I suggest a donation to World Medical Mission. They organized our trip, and do amazing work around the world:

https://www.samaritanspurse.org/medical/world-medical-mission/

Sources of Information

In complex, modern societies, the relationship between reality and our representations of reality—between what Lippmann called the “real environment” and the “pseudo-environments” that make up our mental models of the real environment—is heavily mediated by complex chains of trust, testimony, and interpretation.

                                                    -Dan Williams, 2024

                                                                   Why do people believe true things?

Greatness

When it is no longer possible to stretch those so very elastic threads of the historical rationale any farther, when an action is manifestly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians resort to the device of "greatness." "Greatness" would appear to exclude the standards of right and wrong. For the "great" man nothing is wrong. There is no atrocity for which a "great" man can be accounted guilty....

And it never occurs to anyone that to admit a greatness that is not commensurate with the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one's own nothingness and immeasurable puniness.

For us, with the standard of good and evil given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

-Leo Tolstoy (discussing the actions of Napoleon and their interpretation in War and Peace)

Blessings בְּרָכָה

Background:

The Arabic word بركة (barakah) has several meanings and carries significant theological and cultural meaning in Islam. In Judaism, the Hebrew word בְּרָכָה (barakah) also has deep meaning, including as a name for daily prayers or “blessings.” Both peoples consider "barakah" as deeper and more multifaceted than the English word “blessing.” 

 

When I was looking at Ephesians 1:3-14, a kind of song or poem that starts with the theme of God’s blessings, I found that Paul uses the word εὐλογητός (eulogetos) as the Greek equivalent of barakah that is found in the Hebrew scriptures. So when I wrote this poem based on the Ephesians passage, it seemed using this word with so much depth and meaning was appropriate:

 

Barakah

By Paul Bunge

Blessed be is “barakah”

In temple, synagogue, and scroll

Praise God the source of barakah

He’s the blessings honor roll 

 

God fathered Jesus Christ

Who is our Lord and President

He barakahs us at God’s side

Though he knows our lesser tent

 

Barakah started long ago

Pre-paleozoic age

The God of law and perfection

Took us at our awkward stage

 

Before the time of time began

This God of perfect want and will

Of nature planets cosmos rolling

Used barakah to make them still  

 

Insight of God is fact and wise

All inside of us he knows 

Our plans and dreams of selfish gain

One cut, it’s gone, as red blood flows

 

But barakah and baby’s breath

Eternity found in a stable

Put that red blood in sacred bag

To nurture one who would be able

 

The marrow barakah’d his cheeks

His voice gave life and clarified

In others loss of blood you’re gone

When his flowed out, our sins died

 

Barakah to us is free

Lavished all he has stored up

He planned it though it’s mystery

All punishment he drank that cup

 

But wait, there’s more it’s hope he has

We without a bank account

Have all things promised to deliver

Have his will, last testament 

 

The promissory can’t be lost

Barakah between our cells

Holy Spirit gospel faith

In moving body deepest wells

 

All this promise hope and truth

Now who we are, his final story

He will be back our only vision

In meantime barakah and glory