OCR Text |
Show Saturday, April 8, 2006 DAILY HERALD B2 Gaining humility, one washed foot at a time EAGLE SCOUT Tom Riddle, age 18, son of Brian and Marilyn Riddle of Provo, was presented the rank of Eagle Scout on Thursday, March 30, 2006. Tom is in Troop 1421 sponsored by the Slate Canyon 9th Ward. His service project involved coordi- - ( nating a Red Gross blood drive where over 70 pints of blood were donated which will be used for patients in desperate need of life sustaining blood. Tom has worked very hard to achieve the rank of Eagle and his parents and Troop are very proud of him! Ever since, scholars have debated whether he meant it William Wan THE WASHINGTON POST literally. Pet of the week ' T As they prepared for the holy ritual the churchgoers had all the essential items: latex gloves, nail clippers, chlorine and antibacterial soap. The only things missing were the feet, and soon enough they poured into the church by the dozen. Many were callused and cracked from cold nights spent on the streets. Some were sore and infected. What they needed was some we're talking centuries here Christian doctrine in action. So volunteers at Centenary United Methodist Church in Richmond, Va., got down on their knees and scrubbed. The practice of rooted in the biblical account of what Jesus did for his disciples, has ebbed and flowed throughout church history, abandoned at various times for reasons of dogma or embarrassment. But in recent years it has grown in popularity as an act of submission, both at Easter season services and in many other settings. Homeless shelters from Berkeley, Calif., to Atlanta to Virginia Beach have added to their services for the poor. Men and women wash each other's feet in wedding ceremonies and marriage counseling. In Congress, a U.S. senator once washed the feet of an aide in a show of foot-washi- Small and straggly, old mix who Sammy is a 8 year in a lap. She is fits perfectly Spaniel PugCocker available fo adoption from the South Utah County Animal Shelter in Spanish Fork. For more information call Photo by Animal Images Photography in Provo, www. animalimagesphotography.com foot-washi- KEVIN Continued from Bl least likely to be correct. Ah. this formula makes the questions at the beginning easy to answer. A reminiscence is written late in life, a diary is written daily. So the diary entry is more correct for grandmother's death. The notation "family sources" is as good as .nothing, so anything else is more likely to be true. But a birth certificate was recorded by the nurse or doctor in attendance at the birth a'; Post foot-washin- g The action is as and relevant Ht today's culture as ever, theologians say. Modern-da- y " s, however, still must overcome issues of awkwardness, age-ol- d hygiene and, occasionally, odor: "There are a lot of things you don't think about at first, like the logistics," said Polly Chamberlain. 51, who began the ministry in Richmond last year. She got the idea while working in the church's soup kitchen, where she felt a huge disconnect between the volunteers and the homeless people they served. "How can we really care foot-washi- about them when we don't even know them?" she asked. So she and others started washing the feet of the city's poorest every Friday before lunch, as a way to break the ice. The goal was to bond with their patrons profoundly, show them someone cared and, by doing so, recapture the spirit of Jesus. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus shocked his disciples at the Last Supper by getting up from the dinner table, wrapping a towel around his waist and washing their feet in a basin. "I have set you an example," he said, "that you should do as I have done for you." g, foot-washi- 7-- 343-408- 0. - CLARKWashmgton dark at a D.C. Adventist Church. " ... think about what the world would be like if more people did this," a fellow parishioner said. Homeless shelters from Berkeley, Calif., to Atlanta to Virginia Beach have added to their services for the poor. LaMar Brown tends to the feet of Thomas Crucifixion Continued from Bl 427-541- Relatives In the Catholic Church, the ritual fell out of favor until it was restored in 1955 by Pope Pius XII, who said it should be practiced on Maundy Thursday, three days before Easter. In most other Christian denomiwas siminations, sporadic. larly ."It's a curious thing because, if you listen to what Jesus said, it certainly sounds like a commandment," said Samuel Wells, a minister at Duke University. "But feet are an uncomfortable thing and, for many, too intimate." Last year, when he was installed as Duke's chapel dean, Wells insisted on washing the feet of students, housekeeping staff and colleagues at the ceremony, Although there are no statistics on religious scholars across denominations say they have noticed an increase not only in its popularity but its application. "The popularity might be related to this wider move toward more meaningful spiritual practices, almost as a critique of institutionalized rituals," said John Christopher Thomas, a biblical studies professor at Church of God Theological Seminary in Cleveland, Term., who has studfor 26 years. "I ied mean, you can sanitize baptism and the Eucharist, but it's pretty hard to sanitize feet." true witness, so birth certificates are apt to be correct. Web sites are notoriously wrong, so even with all the problems family Bibles have, if no sources are given on the Web site, I'd choose the Bible every time. Documentation keeps researchers working on their Own pedigrees, instead of veering of f to work on someone else's. Documentation leaves a trail others can follow to find the same sources. I LaRae Free Kerr can be reached at itsallrelatives & grundyec.net. -- no activist or revolutionary. To Bryan, the crucifixion doesn't symbolize either Jesus' relationship to the Roman Empire or to fellow Jews. "It is a symbol of his relationship to the world. And that means, to us." If there's guilt involved, and there is, it's "a guilt that involves us all." Against Horsley, Bryan argues that Jesus didn't align with forces that sought to overthrow Rome's rule and install an independent Jewish government. Rather, Jesus held all sorts of rulers accountable for civil peace and God's justice. In that limited sense, Jesus's words and works were "both political and revolutionary" and today's Christians bear responsibility for society. do the four Gospels even tell us But what actually happened? John Dominic Crossan, a liberal Roman Catholic at DePaul University in Chicago, thought "the early Christians knew nothing" except that Jesus was killed. Bryan, however, considers it "intrinsically unlikely" that Jesus's followers could have been "so utterly devoid of ordinary human concern or curiosity." The ancients were notably interested in learning about people's deaths as an index to character. Bryan, no fundamentalist, is cautious about the Gospels's Passion accounts but thinks it's unproveri, and close to unlikely, that they lack historical value. That outlook is shared by Raymond Brown's "Death of the Messiah" (Double-da1994, two volumes). A typical historical dispute involves claims from a few that the Jewish would have had power to execute . Jesus for religious offenses. If so, crucifixion by Rome implies the New Testament is wrong and Jesus was executed only for mas-terwo- y, , San-hedr- in political crimes. Bryan says both classical historians and Judaism's Talmud confirm that Rome had exclusive power to enact capital punishment. There was only one special Jewexception, noted by the ish historian Josephus: Jewish authorities retained the right to execute foreigners who entered restricted precincts of the first-centur- y ' Temple. True, Jews stoned Stephen to death arid Jesus rescued an adulterous woman from stoning, but these were mob lynchings, not formal tribunals. Josephus reports the Jewish execution of Jesus's brother James, but that took advantage of a power vacuum between Roman governors., Other recent treatments: I "The Crucifixion of Jesus" (M. Evans) by Frederick Zugibe, retired chief medical examiner of New York's Rockland County; forensics and Shroud of Turin materials. "The Last Week" (HarperSanFran-cisco)- , a liberal deconstruction from "Jesus Seminar" members Crossan and Marcus Borg. "Murder at Golgotha: Revisiting the Most Famous Crime Scene in History" (St. Martin's); British journalist Ian Wilson's "crime scene investigation." "The Passion: The True Story of an Event That Changed Human History" (Penguin) by Geza Vermes, Britain's leading Jewish scholar on Jesus, who emphasizes discrepancies among the four . Gospels. II- , , I) .fit V, -- mmi-Miim&m- A' fZTl fWtwUd pjj nij fe, $JlV iV " p ' UTAH POWER A |