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Since many of my readers will be traveling to Boston this weekend for the Society of Biblical Literature Conference, I thought I would draw your attention to an exhibit that is at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

composite triple beat“Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum”online casino is currently on display. As the title suggests, these are all artifacts that are housed in the British Museum. They are on loan to the Boston Museum of Fine arts from September 2008 to January 2009.

I have not seen the exhibit yet, but a colleague of mine at Merrimack College said it was very well done. She is not a biblical scholar, but by her description of one of the reliefs, I believe the scene depicting Sennacherib’s siege of Lachish is one of the pieces on display. I have not been able to find an official list of the artifacts in the exhibit, so I cannot confirm this.

If you want to attend, please keep in mind that tickets are required. You can purchase tickets for specific times of entry on the MFA web site, and the ticket is only good for that time slot. The exhibit tickets are $25 (plus “convenience fee”), and that is on top of the general admission of $17 (plus “convenience fee”).

You can visit the exhibit’s web siteмебели пловдив for more details.

I just found out yesterday that childhood pastor, Wiley I. Rutledge, had passed away on Tuesday. I know most of my readers probably won’t know Wiley, but I encourage you to read this post. He was a remarkable man, and I am sure his story will encourage you to think about the ways in which each of us can minister to those around us every day.

Wiley served at North Johnson City Baptist Church in Tennessee. This is the church of my earliest memories. My family attended this church until I was about thirteen years old. My mother was the director of day care and my now step-father was the minister of music. We left around the same time that Wiley moved to another church.

Wiley was a deeply committed Christian and an outstanding pastor. His pastoral skills were remarkable. He had a way of touching and inspiring everyone around him. The thing I remember most was his storytelling ability. He was a master at it, as is evidenced by his participation in the National Storytelling Festival. As a child, I loved his children’s sermons. He could make you feel like you were there, eating fish beside the Sea of Galilee with Jesus or handing a stone to David as Golath rushed upon him. I accepted Christ at a revival that Wiley preached, and he was the one who baptized me.

Just recently, I learned of a story that illustrates well the way that Wiley touched all those around him. In 1976, Wiley was travelling from Nashville back to Johnson City. He stopped at a restaurant on the way through Knoxville to grab some dinner. His waitress, a woman named Lynn Morgan, was an eighteen-year-old from Ohio who was struggling to get by. Wiley talked and joked with her while she waited on him. When he left, she found a poem that he had left for her. At the bottom, he had written, “Lynn, You are a pretty, pleasant, and efficient young lady. Have love, have joy, have peace. Wiley I. Rutledge 7/16/76.” The handwritten poem, entitled rent a car bulgaria“Through All These Years,” is available online.

Lynn kept the poem and treasured it. She would pull it out and read it from time to time. After the birth of her first child, the placed the poem in a baby book so that her daughter would someday read it. She didn’t know Wiley or where he was from, and she assumed she would never see him again. This past summer, however, she found a reference to his name in a column written by Wiley’s son, Mark Rutledge, who writes for The Daily Reflector in Greenville, NC. She contacted Mark, who arranged for Lynn to meet with Wiley on his farm in Gray, TN.

Wiley had Alzheimer’s during the last years of his life, so he didn’t remember Lynn. But it was a blessing to his family to hear this story for the first time. As his son writes:

For him, the ones he touched are lost in the fog of a disease that will eventually take his life.

For us closest to Wiley I. Rutledge, having one of those people step out of the fog and bring to light such meaningful moments with him is nothing short of a gift from God.

My sister, Sue Ellen, says the gift is God’s way of reassuring us that he remembers our father even if our father doesn’t remember him.

You can read the complete story, which Mark wrote for The Daily Reflector. It was published just two months before Wiley passed away. I don’t know about you, but the story has encouraged me to pay more attention to those around me every day.

To me and those who knew him, Wiley will always be a giant of the Christian faith. He was an incredible preacher, but the best sermon of all was the constant love of Christ he showed to those around him. As my step-father said in a letter he wrote to let us know of Wiley’s death, Wiley was “a tremendous preacher and storyteller, a song writer, a poet, a great father and husband, a beloved grandfather, and a champion for the cause of Christ in and outside the walls of the church. His legacy of quietly reaching the people of the ‘down and out’ of the community will never be equaled by any other in my opinion. . . . [O]ur loss, and certainly heaven’s gain. As my former pastor, I’ll miss him!”

Wiley’s obituary is available in the Johnson City Press Chronicle.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the publication of the NIV, Zondervan is doing what it calls the Bible Across America. It is an RV tour that is driving around the country and making stops in a number of cities. At the stops, people are given a Bible verse and asked to write it on two index cards. The idea is that by the end of the trip, the tour will have collected all 31,173 verses of the Bible in hand-written format. They are asking people to write the verses twice so that they will have one copy to auction to raise money for the International Bible Society and another copy to donate to the Smithsonian Museum. The hand-written version is to be called “America’s NIV.”

I found out about it earlier this week when my step-father got to write a verse during one of the stops in Johnson City, TN. The tour will be near me in Manchester, NH, on October 20, and then in Boston, MA, on October 22. Both of those are days I teach at the college, so I am not sure I will be able to make it to a signing.

I am pleased to announce that the newest volume in the Conversations with Scripture series is available. The current release is 2 Isaiah by Steve Cook of Biblische Ausbildung. As a member of the editorial board of this series, I saw an early version of this book and I can highly recommend it.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the series, it is published by Moorehouse Publishing in conjunction with the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars. It is intended for use by groups in church or for personal Bible study. So far the series comprises volumes on the Gospel of John, the parables, Hebrews, and the book of Revelation. My own contribution was on the law in the Old Testament.

Congratulations to Steve on his latest publication!

It is getting harder and harder to keep up with movies that are based on myths and legends from the ancient Near East (or at least claim to be based on such myths and legends). In addition to The Lost Treasure of Ugarit, we now have Baal: The Storm-God, which is a SciFi Channel original movie. I have only seen the preview once, and the SciFi Channel has only this short description: “When an archaeologist releases and ancient god from captivity, he unleashes the ultimate storm on Earth.” What’s next? Horus and Seth’s Excellent Adventure?

The premier is this Saturday, September 13, at 9:00 p.m. eastern time. I have my DVR set to record it, and I will try to get a review of it up sometime next week (unless it is so bad that I simply can’t force myself to watch all of it).