March Madness - Bible-Style

It all began with an innocuous text exchange last weekend. A couple of buddies and I who have an ongoing thread about our mutual basketball interest were texting about the NAIA and NCAA tournaments. All of the sudden the chat veered into biblical territory when one of my friends jokingly suggested we come up with a 64 person bracket of Bible characters.

I happened to be in one of those fun brainstorming moods and decided to tackle the idea head-on. Before I share my bracket, let me share some of the guidelines I chose to follow:

• First, the Trinity is not eligible nor are any angelic beings. That's just unfair, we're sticking with actual human people from the Bible's history. 
  
  
• Second, because the Old Testament makes up 59% of the Bible, we ought to divide up the characters to reflect that majority. Since there are four regions, my goal was to get close to 75% of characters (3 out of 4 regions). So I decided on the following arrangement.The Beginnings Region is comprised of characters from Genesis. The Law Region, reflective of the people of God being formed under the Mosaic Covenant, covers the Exodus events through the establishment of Saul as King over Israel. The Kingdom Region is comprised of those who lived during Israel's Kingdom days all the way through the years detailed in the Gospels. These three regions would comprise 65% of the books of the Bible. The fourth region is the New Covenant Region which spans the rest of the New Testament after the Gospels. Now, some in the NC region were key characters in the Gospels, especially the disciples. But I am placing them in the later region because that was the timeframe in which they were in their most significant roles.
   
• Third, I chose these 64 people as those who I found as the "most important" to the Biblical narrative. That is sort of nebulous and subjective, but it was my call. 
  
  
• Fourth, I want this tournament to be based on each voter's favorite character. This is not who was most important to God's plan or anything like that. That would be too obvious but also contrary to Jesus' words about "the least being the greatest". Determine these matchups based on who you like most or relate to the best.

Without further ado, I'll share a screenshot of my bracket and after the page break I'll gratuitously share my a breakdown of each region. I'll also attempt to get voting started on a Facebook page and maybe Twitter so keep an eye out for that.

Sermon Snippets - Getting a reputation

When you've been labeled a certain way, it gets hard to shed that reputation. Sometimes those are earned. But I've recently been thinking about how many times in my life I believed something about someone based on no evidence at all and/or because all my peers did.

This has all been provoked by my current sermon series on misunderstood women of Scripture. All of these characters have been unfairly maligned to one extent or another, but this past week when we looked at Mary Magdalene was a doozy.

She's been cast as a everything from a reformed prostitute to Jesus' secret wife. None of these theories are rooted in Scripture though. Luke 8 mentions her as a close follower of Jesus who had been delivered from demonic possession. But there's nothing about sexual immorality or anything of that kind in any of the Gospel accounts which never hold back on people's sin. 

In reality, she demonstrates a high-level of devotion both as a student and a supporter of Jesus. Her life was a dramatic witness to Jesus' divine power and she was undoubtedly a key source for the Gospel writers as they compiled their accounts of Jesus' life. 

She's an example of how God can transform us, just not in the scandalous way we've been led to believe. And she's also an example of how we can faithfully follow Jesus as disciples.

Renaissance artists helped perpetuate these myths about Mary Magdalene, portraying her in a penitent-but-sensual light.

FWIW, this all started (probably), with a sermon Pope Gregory gave in AD 591. He confused and conflated a couple different stories of a couple different women (Luke 7, 8, John 12) and made them all about Mary M.