Buzz King: Grace & Joy thru Scripture

My father's father was a burglar in World War I and served in the trenches for two years.  He came back home very mentally ill and lived on the street in Quebec for the rest of his life.  My dad's mother raised my father alone.  When she was close to death, she gave me the only thing she had from her childhood, a cherished possession.  In doing so, she taught me a lesson that we see in Paul's writ...

I once ditched a boring "team building" academic meeting to hang out for a bit with a bunch of jail prisoners.  One of them was a man who had been incarcerated for sleeping in the snow on someone's private property.  He was planning a Bible study session with the rest of his Christian inmates.  In this podcast, we look at Paul, who also proselytized while in prison - and quite successfully.  We se...

Quantum physics tells us that we understand very little about the physical matter that makes up the universe, the way we proceed through time, and the nature of events in the universe.  We consider Tony the ant, who lives in an anthill, bringing carrying huge crumbs of unidentifiable organic material back to the anthill.  The most important and powerful people who live in this world, who live in t...

We look at Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, and at how I managed to get BuzzKing.com as my domain.  We see that Proverbs and Ecclesiastes both tell us about the importance of having a good name.  They also tell us that it is important that we, as believers, remember that we represent the Church at all times.  We need to protect our good name - and the good name of the Church.  We also see that there com...

I once sat with a woman in her nineties who was on comfort care.  Her adult children could not be there because they were out of the country, so I was with her.  She ended up telling me why she had no fear whatsoever of death - and it had to do with Easter.  We take a bit of a biblical survey, looking at both the literal version of the Easter story, and at the more personal side of the resurrectio...

Luke tells us that Jesus died at a place called The Skull, from which we derive the Latin word Calvary.  I once saw a skull of a Pueblo Indian.  The goal of the display was to show us that the Pueblos ground corn with sandstone, and so when they ate cornmeal, they also chewed on grit, thus wearing down their molars.  But to me, the skull reminded me that real people - long dead - once lived in tho...

We look at the two times in my life that I have encountered donkeys, once as a boy on the edge of town, and once in Santorini, Greece.  These incidents remind me of the two biblical qualities of donkeys, and why this makes the donkey the perfect animal for Jesus to ride into Jerusalem.  We also look at why Jesus was not the savior that many people in Jerusalem were hoping for, and this reinforces...

I taught 3D modeling and animation at my university.  I had a student who apparently was on the autism spectrum, and one day I knocked his notebook computer off his desk onto the floor - and he did not react.  We look at a figure from the Old Testament, one of the fathers of the Israelite people, Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his brothers.  There is a theory that he was also on the spectrum...

We look at the construction of the Tabernacle in Exodus - and at a man whom I once drove behind as he bounced along on three wheels and a broken rim.  His determination to make his journey, to get to his meeting place, reminds us of where God is truly located, where God lives.  We also see that although history has assumed that the Israelites and Jews thought that they had to be in the Temple to b...

When I was 15, there was an Earthquake that did a lot of damage in Southern California.  A fish store that I frequented had all its aquariums land on the cement floor.  It was a huge failure, a loss for the owner.  We talk about one of the biggest failures in the Bible, Peter denying Jesus after Jesus had wanted him to serve as the rock upon which he would build his church.  Peter did rise up, how...

We look at the long-standing mystery of whether Paul the evangelist ever made it all the way to Spain - and we look at Buzz making it to Spain, but hardly behaving the way Jesus would have.  We consider the historical data that supports the theory that Paul spread the Word in Spain.  We look at what Paul had to say about forgiveness in Romans, the letter to the church he wanted to visit on his way...

We look at Noah's ark - the story that is eerily similar to older, polytheistic flood stories.  We consider the act of God destroying all of humanity, due to its total corruption, but showing enough mercy to allow a remnant to survive.  We look at a natural disaster, a much smaller flood, that happened in Colorado, and how such natural phenomena remind us of our vulnerability, our dependency on Go...

My mother identified strongly as French.  Thus, when my best friend's mother lent me Voyage to the Center of the Earth to read, she immediately took me to get the real version: the original French.  We look at the story of these adventurers and their naivety.  We also look at Proverbs, Chapter 2, and a speech to a son by a father, who is trying to teach the son about the importance of gaining wisd...

When I was a boy, my father ran a car shop with a buddy of his I called Uncle John.  One day Uncle John taught me about torque wrenches and - more importantly - leverage.  We talk in this episode about the reasons that a Christian gives, and the constrains on our practice of giving.  We also talk about why giving is very much like the leverage we get from a torque wrench with a very long handle.

Wendy and I were once in Istanbul.  We were pursued aggressively by a Turkish carpet salesman who was desperate to make a sale, given their terrible economy.  We look at Psalm 23, traditionally used at funerals and memorial services by Christians.  But this Psalm is not about saying goodbye to a loved one.  We look at what Psalm 23 is truly about - and why it reminds us of this relentless carpet s...

I once had dinner with Sony Bono.  I did not write about this dinner contemporaneously and am only now talking about it more than forty years after this occurred.  So, I might have some of the details wrong.  The Bible is also not a contemporaneous document.  There were also some reasons for the authors to twist or exaggerate parts of the story - they were telling us about faith, not about the lit...

I have had both my corneas replaced with transplants.  My left eye was repaired successfully with one graft, but my right eye proved very problematic.  We look at the Israelites returning from exile in Babylon, only to find their farmlands in very poor shape and one oppressor (the Babylonians) replaced with another (the Persians).  Malachi tells the People of God that they must be patient, that th...

When I was a grad student at USC years ago, I came across a man lying on his back.  He appeared to have been killed with a shotgun blast to his chest.  We look at the mistake this man made in his life, how he did not learn the lesson of Augustine and of Solomon, and that is to make sure that what we create in life is only good.  This leads us to understand why there appears to be a paradox that a...

We look at the heavy duty use of numerical symbolism in the Old and New Testaments.  We examine specific numbers and what they meant.  Then we address the bigger question: why the preoccupation with numbers?  What about our preoccupation with things like mathematics, art, and literature?  What about our preoccupation with video games and social media?  What of this is good?  What did God intend?  ...

When I was a young guy working in San Francisco as a computer programmer at an insurance company, I decided to do something a bit unethical to help my mother's claims get paid.  I made a one character programmer error, though, that would later make me realize that God had been speaking to me.  We look at 1st Peter and Romans, and we talk about what it means to truly strive toward perfection, to be...

When I was in college, I had a friend with a schizophrenic mother.  She thought that God had commissioned her to write a sort of new New Testament, or what we cruelly called the "New and Improved Testament".  We look at the story of Adam and Eve - and why it is both a clear allegory and a sort of very literal story.  We look at why my friend's mother never had to learn the lesson that Adam and Eve...

Some years ago, a sixteen year-old from Kansas accidentally slid on the ice and slightly damaged my parked car in Boulder.  I had a terrible interaction with his father who angrily blamed his son for being careless.  Then some weeks later I got a call from this farmer father...  We look at a few Bible passages that tell us about just how a believer should behave.  We also look at the issue of how...

I had a friend when I was a kid.  His name was Miguel and he was adopted off the streets of Tijuana.  No one knew when he was born.  The same is true of Jesus, in truth.  We look at the evidence that suggests that Jesus was born on some other day than Dec. 25 - and we look at why we don't care about this...

When I was getting my Ph. D. in Computer Science, I had to take an oral exam where I was told to prove a mathematical theorem.  It was not the most natural task for me.  We look at the story of David and Goliath - and how a determined, faithful man was able to do something that must have surprised many of those around him.  We consider how putting full trust in God can enable us to do things we mi...

We begin by looking at the somewhat scary birth of my wife Wendy's and mine first child.  Then, this advent, we look at the birth of Jesus.  In this podcast message, we consider Mary's song, from the Gospel of Luke, which praises God for the birth of Jesus and prophesies the important role that Jesus will play in humanity.