I think I will resurrect this blog in the coming weeks, but in the meantime I had to share a quote from something I am reading.First, I will say that I have been reading the Bible regularly for the past thirty years of my life. I have been hearing Bible stories for more than than... starting with the classic flannelgraphs from Sunday School. And, to be honest, there have been times over the years that the Bible has become stale -a static book that tells old stories rather than something alive, engaging and to be interacted and wrested with in my life... now, today.
Over the past few years, I have often wished I could erase all the preconceived ideas I had of the Bible and read it as though I had never heard of God or Jesus... and to see what I would think of it.
I have become frustrated with the white male, elitist, republican, conservative, narrow-minded, always-have-all-the-answers, 21st century, American version of the Scriptures.
In that time I have hungered to explore and comprehend the first century, Jewish, poor commoner, illiterate, Samaritan, leprosy-covered, female version of the Scriptures.
Books such as Reading The Bible With The Damned by Bob Ekblad and From Stone To Living Word: Letting The Bible Live Again by Debbie Blue is helping me to do just that (in a figurative sense more than a literal sense).
In chapter eight of Blue's book, as she unpacks John 1:14 which says, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.", she says:
"The incarnation is not something you can believe in like you can believe in the solution to an equation or dinosaurs or penecillin or the US victory in Iwo Jima. The incarnation is the foundation of our faith, and yet you can hardly think clearly about it enough about it to begin to comprehend it. You can look at it and look at it and still never get it in focus. It's blurry and puzzling and enigmatic and inapprehensible. Unsysytematizable. If it is somehow the greatest truth, the most important revelation, it's not something you can grasp. Kierkegard called the central tenet of Christianity, that God became a human being, an absolute paradox. It's not something you "get" through reason; it's something that challenges reason. It doesn't fit into a logical system."
Life around us can be so out of control that we seek for things that can be explained, reasoned, controlled.
And I am reminded that our faith is not something that is figure-out-able. It is alive and active. It is not static. It cannot become contained... even in a book (if we think so maybe we practice"Bibliolatry" - I know I have at times). It doesn't always include "answers, stability, certainty, clarity, and comprehension" (Blue p. 44).
It is (or it's meant to be) messy, something we get our hands dirty with. It should make us tilt our heads and say, "Huh?" as much as it makes our eyes light up as we say. "Aha". It should create as many questions as it does provide solid answers. And we should be honest with others about that.
Thanks to the words of Debbie Blue, I am reminded that the Bible is inspired: "to rouse latent energies, to inhale, to breathe into, to make alive".
And it is coming alive in my heart again...
More on this (hopefully) in the weeks to come.
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