Musings on the Daily Lectionary

I was struck by the opening line of today's Old Testament reading before I ever got to the particulars of the situation. "Again the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel..." I admit that I find such lines in Scripture troubling, as well as difficult to reconcile with my own image of a loving God. Although I am convinced that all our pictures of God are partial and incomplete, it can still be difficult to hold together some of the seemingly contradictory pictures of God found in the Bible.

On the one hand, these varied pictures of God do serve to overturn the God I create in my own image. They force me to see a God who is bigger than any image of mine, and who is beyond my ability to fully comprehend. And yet...

I suppose my struggle with this raises the issue of how one approaches, receives, and interprets Scripture. I've never thought of Scripture as being dictated by God, by I do firmly believe that it is inspired, that it reveals God to us in ways we could never discover on our own. But what exactly does it mean for something to be divinely inspired? How much of the writers' biases and preconceptions about God's nature mix in with this revelation?

Do the opening words of today's reading speak of a God who gets mad, who in anger lashes out at humans? Are an ancient writer's notions of God coloring these reports of what happens when people live contrary to God's desires? Difficult questions, but are they rendered moot in a day when fewer and fewer people view Scripture as authoritative? And is my own discomfort with "Again the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel..." indicative of my own inability to accept scritpural authority over the idol of personal feelings?

Whew! Lots of questions without easy answers. No wonder some go the route of fundamentalism and others the route of "spiritual but not religious." But I guess I'll keep muddling along somewhere in between.

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