Luke 24:44-49
Struggling with Scripture
A Life Founded on the Word: The Evangelical
Tradition
James Sledge September
7, 2014
In
his wonderful little book entitled Eat
This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading, Eugene Peterson
shares an illustration borrowed from the great 20th Century
theologian, Karl Barth. “Imagine,” he begins, “a group of men and women in a
huge warehouse. They were born in the warehouse, grew up in it, and have
everything there for their needs and comforts. There are no exits to the
building, but there are windows. But the windows are thick with dust, are never
cleaned, and so no one every bothers to look out. Why would they? The warehouse
is everything they know, has everything they need.”
But
one day a child takes a stool over to one of the windows, cleans a bit of the
dust and grime off, and looks out. There are people outside, walking on the
streets, people no one in the warehouse ever imagined even existed. The child
calls his friends over, and they crowd around, looking out at this strange
world they have never seen before.
They
notice that people outside are pointing up at something and talking excitedly.
The children at the window look up, but the only thing above them is the warehouse
ceiling. After a while, watching people point up and get all excited about
nothing becomes boring, and the children tire of it.
But
of course the people in the street aren’t looking at a ceiling. They are
looking up into the heavens, seeing airplanes or birds or storm clouds. The
people on the streets are gazing into the heavens, but “the warehouse people
have no heavens above them, just a roof.”
But
what might happen, asks Peterson, if one child decided to cut a door in the
wall and go outside? What if she was able to convince some other children to go
with her, and they discovered the sky and far-flung horizons they had never
imagined? Karl Barth said that this is the sort of thing that happens when we really
engage and enter into the Bible. “We enter the totally unfamiliar world of God,
a world of creation and salvation stretching endlessly above and beyond us.
Life in the warehouse never prepared us for anything like this.”
Peterson concludes this picture saying,
“Typically, adults in the warehouse scoff at the tales the children bring back.
After all, they are completely in control of the warehouse world in ways they
could never be outside. And they want to keep it that way.”[1]
From
the very beginning of Christian faith, Scripture has been crucial and essential.
Our own Protestant heritage is especially aware of the vital role of Scripture.
The Protestant Reformation began as a critique of certain practices by the
Roman Church because they seemed to be at odds with Scripture.
We
Presbyterians share this focus on Scripture as crucial to life with God. When
people are ordained as deacons, pastors, or elders in our denomination, they
are asked a series of nine questions. These are in order of theological
significance with the first being most important. That question reads, “Do you
trust in Jesus Christ your Savior, acknowledge him Lord of all and Head of the
Church, and through him believe in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?” The
second, related question asks, “Do you accept the Scriptures of the Old and New
Testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to
Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and God’s Word to you?”
These
two questions sum up who we understand ourselves to be: people who follow Jesus
in every facet of our lives, above all other authorities, and who understand
the Bible to be the source above all other sources for knowing Jesus and what
he would have us do.
Simple,
right? If only…
The
Bible is both long – the pew Bible is well over 1000 pages – and complex. There
are many different types of literature in it, some of which are quite
unfamiliar to us. It contains multiple points of view and schools of thought
from ancient Israel and the early Church that sometimes contradict one another,
all from a worldview different from ours. Hearing Jesus speak to us through
Scripture is no easy task.
I
suspect that many of you are well aware of this difficulty. Even our gospel
reading today speaks of the need for Jesus to open the disciples’ minds so they
can understand Scripture. Presbyterians traditionally say a “prayer of
illumination” prior to reading from the Bible in worship, asking the Spirit,
whom Jesus promises to his followers, to help us encounter the living Word in
the words we hear. Still, we can struggle to hear Jesus speaking to us and
directing us through Scripture. And so, we often turn to substitutes: our own
reason, intuition, conscience, morality, etc.
Nothing
inherently wrong with any of these, but when they supplant Scripture, they
substitute our voices for God’s. Such substitutes may be relatively benign and
well intentioned idols, but they are idols nonetheless. And we end up serving
gods designed by us, who look like us, with the same tastes and political
leanings and concerns and interests and ways of doing things as us, gods who are
able to do nothing more than we can do and who never ask that we become
something other than what we are or wish to be.
But
there is a God who is so much bigger and grander and more wonderful than the
ones we imagine and construct, perhaps using a few Scripture passages that fit
with what we already think. There is a God outside the warehouses we build for
ourselves who can transform and make new, who can touch us and let us
experience for ourselves the meaning of salvation
and life as new creations.
Meeting this God does require venturing
outside our warehouses and worldviews to allow the Living Word to speak to us. It
requires entering the world of the Bible and spending significant time there.
It may well require learning new ways to enter the Bible such as lectio divina or spiritual reading. It means
being in conversation with others who are wrestling with Scripture. It means a
willingness to let Scripture challenge deeply held assumptions. None of this is
easy. It requires both discipline and a willingness to follow Jesus places we
never would have chosen ourselves. Oh, but the wonders of the new life to be
found there.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Eugene
Peterson, in the book I mentioned earlier, tells an apocryphal tale about the
celebrated Harvard biologist and professor, Louis Agassiz who supposedly
returned to the classroom one fall and told his students that he had spent the
summer traveling. He said that he had made it halfway across his backyard.
Peterson then adds, “I want to hold out for traveling widely in Holy Scripture.
For Scripture is the revelation of a world that is vast, far larger than the
sin-stunted, self-constricted world that we construct for ourselves out of a
garage-sale assemblage of texts.”[2]
In
Christ, God calls us, invites us to discover new lives, to discover who we
truly are through the Word made flesh. And in God’s strange ways, this Word is
revealed to us in a narrative of words. As Christ comes to us in Scripture, God
does not employ force or compulsion. God beckons and waits patiently for us to
leave the warehouse, to turn and discover the fullness that only God can reveal
and give.
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