Spiritual Hiccups - Giving Up the Bible for Lent

A line in today's epistle reading says, "But our citizenship is in heaven..."  I can't say for sure, but I suspect that large numbers of Christians think this refers to our going to heaven when we die.  To be honest, I'm not really sure where this idea comes from.  There is very little in the Bible that speaks of us going to heaven.  There's a lot in the New Testament about resurrection, but that is something altogether different.  Yet somehow we have made resurrection a synonym for "going to heaven when we die."

Brian McLaren and others have pointed out that many Christians, especially Protestant and Evangelical Christians, have preached a "gospel of evacuation."  In other words, have faith and believe the right things, and you will get evacuated to a better place when you die.  (For those who believe in a Rapture, evacuation might come even earlier.)  But Jesus proclaims the "kingdom of God" or the reign of God.  And as his very popular prayer points out, this kingdom is when God's will is done here on earth as it currently is in heaven.  In other words, the kingdom is when earth becomes like heaven.  No evacuation required.

I was reading Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation this morning, and he wrote than in the Lenten season of conversion and repentance, both Catholics and Protestants might want to think about their relationship to Scripture.  He said that Catholics need to be converted in order to give Scripture some actual authority in their lives.  And he said that Protestants need to repent of how our "sola Scriptura" (Scripture alone) has often ignored the ways we read the Bible from our own biases, prejudices and preconceived notions, how we have insisted on scriptural authority for "slavery, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia" (not to mention going to heaven when we die).

As a Protestant, I think this critique from a Franciscan priest is particularly helpful.  And I wonder if we Protestants wouldn't do well to follow Rohr's advice and give up something more than chocolate for Lent.  What if we gave up the conceit that our faith, our practices, our theology, our church rules, and so on, really come from Scripture, much less Scripture alone.

What if we gave up the Bible for Lent?  I don't really mean that we should toss out our Bibles, but what if we gave up our certainties about what it says?  What if we confessed that we have more often used the Bible to support what we want than we've allowed it to transform us and make us more Christ-like?  What if we gave up the notion that our faith is biblically based because we own a Bible and know a few verses from it?  I wonder what might happen if we gave up our Bibles for Lent.

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