Cutting God to Pieces

Sometimes the process of working up a sermon can be frustrating.  (To a much lesser degree, writing these little reflections can be so as well.)  By that I mean that some passages of Scripture do not seem to inspire.  I look over them and find them pedestrian or, worse, threatening.  As one who usually preaches from the lectionary (a set of readings for each Sunday), my nightmare is when all 4 selections leave me cold. 

When you think about it, this process of chopping up the Bible into tiny little snippets is quite odd.  No one would read a novel the way we often approach the Bible, taking in a few paragraphs or perhaps a page or two at a time.  But if I ask a Bible study group to read the entire Gospel of Mark before next week's class, you would think I had just asked them to read War and Peace.  (For the record, Mark is 21 pages long in a large print Bible I pulled off my shelf.)

Perhaps you've heard some version of an old Indian parable about the blind men and the elephant.  It exists in many different versions, but all involve blind men who attempt to discover what an elephant looks like by touch.  One feels a tusk, another a leg, another the tail, and so on.  And they separately conclude that an elephant is like a pipe, a pillar, a rope, and so on. 

These blind men surely could have moved around a bit and expanded on their encounter beyond one particular part of the elephant, but in the parable they do not.  And sometimes I wonder if we don't handle the Bible in similar fashion.  We seize upon a passage or two, then proclaim, "The Bible says so!"

Reading the Bible a page at a time doesn't necessarily cause this.  Presumably we can eventually combine all those little snippets into a whole of some sort, like blind men or women who eventually made their way all around the elephant.  But in my experience, this rarely happens.  Many of us spend so little time with the Bible that a bigger picture never emerges.  And so when we do encounter Scripture, our impressions may be as unhelpful as those of a blind man who thinks the elephant is only the tail.  And I suspect that almost all of us have a picture of God that suffers from this deficiency. 

Back in the 1950s, J.B. Phillips wrote a book entitled, Your God Is Too Small.  I read it many years ago when I first became serious about faith.  Recalling it, I think the small gods he describes are products of this piecemeal and/or selective reading of Scripture.  We end up with petty, trivial, tribal gods that look more like what we want in a god than Jesus or the God of the Bible.

Where do you get your picture, your image of God?  Is it big enough?

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