[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Scouting Scripture

I promised, months ago, to write the Signposts -- small meditations based 
on passages from Scripture -- for the month of November for 
www.explorefaith.com, an excellent and wide-ranging site with all sorts of 
goodies. But then I got busier than I should have been. I needed an 
anguished e-mail from the editor to get me going.

And so on Thursday after choir practice, I settled down and pounded out the 
necessary bits and pieces, an exercise that required me to spend time 
scouting Scripture, thumbing through my battered paperback NRSV to pick out 
passages that spoke to me.

I'd forgotten how much I hate doing this.

It seems that whenever my eye runs down the familiar columns, all the 
pieces that leap out at me are the scary ones: the "many are called but few 
are chosen" ones, the wrathful or accusatory ones, the ones that speak only 
of human failure. I know where to go for the other ones, the ones speaking 
of God's love and abiding kindness, but that feels like a pick-and-choose 
exercise.

But at the same time, I'm lucky. I took a university course in the New 
Testament last year, a course in which we picked up each book and looked at 
it carefully, examining when and how it was written, what its circumstances 
were. If I'd wanted a secure, unblinking, "this is the literal word of God" 
approach to Scripture, I would have been devastated -- and some in the 
class did have a very hard time. But I've never much valued security 
(perhaps too little!) because I long since learned what riches there are to 
be found in desert places. So I lapped up the new understandings that my 
course gave me, and now I could put them into action.

Scripture is God's self-revelation filtered through human experience, and 
the way it got written down has a great deal to do with what that human 
experience was at the time. When I read Mark, now, I do so understanding 
that Mark was written at a time of political explosiveness in Judea, and 
that Mark was concerned with explaining why so many Jews hadn't come over 
to Christ. Matthew and Luke were written to particular communities with 
particular needs of which their writers, whoever they were, were keenly 
aware.  John shows the pain of the split between the infant Christian 
movement and traditional Judaism. And so forth and so on.

When I approach Scripture, I do so with my own human experience -- my 
cultural background, the state of the world I live in, my own understanding 
of the hows and whys and wherefores. The terrible earthquake in Pakistan 
is, for me, not a sign of God's wrath with the unrighteous but a seismic 
hiccup, caused by the grinding of the Indian tectonic plate into the 
mainland of Eurasia. It's tragic for its victims, but it's theologically 
neutered.

We all pick and choose which bit of Scripture (or God) to emphasize or 
downplay. For example, I don't think Scripture takes much interest in 
sexuality, except for the Song of Solomon (which I do not see as being 
Christ's love for the church, not one bit, hmmm....)  I do think that even 
at the most superficial reading, Scripture takes an immense interest in how 
we treat the poor, and its message is crystal clear: we are to be 
responsible for looking after those who need it.  And yet many who wave 
Bibles, talking about the Word of God, around don't seem to get it. God is 
not pleased by the sight of an SUV parked in front of a large suburban 
house, not when too many others have far, far too little.

It makes my job easier, this knowledge. I didn't take the time to take the 
texts I found apart, as I would for a sermon or an academic assignment; I 
had a deadline to meet and I wrote to that. But it makes me a bit more 
comfortable, freer, more trusting in the Spirit and in my own theological 
instincts.

I find that when faith comes through the prism of challenge and 
understanding, it's enriched, not weakened. Paul's letters mean more to me 
now that I know which ones are definitely his and which may be by other 
people. And Revelation isn't nearly as spooky as it used to be, now that 
I've been properly introduced to it.

I trust, too, that God's self-revelation comes to us all. Scripture still 
matters greatly, both as a record of what that revelation has been and 
because it speaks so strongly to the human condition. But I feel free to 
play with it now, if play can be reverent -- and I think it can.

I've promised my editor to get seven more pieces to her by Wednesday. Back 
to scouting Scripture.

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I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly. -- Phyllis 
Tickle, aka The Divine Miz T.