sacred beauty

“…we need to stop approaching the Bible only to confirm what we already think we know, and instead come at it like children, beginners—with a second innocence, as some interpreters call it.”
-Brian Mclaren

Several question emerge in my head when the Bible is brought up in modern circle of thinking. First, what is the purpose of the Bible? Secondly, How have we placed the lens of modernity on the Bible and how we come to the conclusions at which we arrive?
There are times I am in love with the Bible and other times I want to raise my hand and throw the Bible out the window! Just when I come to a sense of understanding I read something that throws everything off and I suddenly start to question myself. After much inner dialogue I realize that its in this paradox I see something I never would have seen if it weren’t for this tension.
I believe the Bible is from God written by men, using their language and inside their culture. However, I cannot sit through another sermon that takes this amazing collections of writings and reduces to simple truths where all mystery has been taken out so that I can feel better for the upcoming week. It happens all across the country ever Sunday morning. Preachers preach sermons and strip the bible and squeeze the moral truth so that we can live a nice life and raise a nicer family. However, I can’t say that this is all bad (no matter how much I can’t stand it).

Modernity taught us that to understand the whole, we need to reduce it to the parts. We are taught this as small children and taught all through our teenage years. Then we practice this philosophy in life. To understand a car, we take it apart and reduce it systems which do a specific job. Doctors do the same thing, reduce the body to set of systems, which have organs, those organs have tissues which perform a set of objections to make life possible.
Do you know which artery, (a vessel which carries oxygenated blood throughout the body away from the heart) carries no oxygenated blood? It’s the pulmonary artery. The pulmonary meaning lung in Latin, takes blood just received from the inferior and superior vena cava then pumped to the right ventricle. From the right ventricle its it thrown into the pulmonary artery where it goes to the lungs and receives oxygen. From there it taken oxygenated blood through the pulmonary vein to the left side of the heart and sent through the aorta. You ask any doctor and they can tell this process with little hesitation and less excitement. I am glad that they know the details and am thankful they have commitment their life to this field. However, there is a sense when we reduce the whole of the body to simpler terms we lose a sense of the mystery and wonder of it all.

This Is why I have a hard time sitting through a reduced systematic sermon. The bible is an amazing and glorious text full of mystery and story. Instead of taking the Bible as a moral code book, we should encourage each other to experience the wonder and mystery of it. We should take the Bible as we look at a wonderful work of art. We should look at it with as the same eyes that an artist sees shadows on a dusked painted sunset. The bible is a wonderful story filled with paradox’s literature genius. Take the story of Creation for example. The first thing that many church leaders want, is to prove that God is Creator and one day is 24 hours, end of story. However, creation is a picture of God. The details I would rather leave to the imagination. I want to sit and watch a flock of geese fly by and think of the story found in Genesis 1:1, in the beginning…..God created those flocks, and he gave them instinct to fly north! God isn’t done creating, yet creation story continues as God continues to create. We need to approach the Bible, “…more like a lover of landscapes and less like a miner looking for a hill to strip-mine for a quick and saleable product.” The more and more I am learning about God in the post-modern world—I sense that the “Christian” life isn’t based on a one-time experience—yet it continues to take on the creation story. Our story—our conversion story is more than a simple prayer and even a swim in a pool, yet it goes much deeper and looks more like a dark path full of exception, imagination and wonder.
So where do I go to church—or where do I want to go, you may ask. I want to go to be a part of community that incorporates many different aspects of the faith. Concerning the sermon, I want to be made to question what I hear from the sermon. I want to be overtaken by the text—I don’t want it to be boiled down to something I can wrap my mind around—cause in reality—who can explain the ways of God. Maybe the Bible is a book to lead us into questioning and puts us in community, rather than a text book which one can study by ourselves.