Scandalously

Seen on Twitter today:

Being religious won’t save you, following Jesus will.

What does it mean to follow Jesus? If you were to ask two different Christians you might get vastly different answers. If you were to ask two different Christians from different denominations you would almost certainly get different answers. Especially if those different denominations were on different parts of the theological spectrum.

To me following Jesus means trying to be a good person. Accepting people as He did, scandalously, across the barrier of human constructs. I believe if Jesus were here today He would accept the outcasts of our society just as He did in biblical times. That means that those Christians hate the most would be loved by Him.

If He chose to live in the Israel of 2018, He would reach out to Palestinians. There would be no limit to His mercy and understanding. I am convinced that Jesus would fly in the face of how conventional wisdom would expect Him to act. Just as He flew in the face of how the Israelites expected their Messiah to act in the world of first century Israel.

What does it mean to follow Jesus? When I figure it out I will tell you.

A Point Missed

Midrash

noun

an early Jewish interpretation of or commentary on a Biblical text, clarifying or expounding a point of law or developing or illustrating a moral principle

Via

I wonder what we are losing. We read the Bible at face value, as if everything we are reading actually happened. We fight over it and alienate each other because of different interpretations. Schisms form, creating denominations and other human constructs.

The majority of people who wrote the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, were Jewish.

Jewish people read scripture differently than you and I. They dialogue with it. They search for the meaning hidden in the text. They get together and hash it out. Rarely do they concern themselves with the historicity of what they are reading. The meaning is what matters.

The people writing for this audience would think the same way. Did Jonah spend three days in the belly of a great fish? Did Jesus spend 40 days in the desert? None of that really matters when we dig deeper and find what the authors were trying to say.

Chances are Jonah, if he ever even existed, did not spend three days in a fish. Jesus may not have spent 40 days without food in the desert (if he was as human as he was divine it stands to reason that going without food for 40 days would have brought Him to the grave long before the crucifixion).

With our Western assumptions and worldview we are missing the point. The Bible doesn’t have to be factual to be true.

300 Foxes and a Cat

And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails (Judges 15:4 KJV).

This is one of those moments when I must admit I shake my head at those who subscribe to the notion of an inerrant Bible. This dude, named Samson, manages to get 300 foxes to stay in one place long enough so that he could tie all their tails together. If that isn’t enough, he manages to somehow affix a torch to each set of tails.

Anybody who has ever tried to get an otherwise tame cat into a cat carrier will be able to get where I am coming from.

I’m OK with the story. Samson is one of the best known legends in the Old Testament. It teaches us about the importance of keeping the promises we make to God and staying on the path that God puts before us as best as we can. It has value as it is. Just don’t tell me it’s a factual account. If God lives or dies on the shoulders of 300 foxes tied together maybe it’s time for that God to die.

I realize what I am saying here is blasphemy to some. I also understand that I will make some people angry. The Bible tells many stories of people being angry as their idols were destroyed. Hanging on to an idol, however, will never make you free.

Thees and Thous

It’s ironic, I suppose, that as I happily trot along the path of what some would call progressive Christianity, I fall in love with the King James Version of the Bible. The version that fundamentalists pick over any other is coming to me as I rethink everything I have ever been told about the Bible and Christianity. Though I suppose, if truth be told, I’ve been on this path since I was a kid.

I grew up Catholic. We went to mass every Sunday, even though the days that filled out the time in between had very little in the way of Christian living. But that is for another post on another day.

Like any good Catholic kid I went to Catholic school. I remember my teacher telling us the story of Adam and Eve. Somehow I knew at that moment that Adam and Eve never really existed, at least not in the literal sense, but that was OK. There was stuff we could learn from their story.

Here I am all those years later, reading their story again. This time not to gain any sort of indoctrination. But just to learn from it. I guess the truth is that we don’t need an infallible Bible to learn from it. Maybe, just maybe, if we expect it to be infallible we miss some of the best nuggets of knowledge available to us.

Here I am with the thees and thous. Enjoying the beauty that this version of the English Language brings. There may not have been a literal Adam and Eve, but I can tell you one thing, I ain’t going anywhere near that apple.

That One Thing

In other words, Bible stories don’t have to mean just one thing. Despite what you may have heard from a pastor or Sunday school teacher along the way, faithful engagement with Scripture isn’t about uncovering a singular, moralistic point to every text and then sticking to it. Rather, the very nature of the biblical text invites us to consider the possibilities. From: Inspired by Rachel Held Evans page 40

What an amazing, scandalous and true method of interacting with scripture Ms. Held Evans points us to. When you think about it, it really makes the Bible come alive to read it this way.

Thou hast heard, see all this; and will not ye declare it? I have shewed thee new things from this time, even hidden things, and thou didst not know them (Isaiah 48:6 KJV).

I was reading the Psalms while I ate my peanut butter sandwich today. This is one of the most beautiful and yet selfish parts of scripture. People don’t stop to realize that in some parts David was asking God to wipe out his enemies and prosper him.

The Psalms are delightfully human.

Thank God we have move past the parts of scripture that subjugate and silence women so that we can be blessed by wonderfully prophetic writes like Held Evans. Let’s face it, while he wrote many great things, there are still some ways Paul got it wrong.

Now before you chide me for saying this, let’s look at all those “Bible believing” churches that allow women to participate on Sunday morning. From leading worship to something as simple as reading announcements. Whatever way in which women participate, you are flying in the face of what Paul said.

And thank God you are doing this.

Now stop for a moment and consider some of the other ways in which scripture may need to be reinterpreted in light of what we know today. Maybe, just maybe, there are other things that need to be looked at.

Wow, this post just went off on a tangent I was not prepared for.

Go buy Inspired, I am really enjoying what I have read so far.

More Pros than Cons

Our Bible App is a new app that caters to progressive Christians and people across a spectrum of spiritualities. It’s now launching a campaign titled, #BaggageClaim, which encourages readers to share about the baggage they are unpacking regarding their faith, religion, and spiritual journey.

Entering digital spaces that are dominated by conservative Christian resources, Our Bible App is attempting to carve out a unique space. It is explicitly pro-LGBT, pro-women and pro-interfaith inclusivity in its stated mission. “I created this app because I’m tired of feeling left out of Christianity because of my complex identities,” Crystal Cheatham, the app’s founder and CEO, told Sojourners. “I wanted worship materials that talked about an inclusive kind of faith and embraced that same kind of community.”

Via

From the site:

Our Bible App supports the belief that spirituality is a spectrum and that faith is a journey. At its core, the holy text was written to be inclusive of all of God’s creation especially those on the margins. Our Bible App is bringing it back to the roots celebrating the diversity of God’s creation with devotionals highlighting the inclusiveness of the text. Whether one goes to church to find spiritual clarity or to the sanctuary of nature, Our Bible App supports the belief that we are each trying to understand our place in this grand universe. Our goal is to untangle the binds that Christian colonizers have spread across the globe over hundreds of years. Through devotionals highlighting pro LGBT, pro-women and encourage interfaith inclusivity we hope to provide a tool that is needed to create healthy prayer and meditation habits.

Literally Illiterate

To suggest that this text is in any sense the “literal Word of God” is to place extreme limits on both its truth and its power. Out of our sincere religious need to possess in some written form an infallible source of truth, we run the risk of reducing our treasured book to irrelevance. If the religiously alienated, which in many cases includes our own children, can ridicule our sacred tradition by an appeal to our own sacred Scriptures for which we have claimed too much, then we will have little to offer the world. If those elements of organized religion are allowed to claim for the Bible such words as “inerrant,” “infallible,” “the literal Word of God,” so that it is their limited understanding that becomes the only perception of Christianity in the public arena, then the Christian church, so heavily burdened, will not be able to speak with power to our own generation. – Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism By John Shelby Spong pages 54-55