Misreading Scripture
 
I have just finished a very helpful book called Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, by Randolph Richardson and Brandon O’Brien. The authors show how people often impose their own values and assumptions on the Bible without realizing it.
 
For example, we in contemporary America are very focused on time and, by extension, chronology. The biblical authors seem to be much less focused on chronology. Rarely do they tell us how much time went by between events. And sometimes they seem to juggle the order of events to make a point. Richardson and O’Brien suggest that, if we could ask them about this, the biblical authors would cheerfully acknowledge it and not see any problem.  This is a place where our value system and the value system of the biblical authors simply differs.
 
Richardson and O’Brien don’t elaborate on this point at much length, but what they suggest is distinguishing two ways of reading the Bible. Interpretation means trying to figure out what the biblical authors meant on their own terms. To do this effectively, we have to bracket out our own cultural assumptions as much as possible. Application, by contrast, is reflecting on what a passage means for me, in my own context. Application is like translating an interpretation into a form that is culturally relevant.
 
A small shift in our language could, it seems to me, make a big difference in our Bible studies. We could talk about what we think a passage means (interpretation, where our assumptions are bracketed). And, as a second question, we could then ask how it applies to each of us. That would give us a common understanding of what the passage means, with a potentially wide range of applications to the personal circumstances of each one of us. That leaves the Spirit room to speak through words that we claim are living and active, but it also keeps intact the integrity of the words themselves.
 
None of this was entirely new to me. But these authors do a nice job of articulating some of the complexities of biblical interpretation and application. I am grateful to them for that!

I am in the middle of an emotionally intense week: a funeral on Saturday; another today; a committal tomorrow; a third funeral on Friday. Because each funeral requires a certain amount of preparation time, the last several days have been dominated by funerals, and the next few will be, too.
 
I was only really close to one of the people who died, but every funeral is sad. Still, the week has not been depressing. Indeed so far it has been closer to the opposite. The service on Saturday was uplifting. All three of the people who died lived well. I am quite confident that all three are now with God.
 
And funerals certainly remind us of what matters in life. I inevitably spend a lot of time on things like the details of the service, which pale in importance compared to the overwhelming fact of human mortality and death. But those details are part of how we show our love and respect for the people who died, as well as support their grieving families and friends. In that sense, the seemingly petty details of life take on real importance too.
 
I have never had a week quite like this before, and I don’t know how to put all this together at this point. Among other things, I am just tired! And I could not sustain this level of intensity for long.
 
But what I think I am glimpsing is the way that everything we do, no matter how simple, points beyond itself to the great mystery and meaning of life, beyond itself to the fact of our mortality and to our ultimate destination in God. If I can hold on to that insight in times of lesser intensity, my life will be richer and deeper. May it be so!

In the gospels, we read about Jesus talking to all kinds of people, and in virtually every exchange, he looks great.
 
And then there is Mark 7:24f, with a parallel at Matthew 15:21f. A woman begs Jesus to cast a demon out of her daughter. Jesus replies, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
 
Some Jews referred to Gentiles—non-Jews—as dogs. So when Jesus compares healing this Canaanite woman’s daughter to feeding the children’s food to the dogs, he has made an ethnic slur. That is a bad thing. But this is Jesus. What are we to do with that?!?!
 
Jesus is like us in all but sin. Prejudice and ethnic slurs are sinful. I conclude, Jesus is not in fact insulting this woman’s ethnicity, even though that is exactly what it looks like. So, what is he doing?
 
In the story itself, Jesus acknowledges that his ethnic slur was not fair, and he ultimately grants the woman’s request. That makes this a story about overcoming prejudice. This story shows us that people who differ from us are not in fact undeserving dogs, no matter what we might be inclined to think at first. This story shows us that, surprise, surprise, God blesses even Canaanite women.
 
Who needs that lesson?
 
Not Jesus. Everything else we know about Jesus from all four gospels shows us that Jesus was remarkably open to all sorts of people: men and women, rich and poor, respectable people and scandalous people, Jews and Samaritans and Gentiles.
 
But some of Jesus’ first followers were not.
 
When Samaritans tried to join the Christian movement soon after Jesus’ death, some of Jesus’ followers resisted. When Gentiles tried to join the Christian movement soon after that, some of Jesus’ followers resisted again. Some of Jesus’ earliest followers thought that the grace of God in Christ was for them and for their people alone. Some of Jesus’ earliest followers claimed the bread of life for themselves and tried to withhold the bread of life from the dogs all around them.
 
In our story, Jesus himself articulates the prejudices of those followers. Jesus himself speaks like they were speaking. And thus Jesus models a learning process for his prejudiced first followers. In this story, Jesus articulates prejudices to show his followers how to overcome those same prejudices.
 
Details in our story show this. When the Canaanite woman first approaches Jesus, Jesus waits to see how his disciples react to her before he says anything. The disciples ask Jesus to send her away (Matt 15:23). Only then does Jesus refer to the woman as a dog, echoing the disciples’ hostility to her.
 
The point is not that Jesus learns to accept Gentiles. The point is that Jesus exposes the prejudice of his disciples and then moves beyond it when faced with the faith of this foreign woman.
 
What does this mean for us?
 
Well, it confronts us with a choice. We can be like the disciples, or we can be like the Canaanite woman.
 
All of us have some things in common with both.
 
Like the woman, we were not born into the covenant community of God’s chosen people, the Jews. As Paul says in his letter to the Romans, we are grafted into Israel. We join the body of Christ. Our families might have done that decades or even centuries ago. Still, Gentiles like us began outside the circle of God’s people and were then brought in. Our inclusion is not something to take for granted. Like the woman in this story, we should approach Jesus with humility and be grateful that we are recipients of God’s grace.
 
But we are also the disciples. Having received God’s grace and been incorporated into the body of Christ, we stand with Jesus. Unfortunately that means we, like the disciples in this story, are subject to the temptation to claim the bread of life for ourselves and to look down on outsiders who do not strike us as worthy.
 
We know we should do better. But we are not always better than the disciples. We sometimes urge Jesus to send away those people we believe do not really belong, for whatever reason. They might look different or smell bad or have different politics or sound strange when they talk or differ in any number of other ways. They might just be irritating and obnoxious. And so we incline to send them away, or at least to hope that they go away.
 
But in the end, this story calls us to be like Jesus, who intentionally models growth in love. Jesus reflects our prejudices for us, and then moves beyond them. We hear Jesus praise the faith of people we might not otherwise be inclined to like very much and certainly not to admire.
 
And that is a lesson we all need to learn!

Tomorrow we vote, so politics is on my mind. And with every election, I feel an increasing need to speak on behalf of irrational hope.  
 
There are obvious reasons to worry about the future of our democracy. I haven’t looked up numbers, but anecdotally it seems clear that people are discouraged about the direction our country is heading. Our political leaders seem unable to work together to solve real problems, and often uninterested in even trying. Ordinary folks feel disenfranchised and so check out altogether. The system seems broken.
 
I can be pretty cynical about politics in America today. But I fear we get the political leadership we deserve. If people fail to vote, they are effectively endorsing the current status quo. If people vote their passions rather than their principles, if they vote to support their tribe rather than for the common good, then we shouldn’t be surprised that our “leaders” cannot work together.
 
We need good candidates. And maybe we haven’t had enough good ones lately. But as best I can tell, voters have not shown a consistent preference for good candidates. All too often we support candidates who appeal to our self-interest or to our basest instincts rather than candidates who articulate a compelling vision of the common good.
 
The solution to our problems seems simple to me, even if it is hard to make it happen. First, voters need to get informed. Despite exaggerated concerns about “fake news,” plenty of good sources of information exist. Then voters need to insist on candidates who at least pretend to care about the common good more than about personal advantage or political party.
 
No single election can fix our problems. But every election is an opportunity to take a step back towards political sanity. And no matter how discouraged people are, we need to continue to believe that the system can work, that our leaders—current or future—can guide us towards a shared vision of the common good. The alternative is to give up on democracy and on American values as a whole. And that is not a good alternative!