How do you engage with scripture? How does scripture engage with you? How do we do this work together, as a community?
The Bible has connected and still connects with people all around the world, across time and culture. So how do we today engage with scripture and allow scripture to engage with us? It is too trite to say it is an old book and does not fit us today, and yet there is some truth to that. Often we see images people off on their own reading (and interpreting) scripture, yet through the ages, that has been the task of the church, a community gathered. How do we engage scripture, how do we let scripture engage us?
Sometimes we need a reminder – a nudge – to do what we really want to. There are a variety of ways that you can have a daily nudge to read and reflect on scripture. One that i have been using for the last while is the Moravian daily texts, in a daily email, written by the Moravian church. You can get more info at:http://www.moravian.org/faith-a-congregations/an-introduction-to-the-daily-texts-2/ and in the lower right corner you can see a heading that says “subscribe”
This meditation from Richard Rohr was shared with me. You can subscribe to his regular meditations on his web site. … Glyn
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
Photograph by mercucio2 _https___www.morguefile.com_creative_mercucio2_
Photograph by mercucio2.
Scripture: Week 1
Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Backward
Monday, February 22, 2016
Life itself is always three steps forward and two steps backward. We get the point and then we lose or doubt it. In that, the biblical text mirrors our own human consciousness and journey. Our job is to see where the three steps forward texts are heading (invariably toward mercy, simplicity, inclusion, nonviolence, and trust) and to spot the two steps backward texts (which are usually about vengeance, exclusion, a rather petty and insecure god, law over grace, incidentals over substance, and technique over actual relationship).
The Bible is an anthology of many books. It is a record of people’s experience of God’s self-revelation. It is an account of our very human experience of the divine intrusion into history. The book did not fall from heaven in a pretty package. It was written by people trying to listen for and to God. I believe that the Spirit was guiding the listening and writing process. We must also know that humans always see “through a glass darkly . . . and all knowledge is imperfect” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Prayer and patience surrounding such human words will keep us humble and searching for the true Living Word, which is exactly how the Spirit always teaches (1 Corinthians 2:10,13). This is what it means to know something “contemplatively.”
We must trust that there is a development of the human capacity for divine wisdom and human response inside the Bible. We must be honest and recognize that things like polygamy, slavery, genocide, torture, racism, sexism, stoning, and mutilation of sinners–things that are often fully accepted in the ancient text–become more intolerable as the text matures. God does not change, so much as we do. If believers cannot begin to be honest about this, we are going to lose most future generations to any sincere or faith-filled reading of the Bible. Far too many have already thrown the Bible out when they really did not need to. But they had no good teachers to guide them.
Woven throughout these developing ideas are what I call “the Great Themes of Scripture.” (This was the title of my very first recordings in 1973.) I try to mine these timeless, essential themes from the text. My approach is almost so simple, it is hard to teach. It is what I call the “Jesus hermeneutic.” (Hermeneutic is a method of interpretation.) My approach is, quite simply, to interpret and use the Bible the way that Jesus did.
When we get to the Risen Jesus, there is nothing to be afraid of in God. Jesus’ very breath is identified with forgiveness and the Divine Shalom (see John 20:20-23). If the Risen Jesus is the full and trustworthy unveiling of the nature of God, then we live in a safe and love-filled universe. It is not that God has changed, or that the Hebrew God is a different God than the God of Jesus; it is that we are growing up as we move through the texts and deepen our experience. Stay with the text and with your inner life with God, and your capacity for God will increase and deepen.
Just as the Bible takes us through many stages of consciousness and history, it takes us individually a long time to move beyond our need to be dualistic, judgmental, accusatory, fearful, blaming, egocentric, and earning–and to see as Jesus sees. The Bible itself is a “text in travail,” according to Rene Girard’s fine insight. It mirrors and charts our own human travail. It will offer both the mature and the immature responses to almost everything. In time, you will almost naturally recognize the difference between the text moving forward toward the mercy, humility, and inclusivity of Jesus and when the text is regressing into arrogance, exclusion, and legalism. Even a child can see the difference, but an angry or power-hungry person will not. They will favor the regressive and violent passage every time.
Gateway to Silence
Astonish me with your love.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 12-13;
and Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos, The Great Themes of Scripture: Old Testament, (Franciscan Media: 1988), 1.