Here's a good word to bring up at the end of the week - again from Brian Blount.
A last word tries to mask its own insecurity about its timelessness by forcing the present to live in the past. We often hear the criticism that the church ought not to adapt to the surrounding culture but speak to it. That's a powerfully correct assertion in my mind. But the church and its believers also ought not adapt to any past culture but, rather, speak to it! Speak from it, yes, but also speak to it in a way that values human living now, before God, just as human living before God was valued in the first century. And that valuing process may well mean that words that may have been valuable in the first century must no longer be equally valued today.
We must always ask, "how will we value those words?" Words once stressed may be given less weight among us. Words less stressed may be given great weight among us. This must happen within the context of a faithful community that is not afraid to have the word come alive and speak in new ways that may even be contrary to the way we have always learned to hold them. Isn't that how Jesus often lifted up the scriptures with those who were able and willing to wrestle with their meaning as the days changed among them. Good teachers were not afraid to wrestle and they were very willing to say "no" to words that did not bring new life. I often wrestle with how the church at large deals with the words from scripture that are often used as defining words about homosexuality. They are often used as last words - as though nothing else can be said. For me this is most troubling as I hear the differences between the US and European churches and churches in Africa and Asia. I find that we must listen to the way the word is coming to life from all areas of the church. Too often we don't listen to anything but churches from the northern hemisphere - that must stop and our hearing must be expanded so that we can be surprised and refreshed by a living word. But, this cannot mean that we accept all the words from any one people or area. Personally, I think some of the notions of a "last word" that is being pressed by church leaders in Africa and the US, for example, limit the expansiveness of the gracious Reign of God among us. The brutality surrounding the treatment of GLBT saints and women must be a word that is questioned prayerfully and consistently - or, we may not be able to value it at all.
Connection: The word really is a resting place. It really does bring comfort and it really does stir up new life. Today is always the time to let it be that living word among us.
Holy Word, bring us into life eternal and carry us through this day with lives that are open to how you shake us up with stories and words that help us see and hear all things through the lens of your promises. Amen.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Thursday 29 November 2007
Here's another short piece from Brian Blount on this notion of scripture being the "last word."
Making the biblical words the last word turns them into literary artifacts. Over time, any church working with such a word becomes fossilized into the past itself; it becomes an archaeological dig rather than a living faith community that celebrates seeing God say and do new things in new times.
For me the key to this piece comes at the end - the ability for a faithful people to see "God say and do new things in new times." The community remains faithful to the same promise from our God who keeps promises, but faithfulness is translated within each new context so that the promise still blows the day wide open with life that was not expected. Often I hear people quote a biblical passage as though it is a wand that must be waved to make things happen in the way they would like them to go. So we wave a "one-liner" in order to condemn things from ages ago without understanding what was being said then...and therefore not having any idea what we are condemning today. Even if the condemnation is the same...how is it the same...and what is the sameness today. Many biblical images come to mind. Probably the least controversial would be the notion of Noah's ark. There are folk out there whose whole life is given to finding that boat...somewhere...as though finding it...just as the book says...will make the word "true." But what life is this...lost in pages rather than found within life that continues to burst forth from the promise of that story of the ark. A dead word has a hard time expanding the boat to contain the present and lead us into the future. We are invited to walk into a promise not walk on something we can call a sure bet. If no ark is found, we are free to see those promises of God sail around us and blow us over rough seas and onto dry ground. A living word is the power to recreate when it would be so easy to stay put and die.
Connection: What is blowing in the wind today that is calling us to re-view and re-examine what we so often want to keep locked up and secure as though it will save us if we can simply manage that feat?
Lord of What Will Be and Has Been and Is Now, twirl us around again and again so that as we come to rest, we will see what is in front of us with eyes made new by your interpretive and hope-filled word. Remind us of the way your promises cannot be contained - ever. Amen.
Making the biblical words the last word turns them into literary artifacts. Over time, any church working with such a word becomes fossilized into the past itself; it becomes an archaeological dig rather than a living faith community that celebrates seeing God say and do new things in new times.
For me the key to this piece comes at the end - the ability for a faithful people to see "God say and do new things in new times." The community remains faithful to the same promise from our God who keeps promises, but faithfulness is translated within each new context so that the promise still blows the day wide open with life that was not expected. Often I hear people quote a biblical passage as though it is a wand that must be waved to make things happen in the way they would like them to go. So we wave a "one-liner" in order to condemn things from ages ago without understanding what was being said then...and therefore not having any idea what we are condemning today. Even if the condemnation is the same...how is it the same...and what is the sameness today. Many biblical images come to mind. Probably the least controversial would be the notion of Noah's ark. There are folk out there whose whole life is given to finding that boat...somewhere...as though finding it...just as the book says...will make the word "true." But what life is this...lost in pages rather than found within life that continues to burst forth from the promise of that story of the ark. A dead word has a hard time expanding the boat to contain the present and lead us into the future. We are invited to walk into a promise not walk on something we can call a sure bet. If no ark is found, we are free to see those promises of God sail around us and blow us over rough seas and onto dry ground. A living word is the power to recreate when it would be so easy to stay put and die.
Connection: What is blowing in the wind today that is calling us to re-view and re-examine what we so often want to keep locked up and secure as though it will save us if we can simply manage that feat?
Lord of What Will Be and Has Been and Is Now, twirl us around again and again so that as we come to rest, we will see what is in front of us with eyes made new by your interpretive and hope-filled word. Remind us of the way your promises cannot be contained - ever. Amen.
Wednesday 28 November 2007
Today we are simply continuing in the same line of thought as the past two days...more on the last word...by Brian Blount.
...as far as biblical ethics are concerned, for the peasants Mesters was talking about, there is no last word on biblical authority. Why? Because the authoritative words are linked to the contexts in which they are uttered. And since we're always changing, and our contexts are always changing, the words that interpret the whisper of God's Spirit in our time must necessarily be changing as well. God, you remember Jesus saying, is a god of the living, not the dead. But a last word is necessarily a dead word. It stops listening. It stops learning. It stops living! It just wants to be repeated over and over without being informed by anything about anything that has happened between the time of its first utterance and its purported final utterance now.
This does not say that the biblical word cannot speak to us and that we cannot hear the new life or begin to dance in a place that has yet to be a part of the old, old story. Rather, the word speaks with a new fullness. It was full and alive once before our day...and it must be today...without having to keep the word as though it has spoken all it could speak back centuries ago. I do not think that Blount is advocating a "situational" ethics that allows us to do as we want and only hear the words we would like to hear to suit our situation as we would want it. That would be idolatrous. We are really being invited to listen with new ears so that the life within the word will be a word that stirs up our hearts and brings the life of the Reign of God right into our hearts and thus our lives. Too often, it is easy for a group of people to come to the last word and make that word something so etched in stone and therefore so rigid that the wind of the Spirit must blow extra hard just to help people bend and bow and move a bit off their beaten path. When we view the word as the last word, I do not see how we are able to let ourselves walk with the word and be taken to new place, new insights, new vitality, new creation...that never, ever ends.
Connection: Take a walk...wander a bit...let your story find a place to hear the words of the scripture and let those words engage your walk in a real dialogue that is ready to unfold anew.
Word of Life, Come! Enter into the hearts of your people and engage us so that our wondering and wandering may be brought to new depths of experience and understanding. As your word lives, we all begin to come to life. Amen.
...as far as biblical ethics are concerned, for the peasants Mesters was talking about, there is no last word on biblical authority. Why? Because the authoritative words are linked to the contexts in which they are uttered. And since we're always changing, and our contexts are always changing, the words that interpret the whisper of God's Spirit in our time must necessarily be changing as well. God, you remember Jesus saying, is a god of the living, not the dead. But a last word is necessarily a dead word. It stops listening. It stops learning. It stops living! It just wants to be repeated over and over without being informed by anything about anything that has happened between the time of its first utterance and its purported final utterance now.
This does not say that the biblical word cannot speak to us and that we cannot hear the new life or begin to dance in a place that has yet to be a part of the old, old story. Rather, the word speaks with a new fullness. It was full and alive once before our day...and it must be today...without having to keep the word as though it has spoken all it could speak back centuries ago. I do not think that Blount is advocating a "situational" ethics that allows us to do as we want and only hear the words we would like to hear to suit our situation as we would want it. That would be idolatrous. We are really being invited to listen with new ears so that the life within the word will be a word that stirs up our hearts and brings the life of the Reign of God right into our hearts and thus our lives. Too often, it is easy for a group of people to come to the last word and make that word something so etched in stone and therefore so rigid that the wind of the Spirit must blow extra hard just to help people bend and bow and move a bit off their beaten path. When we view the word as the last word, I do not see how we are able to let ourselves walk with the word and be taken to new place, new insights, new vitality, new creation...that never, ever ends.
Connection: Take a walk...wander a bit...let your story find a place to hear the words of the scripture and let those words engage your walk in a real dialogue that is ready to unfold anew.
Word of Life, Come! Enter into the hearts of your people and engage us so that our wondering and wandering may be brought to new depths of experience and understanding. As your word lives, we all begin to come to life. Amen.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Tuesday 27 November 2007
I find this quote to be a good follow-up to what Blount wrote in yesterday's devotion.
We're too often the not-yet-ready-for-prime-time pietists who equate faith with God to faith in the written words of human texts. Carlos Mesters makes the case provocatively when he talks about the poor Latin American peasants whose oppressed circumstances often motivate them to challenge the ethical exhortations of the biblical texts whenever those exhortations would perpetuate their oppression. So, Mesters writes, these "common people are putting the Bible in its proper place, the place where God intended it to be. They are putting it in second place. Life takes first place.
Therefore, God becomes flesh. That is not merely part of the storytelling. That is what God intends the word to be among us - alive. It become the life of the community. When that is the case, the text does not rule over us. We challenge it...just as we are challenged. Within that dialogue, words that are not life-giving will not be able to stand up within the conversation. That may be why words that are used to put people "in their place" are really words that are frightened to be a part of a dialogue. They are, in essence, afraid that they might be changed. A Good News word calls people out into the world to live boldly and not fear what might come when we bow and bend and lean and give up and give over and turn around and go forward and yet go backward. When the word brings life, we can never be sure where we will go prior to wrestling with the word as it is and how it is when we read it and share its fullness.
Connection: Life takes first place...and the word will be one help along the way to a life that is greater than what we anticipate. In the meantime, we struggle and share and keep living.
Living Word, when you challenge us with new life, it is so easy to run from that life by simply staying stuck within the words. We long for you to pull our lives from the page and set us leaping into a life that will shape this day. Amen.
We're too often the not-yet-ready-for-prime-time pietists who equate faith with God to faith in the written words of human texts. Carlos Mesters makes the case provocatively when he talks about the poor Latin American peasants whose oppressed circumstances often motivate them to challenge the ethical exhortations of the biblical texts whenever those exhortations would perpetuate their oppression. So, Mesters writes, these "common people are putting the Bible in its proper place, the place where God intended it to be. They are putting it in second place. Life takes first place.
Therefore, God becomes flesh. That is not merely part of the storytelling. That is what God intends the word to be among us - alive. It become the life of the community. When that is the case, the text does not rule over us. We challenge it...just as we are challenged. Within that dialogue, words that are not life-giving will not be able to stand up within the conversation. That may be why words that are used to put people "in their place" are really words that are frightened to be a part of a dialogue. They are, in essence, afraid that they might be changed. A Good News word calls people out into the world to live boldly and not fear what might come when we bow and bend and lean and give up and give over and turn around and go forward and yet go backward. When the word brings life, we can never be sure where we will go prior to wrestling with the word as it is and how it is when we read it and share its fullness.
Connection: Life takes first place...and the word will be one help along the way to a life that is greater than what we anticipate. In the meantime, we struggle and share and keep living.
Living Word, when you challenge us with new life, it is so easy to run from that life by simply staying stuck within the words. We long for you to pull our lives from the page and set us leaping into a life that will shape this day. Amen.
Monday 26 November 2007
We are still walking through "The Last Word on Biblical Authority" by Brian Blount.
We're asking the question, How do we go about understanding which biblical words live today, and which don't?... People need some absolute, something hard and lasting, a last word on all things for all ethical situations for every ethical context imaginable. We are like Paul's babes in the faith; we need the suckling security of a milk bottle filled with authoritative assurances about what we should do and how we should live in any and every time for any and every circumstance. We don't want complexities because we're not spiritually grown up enough to handle them. We want it simple: simplified faith, simplified ethics in light of that faith. We want "do this" or "do that," "don't do this" or "don't do that." We're too often not ready for the meat of mature considerations about the words of texts that were often right for their own time twenty centuries ago but may well be wrong for our time.
It sounds like we must be able and willing to talk with texts. That is, not simply look to them for precise answers like those to a simple math test. Rather, we must be willing to hear the text and talk with it so that we can find out if the context of the written word can or does match up with the context in which we are reading the word and attempting to make sense of it for our day. I think we all have a tendency to listen to a text only as we want to hear it. In that exercise, I suppose we do not hear anything that will cause us to get up and wrestle with it. Instead we avoid any confrontation with the text by simply letting it speak as we want it to speak. There are many ways we can turn texts into "do this" and "do that" when the text really isn't that specific. What is really going on within our encounter with the text is that we will only hear what our filters let us hear - or are able to hear.
Connection: Maybe we can begin by keeping the opening question before us as we go through this day: "How do we go about understanding which biblical words live today, and which don't.? Already, we will begin to face the moment a bit differently.
Living Word, you change what is into what will be. From here to there, we will experience loss and we are overwhelmed by joy. We would ask that your Word would continue to pull us into life that we have yet to experience to the fullest. Amen.
We're asking the question, How do we go about understanding which biblical words live today, and which don't?... People need some absolute, something hard and lasting, a last word on all things for all ethical situations for every ethical context imaginable. We are like Paul's babes in the faith; we need the suckling security of a milk bottle filled with authoritative assurances about what we should do and how we should live in any and every time for any and every circumstance. We don't want complexities because we're not spiritually grown up enough to handle them. We want it simple: simplified faith, simplified ethics in light of that faith. We want "do this" or "do that," "don't do this" or "don't do that." We're too often not ready for the meat of mature considerations about the words of texts that were often right for their own time twenty centuries ago but may well be wrong for our time.
It sounds like we must be able and willing to talk with texts. That is, not simply look to them for precise answers like those to a simple math test. Rather, we must be willing to hear the text and talk with it so that we can find out if the context of the written word can or does match up with the context in which we are reading the word and attempting to make sense of it for our day. I think we all have a tendency to listen to a text only as we want to hear it. In that exercise, I suppose we do not hear anything that will cause us to get up and wrestle with it. Instead we avoid any confrontation with the text by simply letting it speak as we want it to speak. There are many ways we can turn texts into "do this" and "do that" when the text really isn't that specific. What is really going on within our encounter with the text is that we will only hear what our filters let us hear - or are able to hear.
Connection: Maybe we can begin by keeping the opening question before us as we go through this day: "How do we go about understanding which biblical words live today, and which don't.? Already, we will begin to face the moment a bit differently.
Living Word, you change what is into what will be. From here to there, we will experience loss and we are overwhelmed by joy. We would ask that your Word would continue to pull us into life that we have yet to experience to the fullest. Amen.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Firday 23 November 2007
The week draws to an end with a bit more about the transformation of what we hear into what we have as written biblical texts.
That flesh (that is God's whisper) is the human word of the human disciples who have written our biblical texts. Like all flesh, it is limited, and often the ethical words they have written are also limited to their times and their places. This means that the words of those texts ought to be challenged when we find that they were influenced by their contexts in such a way that they are damaging, and not life affirming, in a contemporary circumstance.
These few sentences will not be received well by some. And yet, if this whispering God continues to whisper and we hear that Word in and through and with our context, it is quite obvious, that as the context changes, the Word will be heard differently. This does not mean that anything goes and we read as we want to read. Rather, we must be willing to listen and discuss and question and resolve to wrestle with what might be the written word in front of us and the Word as it is being whispered anew among us. Quite frankly, sometimes the word must be reviewed so that we can hear it again with new life that is still within the transforming power of God's living word of life. When the words of the past do not serve us by bring life, we really must question what is being said and how those words for another context need to be heard among us today.
Connection: Changing lives....changing voices....changing directions, all have the potential to frighten us. And yet, we can be the recipients of a great and powerful Word of God as the spirit moves us to bend and bow and continue to listen with a fresh mind and heart.
Come, Lord God, and tickle us with you Word so that we will not settle for anything less than a Word that affirms and lifts up life to it fullest among us. Amen.
Wednesday 21 November 2007
We continue to move into a look at biblical authority from the view point of Brian Blount.
God's voice, then, is like an inaudible whisper - sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce - that jangles the nerves of the human spirit until, tensed and alert, it attends to what it is that God wants to "say." That saying will be different according to the variable conditions in which the human spirits who encounter it find themselves. When that spiritual whisper grips the human spirits where they live, it becomes an incarnate Word taking up the cause of the people who encounter it in the situations of that encounter. It is in this way that God's eternal voice for all becomes a living Word exclusively for them. God's whisper takes on flesh.
The word of God becomes flesh. It always does. It cannot stay a word without life. And yet, that is what we do to the word. We make it just that...a word about life or a word about life as we want it to be. But when the word of God becomes flesh, it becomes a part of our character and our character serves to bring the Word alive. This seems to open up a variety of ways for the Word to be heard and to become alive. It is not bad for the Word to take on flesh that has various faces to it. In fact, we are invited to make such a Word vulnerable among us. To embrace such vulnerability simply means that as we hear one another stories that have been brought to life by God's Word, we will learn a bit about how this Word takes on different forms of flesh. It is here that we must deal with one another and find ways to honor the different ways this whisper of God pulls us into new life. This is not always an easy project. And yet, it carries the potential of being a situation of great insight and hope.
Connection: Listen for that whisper...listen for that life that starts up and begins to transform the day even when we are not ready for transformation.
By your love and grace, O God, we are stretched because your Word is life. When we listen, we hear best when what we hear becomes who we are as the day unfolds. Keep our ears open to your whispering presence. Amen.
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