Posted by: sanctuarybath | April 22, 2008

…but what does it mean?

Ok, I need to hear from you all. Does anyone else ever have this experience when they are reading the Bible? These days I frequently read passages which I am familiar with and which I know ought to make sense, and find myself thinking “Yes..but… what does it actually mean?”

Let me give you an example. I read the passage in Matthew that I guess many of you will know well, where Jesus exhorts his disciples not to worry about food or clothes. He ends by saying “seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you.”

Well…HOW???? What does ’seek first His kingdom’ actually mean in my day to day life? Do I look for it in Ikea? (which is where I spent most of my day today, drove to the Bristol store and back twice, don’t ask). Maybe in my job? Hmmm… maybe not.  And how do I look for it? Do I have to go and meditate on a hill for weeks? (hope not). And how do I know when I find it? Do you see my problem? Or am I finally losing the plot once and for all?

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Responses

after doing time in Ikea, you deserve a little time out!

In the Kingdom of God, everyone is of immense value, it’s hard to feel this in our crazy world. Thats where our pain and frustration are signs of hunger for the Kingdom of God - where we are not demeaned and marginalised.

By: subo on April 22, 2008
at 10:26 pm

Have you ever written something that you write all the time and you think, “Is that right?” You know it is but you can’t figure out why and it looks so wrong. The word “two” is one such word which led me to a literacy crisis a few years back. Likewise, things that people take for granted, including me, suddenly confound me. For instance: God sent his son to die for my sins.
Why? I lose my temper from time to time, gorge on food a bit more than I ought to, tell the odd ‘white’ lie. I don’t think I do anything worth killing someone for. Why did Jesus ‘have’ to die for anyone’s sins anyway. Why was it a necessity? Why was it the only way? No-one has ever successfully explained the logic behind that one. They just spout it at me and it is taken as read that I understand it. I feel terrible now, and really dumb. It’s like seeing someone on a daily basis for about 10 years and then having to admit that you don’t know their name. No doubt there is a theologian or ten out there to set me straight.

By: Carole on April 22, 2008
at 10:48 pm

Cheers Su, that’s a positive way to look at my feelings of confusion.
Thanks for your empathy Carole, I was beginning to think it was just me! Perhaps you are right, and familiarity is part of the problem… although I am starting to wonder if perhaps I have just been going along with what everyone else believes for a long time and I’m only just starting to wake up to the fact! I identify with the why did Jesus have to die question. It came up when Sonia and I were doing a theology foundation course a few years ago. We went through all the various viewpoints (penal substitution etc) and at the end of it I still didn’t feel any of them actually explained why it was necessary. *sigh*. I know there are some things which are supposed to be mysteries… but it feels like most things are at the moment!!!

By: Clare on April 23, 2008
at 8:10 pm

Hi Clare,

I totally get what you mean! I find reading the bible so challenging, and I find I get upset when I read a bit that to me sounds harsh, and yet I know God is good. So it must be me that’s misunderstanding, but I can’t seem to find an explanation for certain passages that fits. Then I worry about the fact that everyone else seems to understand it but me…and eventually end up calling up my mum for her to reassure me that I am a sheep!

I hope that even though I sometimes struggle with hearing my sheperd’s voice in the bible that I hear it in other ways…

By: Hayley on April 23, 2008
at 11:42 pm

…and that maybe one day I’ll even learn how to spell shepherd!

By: Hayley on April 24, 2008
at 1:22 am

Clare, I am so impressed you have been reading the bible recently!- more than i have done:). I thought as you get older things become clearer, but I’m finding the opposite, as I get older it all gets more unclear!. I find I am questioning so much, Iain jokes I am such a “woolly liberal”!. Most of me thinks it is good to question and feel cross that so many churches don’t encourage it- but then I also feel so guilty that I don’t just accept things and go along with what I’m told.

By: sonia on April 24, 2008
at 8:02 am

Hiya folks, I love talking about this stuff (encase you haven’t noticed!) and think ‘mysteries’ work on a number of levels and dimensions. yes, there’s the substitution stuff, for the rational/legal dimension. to some extent though, I feel this is about the church trying to prove that faith is rational, like making an abstract formula for a tangible experience.

and yet having grown up in an environment where I absorbed a sense of damnation in stiff quantities, finding how much God values us has let me view myself as human

just believing God sought after me, enables me to look at how I’ve damaged the people around me, with the hope I can begin to live in a way that brings healing to others.

an essential aspect of this is a view of our interconnectedness, and a rejection of my sense of being an existential, independent, free spirit

except it’s only as a free spirit that I can give anything meaningful to anyone else!

for me this is an experience over time, of the holy spirit nudging me to rethink stuff, finding out what God sees in us, why we crucified Jesus, and the way the Holy Spirit wants to relate to us as people of the kingdom of God.

By: subo on April 24, 2008
at 1:14 pm

I think I know where you are coming from Su and Hayley. For me it is the relationship that really keeps my faith going. It is the illogical certainty in my heart that somebody knows me better than anybody else, better than I know myself, and loves me in spite of all that. When the world is not going as I would like it, it is this sense that keeps me going. What you said, Su, about church trying to make faith rational - that is the problem I have with theology. All the different factions argue the toss over their own particular party line, but actually, it is just opinion not fact. They are just hellbent on dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s that they take all the good out of faith. I don’t need to be a psychologist to love another human - if anything that would take the spontaneous joy out of love. I can also live without theology encroaching on my relationship with God. That sounds so wishy washy and simplistic!

By: Carole on April 24, 2008
at 6:38 pm

cheers Carol, it’s so heart-warming to get your engaging responses on the blog.

I guess I think at times, through church history, theology’s been useful in demonstrating what’s amiss, even now in our enlightened times, the church gets caught up in dodgy activities. Some of the problem for me, though is, they seem to be adept at finding theology to back up the said activities - like damning gay relationships!

By: subo on April 24, 2008
at 9:01 pm

Thanks for all the comments. Welcome to the blog Hayley! You are right, the Bible can be pretty confusing. I think what I particularly find hard as I get a little older is actually knowing how to apply these teachings to my life. Church seems to manage to talk a lot about the Bible without actually giving much practical advice or encouragement about how to live out a christian life, whatever that is. But increasingly I’m finding that faith that is expressed only via a set of values and beliefs is not meaningful - I yearn for something which is integrated into my life and myself. I wish I had that sense that Su & Carole talk of, of knowing how God values you. It isn’t all that real to me any more, yet at the same time I’m not able to contemplate a view of the world without God - that doesn’t make any more sense than the alternative! *sigh* Time for a glass of wine and another episode of ‘Life on Mars’ I think…

By: Clare on April 25, 2008
at 8:27 pm

wow… what an amazing thread.
like carole, it’s relationships that keep me going. that and a sense of not wanting to live in a godless world. by which i don’t mean i want a religious world… i just want to/have to believe that it all means something.
i identify completely with my mrs…
i read the bible these days because my job requires it. i’m not in love with the bible. it’s a very long book, mostly written dryly (except psalms, proverbs, song of songs etc… which have a degree of passion and humanity about them)… and it’s mostly about people who lived eons ago… not that that would be a problem, given i like a bit of history, but the bible seems to manage to tell even really exciting story plots in a way that kills the drama stone dead.
but i do love this world and the things in it and i believe god must. + jesus seriously rocks. he was out there… right out there… what a man! everything i read about him tells me that’s where i must lay my hat. jesus was all about relating… restoring broken relationships, engaging and partying and telling stories and dying for what he loved (everything)… relating to the creator, even relating to women (heaven forbid!) in a culture that was (and still is) pretty damn patriarchal.
i just don’t think there is any meaning beyond relating… to the world around us, to each other, to those with the least etc. etc. etc. i believe this is the very core of what jesus was saying and living out. relate, relate, relate.
in short… relating is everything… anything else is simply fluff… no matter how clever we think we are.

okay… rant over.

i don’t even understand a simple line like “no one comes to the father except through me”… evo’s, fundies, prots, caths etc… they reckon they’ve got it sorted… but it can mean a million things.

okay… rant now over.

once again clare… great topic for discussion. thanks for the honesty.

ps. everything i know is probably wrong. :-)

By: jonbirch on April 26, 2008
at 2:03 am

I just wanted to say a few things about this thread. I’ll probably ruffle a few feathers. I spend a lot of time studying and reading the Bible and I think this is an important discipline for the Christian. Let me explain why I think this is important. Of couse I’m just scratching the topic.

The Bible, correctly understood, is a story of liberation. Take the Exodus. In Egypt the people were slaves and it was a nightmare. Yahweh took them out of the land of slavery and took them into the land of freedom. At its best the Christian faith has done this. Consider the story of Amy Carmichael (1867-1951) who rescued hundreds of children from the most appalling lives of sexual slavery in India. She rescued these children from religious shrine prostitution. This still goes on in parts of India. Why did she do this? Because she spent a lot of time marinading in the biblical story. Take the story of Richard Oastler. He spent his entire life fighting the appalling factory conditions in 19th century England. Why did he do this? Answer he marinaded in the biblical story. He loved that story and made it come alive. The same can be said for Josephine Butler, Catherine Booth, Elizabeth Fry, William Wilberforce, George Cadbury and many many others.

My basic beef with many Christians is that they do not know these stories. They do not know their own Christian story. There are parts of the story that we should be ashamed of but there is so much that is very good. Too often we have swallowed the secular mythology that Christianity is an inherently reactionary force. Take Tahiti. The secular story often tells us that the missionaries went to that island and stopped people dancing and having fun. This is just total balls. Before the missionaries arrived there was extensive human sacrifice to the god Oro. The missionaries stopped the human sacrifice by their preaching of the gospel and they introduced the just war doctrine and this stopped the appalling massacres which normally happened after battles. We can find very similar things to this in Fiji, India, New Zealand etc. But again very few Christians know these stories or they have bought into the dominant secular stories which suppress and distort this.

I read the Bible because in marinading and metabolising the story I can join in with the stories of Amy Carmichael and the other people I have mentioned. Also we must stress that if we don’t know and love the biblical story we will be discipled by other stories (eg consumerism). And then we might live like Simeon Stylites and spend 37 years living on a pillar!

Rocky

By: Mark Roques on April 26, 2008
at 2:22 pm

I’m with you Rock’s, on the liberating force of the Bible,
I felt it for myself at times, when it’s tasted like a strong drink
stirring up a sense of our value at times when I’ve felt overlooked.
It has the power to let you meet with God
and find him fill your heart with hope and love.

Last week I got to hear The Revd Dr Naim Ateek, Director
of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre, Naim
had bee forcibly expelled from his home as a wee lad during the
1948 Israeli invasion of Palestine, yet his love for Israelis and
his fellow Palestinians lit up a big smile across his face,
he draws deeply from the liberating power of the Bible.

to be honest, I’m miles behind this guy, and let myself get
washed about, between resentment and indifference,
however, I think I’ve tasted the real thing at times, and it’s good

By: subo on April 26, 2008
at 3:50 pm

I wasn’t suggesting that we shouldn’t read the Bible, although I agree with Jon that it is extremely challenging at times to wrestle with it! But how should we react when we do not understand what we read? I like to think I am quite bright, but clearly I am missing something here. When I hear about amazing christians like those you mention Rocky its clear to me that they got something out of the Bible which I am just not getting. They had a sense of how they needed to apply the Bible to their daily lives. Perhaps I am just dense or not very adventurous or not prepared to change as much as I need to in order to become like these people. I want to relate, like Jon says, I want to love people, and I hope I do some of the time. But is that ’seeking first the kingdom’? I don’t know. Is God in it? I don’t know. Does my wanting to do it depend on my faith? I’m not sure it does.

By: Clare on April 26, 2008
at 7:34 pm

am trying to understand what your saying on this thread, as though there’s a mismatch between what you read in the bible and what you know of God.

one thing I find I do sometimes is accidentally put on those freebie card ’specks’ that circulate in Christian magazines, and distinguish between really spiritual and less spiritual reading material. I find I can’t make sense of anything wearing these specks

reading concordances or stuff by eminent writers makes the whole thing worse, and yet immersing myself in secular thinkers helps! who’d have though Rogers cribbed Aquinas!

By: subo on April 26, 2008
at 11:34 pm

i’m not disagreeing with the importance of the bible rocky me ol’ fruit. just saying that for the non-academic (of which i am one) it makes for very dull reading a lot of the time. the themes are mega, the situations amazing, the stories wide and varied, the main character is the best ever written about… but it is so dry for the majority… with the exceptions i gave before. i understand how an academic or a voracious reader may enjoy pouring over it… but i am neither. i’m bright, learn fast, unlearn faster, then learn again… i am a follower of christ and as such would hope to find the bible more readable… but i don’t. thank god for people like yourself who are academic and a good teacher and have no intention of misleading people. if i have no bible and find myself on a desert island i would like to think that my faith would remain intact.
anyhow… thankfully, the work i do means i must grapple with the bible, otherwise i probably wouldn’t… but i’d never stop grappling with my faith. you know those minister types who have very affected deliveries and can make some interesting points seem like a dose of prozac?… often that is my experience of the scriptures.
maybe sad, but certainly true. just being honest.
anyhow my best response to clare and the most challenging one for myself by a mile, and the most salient point in the whole of scripture is ‘love god, love your neighbour’… nothing too ambiguous about that, that is my challenge. with ‘relate, relate, relate’ as my mantra for life, to the creator and to his creation…and the sermon on the mount as my topsy-turvy wisdom i will struggle forward. btw… i learned this from the bible. :-)
ps. i’m not really much good at any of it.

By: jonbirch on April 27, 2008
at 1:47 am

i for one have really benefited Jon, from your warmth and brotherly love, you are able to see something about people.

By: subo on April 27, 2008
at 9:35 pm

that’s very kind su. i’ve felt very supported by you too over the last year. jx

By: jonbirch on April 28, 2008
at 12:27 am

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