What’s your next Good Read?

Newspapers deliver news, and at least the hard news stories give us the facts that will become the stuff of history. Magazines tell us something about a subject we want to explore in more depth. Stories open our imagination to an alternate world. Poetry helps us engage all our senses. Nonfiction, like biographies and Wikis, teach us who people were and how things came to be, and what makes them work, answering the questions of “Who?”, “Why?” and “How?” that lay behind what we see happening in the world around us. The written word in its many different genres and forms shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

But, when we talk about reading the Bible, suddenly the written Word becomes more intimidating. We imagine that there is a “right” way, and consequently, a “Wrong” way, to read the Bible because its text is, after all, the Holy Scripture of Christianity. It stares at us weightily from our bookshelf, like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Shakespeare’s Collected Works, or Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln’s War Years (which is actually 4 tomes). Challenging and intellectual and unfamiliar. And, there’s so much of it – 66 books, in fact! Or perhaps, someone has given us their version and their interpretation does nothing to recommend it to us. But suppose we do open it, or download and open a Bible app, depending on where is falls open or which translation we read, the language sounds awkward, repetitive and formal. And if we stay in the text, we run headlong into stories of deception, like the king killing the husband of the woman he lusted for, or violence, like the rape of the king’s daughter. With the number of heartbreaking and terrorizing stories in our neighborhoods and cities, why would you invite more? Why read the Bible?

The Bible tells us who God is. If you are curious about a culture or a language or a people, you go to Fodor’s or Lonely Planet and you read about it. So engage your curiosity, learn the language of God as it’s expressed in the Bible, discover the less known God than the one that you may have heard shouted through a bullhorn, and meet God. God is a creator, an active, vibrant, attentive God who gets angry, who grieves, and who rejoices. God’s character is expressed in many names for God that identify particular aspects, or point us to specific promises that God has made. In the same way that a biography might give you glimpses into a person, the stories of the Bible reveal God’s character.

The Bible describes the covenant or relationship that God made and what promises are part of that. God designs us to be in relationship with each other and with God’s own self. This relationship is the ground for our understanding of who we are as community and what it means to be called into life together. Learning the promises of God helps us know how we can live into the hope of those promises and how one faithful response to those promises is to be in relationship with our neighbors and the world around us.

The Bible tells us how ancient Israel - the ancestors of Christian faith - understood God and what was important to shaping their tradition. Jesus was born in Israel and practiced Judaism. The stories he was taught and the instruction or Torah he was given are the foundation for his own teaching and ministry in the world where he lived. Reading the Bible opens his world to us and connects us to a story that is thousands of years old.

The Bible shows us what a follower of Jesus looks like.  It doesn’t prescribe what Jesus’ followers look like, and it doesn’t issue a secret handshake, or uniforms or nametags, but it talks about the people who traveled with Jesus during his ministry and those who witnessed his teaching and his miracles, his death and his resurrection. While we don’t always resemble followers of Jesus too closely, these stories provide us with a plumb line, so we know what true discipleship looks like.

The Bible is not an archival document that serves us better by kept under glass or locked away in pristine condition; neither is it written to sit unopened and gathering dust. It is a Living Word that invites us into its stories, asks us to listen to the stories of the arrogant little brother whose siblings trade him in, the man who wrestles God in the desert, the stories of betrayal and injustice righted. It invites us to walk alongside the Psalm writer who cries out in pain and provides us for a place to go when we are worn out, too. It invites us into the anticipation in the air at Elizabeth’s house when Mary, mother of Jesus, comes to see her during her pregnancy. It invites us into the courtyard where the disciple Peter lives out the struggle to tell people about Jesus and filled with fear and shame, denies him three times. It invites us to see how God uses unexpected people in unexpected places and in unexpected ways to share the Word of God’s love and forgiveness with the world.

When we read or listen to the stories we can begin to recognize God’s activity in each one, and we can begin to imagine how those stories from thousands of years ago are played out in our lives, and then, we can begin to see how our lives and stories connect and intersect with the biblical narrative, the story told through the texts of the books of the Bible. Like any good story, whether it’s your favorite movie or t.v. show, every new hearing, or reading, opens your eyes to see new details and prompts you to ask new questions.

As you read, or listen to it, the stories become more familiar until you can begin to complete the narrative from memory and the language seeps into your own vocabulary. And you learn how the books were written and why some were chosen to be held together in one collection as the canon; what is factual and what is allegorical; what is narrative and what is poetry; how a temple would have been constructed and what a Passover Seder meal may have looked like; you discover who the kings were, and what role the judges played, and you meet the men and women who were leaders in the early Christian church. And through all these different genres and forms, the Bible shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. So perhaps it doesn’t need to be so unfamiliar or challenging, but instead inviting.

Pick one up and read!

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