Within my ministerial group we have an ongoing debate as to the importance of reading scripture durring a service. The Revised Common Lectionary provides four texts each Sunday. My friend Cliff, an ELCA pastor, is famous for calling us to read all four texts each Sunday.
"Faith comes by hearing," he reminds us, "and God's word will not return void."
Mulholland suggests inspiration has two sides, God breathing the Word to the authors and breathing it again to us a we hear it. The second part requires our attention. Like Joe suggests we must approach it with appropriate postures.
For me this often takes the form of unpacking the scripture, telling the story, or, to say it with it's peculiar title, preaching. Still I wrestle with how to help people attend to the scripture and, with the public reading of it, make it more than just informational or worse a time to zone out.
Perhaps ironically, it was learning to do exegesis that rescued me from informational reading of the scripture. In college I was trying to get through the Bible in a year and I was drying up. My dad sugested that I take the exegetical Bible study methods I had learned and was in love with and really get into the text.
I don't know that I was so much trying to master the text as I was trying to figure out what God was trying to say, and that was terribly formational for me. Exploring what was really intended by the scripture made sure I was hearing the word of God and not the information that reinforced my false self or as Mulholland put it my false word.
It's probably something my dad instilled in me, but I have always sensed the great responsibility to wrestle with the text. If it hasn't my life, how can my sermon change others? It is in the discovery and the journey that I find the ah-ha moment for myself, so I've tried to craft sermons that would bring the audience along the journey in some way. It would be grand if my meager trying would grown into a great wrestling of ancient Olympic proportions - well developed muscles straining...
But then does the Bible have any power apart from our wrestling with it?
If I had lay readers like other churches in the area, I think I'd like to get together with them and talk about the readings so we can get excited about them together.
It seems to me that the acedemic pursuit has well taught me to read informationally, or at least it demands it of me. My approach to a book is different when I have an agenda, and teachers and profs. for the whole of my academic career have seen fit and prudent to impose an agenda on my reading. The call it objectives and due dates and the like. Then they ask me to write a paper of my thoughts justified by the text. So naturally I approach a text, sometimes not even reading (not for this course certainly) just to find a quote or two to back my position. After our study doesn't all this sound repugnant.
The result is I have rarely enjoyed a book I was forced to read. Perhaps the greatest tradgety of my academic career was that I didn't get anything out of Celebration of Discipline the first time I read it as an assignment in class. Fortunately I had some aspiration of building a personal library and didn't sell it back to the book store. I've read it four times since then and what life it has brought!
This isn't the way I approach the novels I read at all. Isn't it ironic that those books that purport to change our lives we read for information and those that merely claim to entertain us can change our lives as we let ourselves be immersed in them. Makes me write the novel version of the Divine Conspiracy.
I keep coming back to the narrative quality of God's revelation to us. I was thinking today as I read Mulholland about the times when I read formationally and when I read for information.
Every night before I go to be I read a good novel to get to bed. I love some Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Right now I am reading Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. These stories suck me in, I could be reading for hours. I read slowly (much more slowly than my wife) and I feel like I am part of the story for the time I am reading. I am immersed in it, baptized in the authors vision. I often find I am picturing the events from slightly above, as if I were standing on the desk with Robin Williams (like Keating in dead poets society).
I think that is what it is like to read formationally. As we engage our imaginations (I wonder if that is somehow intrinsically linked to our spirits) we make manifest the story in our inward parts.
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