December notes, Men's Bible Study

Tues. Men's Bible Study, 12.22.2009

*What to do when disillusioned or loss of taste for the Jesus & God story?
-Stay in the game: show up; routines
-Go back to the raw wonder
-Doubt is flipside of Belief; fear not
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*Must one read to access the message of the church? Or is spoken word sufficient? Before mass literacy and printing of household Bibles, were those people missing part of the fullness of the Jesus story and the books that came before him?

*To know and love God it seems that we should follow ALL paths that can teach us, including writings not included in the current editions of the Bible such as minor prophets, but also the writing and thinking of Islam and Judaism.

*How to skim off the custom and clutter from the essential message(s)?-strip what is modern/unneeded-use the "WWJD?" seeing tool
-compare other denominations for underlying shared bedrock-personalize: own scale & options
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church >people >God >church

Thinking about church-going and Bible reading, it occurs to me that while I find meaning in the printed words, it is the periodic worshipping with familiar faces and names that is even more meaningful to me. Abstracting from that I imagine that the institution and the outline that church building, order of service and programming all give to one's week and annual cycle is a "means," while it is the people thereby brought into relationship with each other that is the ends. Going further, though, you can say that those relationships with fellow sojourners of this life is, in turn, a means through which each of us gets into relationship with God; it allows us each in the ways we know best to make "Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven." So the institution is about the people, because working with and knowing the people IS expressing God's love.

The convolution of church is about people, but people is about God, and God is about church seems to return to the starting place; not gaining any ground. But still this exercise helps me to hold the parts of the equation up to the light to see what they are.

hearing versus only listening to the Bible

"leaps of association" 

Thinking about the Palm Sunday vesper service a few days ago here in urban Japan, I had the curious feeling of vaguely being able to follow the Order of Service and to recognize some of the phrases of familiar Bible passages. But later I got to thinking: I wonder how well the Aramaic worldview transfers to the Japanese language in general, and to the 21st century Japanese lives in particular? The next moment I began to wonder the same about English: just because the sentences seem crystal clear as written, perhaps we are missing something important. Then a few days later it dawned on me: the way language is wrapped in social habits and ways of seeing things works something like the following.

As with books, movies and song lyrics, so also perhaps with the Bible: we tend to identify with certain parts. We tend to hear the parts that reinforce what we already hold true, whether it is the "Good" parts (for Americans that might be scenes that demonstrate when a person is strong, independent and with a confident optimism about outcomes; for Japanese that might be the parts that demonstrate group solidarity, awareness of hierarchy and propriety), or it is the "Bad" parts that we accept as things not to condone or strive for (for Americans that might be damaging property or rights; for Japanese that might be inconveniencing others). So it seems our minds sift the episodes and parables of the Bible for the parts that "make sense" to our existing language/society. By extension we are culturally blind to the parts that seem inscrutable, nonsensical or strange and foreign to us.

If all this is true, then here is a powerful reformative exercise for one and all - in study groups tasked with separate incidents to grapple with, or as lone pilgrims wrestling with a set of "exercises." Start by sifting out all the parts that get quickly passed over, or seem plain odd or aberrant. Those represent one region of unknown terrain for which we have no clue or tools to begin to make sense of. Then form a subset of parts that are not exactly recognizable to our modern, culturally rooted minds, but we kind of understand the intent and consequence involved. These are the middle ground where our footing is not fully firm, but neither are we adrift: visually you can think of a marsh or wetland (not quicksand, mind you). After working through these sort-of-odd bits, then maybe it is possible to step a little further away from the warm dry land that we normally tread and work through the inconvenient parts that just don't resonate with us, and that we can't readily identify in.