ken wilson online

Well of course you have.  Then why did you cringe with the title of this post?  Because you probably realize how incredibly daunting the Bible can be–you who wrestle with it week to week to make it sensible to others.  Those others can maintain the comfortable fiction that the Bible is a plain and simple text for plain and simple people, as accessible as Chicken Soup for the Soul or The Purpose Driven Life.

First, give yourself a break.  There’s a reason you feel inadequate when it comes to your text.  Chances are, your knowledge of the Bible is, well, inadequate.  This is likely the case even if you have read the Bible all the way through several times.

The Bible is a communal text but we no longer read or experience it communally.  Oh in small bursts we do, but for most of us the Bible is a text we engage individually, which means we don’t have the advantage of the multiple frames or lenses that come from a communal understanding. And if we do share a communal understanding because we’ve grown up in a Bible literate community (increasingly unlikely) such a communal reading is often narrow because each of the Bible-literate tribes that we’ve separated into have their massive blind spots.

So practically speaking, we don’t have the advantage of the multiple connections that come with a communal experience of the Bible: when one text reminds one in the community of another text, and another in the community of another text,  which, through the multiple facets that can only be enlighted by a multifaceted person, sprinkles new light, like fairy dust,  on each and the community feels a thickening in the atmosphere and goes, Wow! God is in the midst of us, speaking!

I mean, when you read through the Bible in a year,  you known darn well that certain books just get a quick skate over.  Leviticus, for example.  You finish that, and congratulate yourself for getting through it.  With all its foreign concepts and concerns.  If you’re wise, you realize you’ve actually absorbed perhaps half a micron from its surface and that, you’ve likely grossly misunderstood.

But you’ve heard that, say, its Rob Bell’s favorite book.  I think it’s my friend Mark Kinzer’s favorite book.  And you think, “What do they see that I don’t see?” and realize that you’ll never know until you know them and can talk it over with them–to feel what they feel, known what they know, see what they see in the thing.  Something you may not even be able to absorb from a good commentary on Leviticus, and how many of us have bothered to engage a good commentary on Leviticus, as a book like that would require to yield even it’s first surface half micron’s worth of inspiration?

Here’s the advice part:

1. Be humble about your Bible knowledge.  It really is inadequate.  When you wander into realms where angels fear to tread, understand that you enter as a very nearsighted, near deaf, olfactory and tactile deficient sensory being.  Just because you know a lot more Bible than the people around you [perhaps one of the easiest things a person can ever achieve] doesn’t mean diddly.

2. Start investing now in the project of engaging the Bible with the realization that the really big rewards for your investment are decades away.  If you can’t operate on that time scale, consider another calling or reckon with the one you’ve got.

3. But here’s something you can DO, now: Start practicing The Divine Hours.  I’ve been at it for close to 10 years running now and it’s been as helpful for my Bible knowledge as any single practice (including reading through the Bible in a year, which, like you, I’ve done several times.)

The Divine Hours is a form of fixed hour prayer using Scripture and the prayers of the church soaked in Scripture.  Fixed hour as in praying with Scripture at short intervals 3-4 times per day.   If you’re in a hurry, might take 12 full minutes out of your day, but you’ll have to carve out 3-4 two minute intervals.  That little discipline, my fellow pastor, may not be easy, but it will be incredibly rewarding, though the rewards will not be evident until the practice is moving close to the habitual threshold. [I've got a chapter on fixed hour prayer in Mystically Wired, which I'd love for you to buy as I've got one last kid in college.]

The Divine Hours is littered with connections that come with a communal experience of the Bible.  Take for example, “The Refrain for the Daily Lessons” from this morning’s office, Saturday closest to Jan. 22: The Lord executes righteousness and judgment for all who are oppressed.

This refrain frames the morning office reading from Luke 6: 27-30, Luke’s mini sermon on the mount with the love your enemies, turn the other cheek bit.

The refrain is a hint from the massive storehouse of communal wisdom: turning the other cheek is the action of an oppressed person empowered by an incredibly powerful God to overcome the hatred of his or her enemy with a love that will outlast the enemy’s hatred.  In your face, enemy!  I’m more powerful than you because my God is with me, loving you! [Of course it ruins it if you say that to the enemy, but it's probably fine to think it.]

The refrain repeats (being, after all, a refrain) and then you’re into the morning psalm, which is 59: 5-11 all about God punishing the wicked, showing no mercy to the faithless, evil, snarling dogs.  The refrain, again, is a hint: this prayer is from the Judge who delivers the oppressed, for the oppressed. Of course it sounds obscene when voiced by the powerful who are likely if unwittingly part of the oppressive empire.  Because it ain’t for them, but these others.  We won’t be able to pray this psalm with integrity, perhaps, unless we identify with the oppressed if we aren’t among them.

And so on.

It might take you multiple decades of daily reading through the Bible alone in your study to make a connection like that.

But if you practice a form of prayer like The Divine Hours, you’ll at least have the opportunity, day in and day out, to catch those echoes of a long ago communal conversation between people pickled in this marvelous text, many of whom stepped through the text as though it were a portal into the presence of the living God breathing the text into the clay of words invented by clay-people.

Tags: bible, Community, fixed hour prayer, Mark Kinzer, pastors, phyllis tickle, Rob Bell, the divine hours, young pastors

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 29th, 2011 at 11:26 am and is filed under advice to young pastors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.