Seeing Straight

Another parable this week, a triplet with last week’s and next’s. Last week’s parable is good news for people doing thankless work in hard places. But understanding this requires being in love and not out of it. Bring bitterness, blame, and condemnation, and we will find in the parable an excuse to write people off and refuse to invest in them.

I want to expand on that last point, with a quotation from Richard Rohr’s booklet, What Do We Do with the Bible?

For all its inspiration, all its marvelous one-liners, all the lives it has changed forever, the Bible persists as a major problem for many people. Put in the hands of egocentric, unloving, or power-hungry people, or those who have never learned how to read spiritually inspired literature, it is almost always a disaster. History has now demonstrated this, century after century, so this is not an unwarranted, disrespectful, or biased conclusion. The burning of heretics, the Crusades, slavery, apartheid, and the dismissal and oppression of native peoples were all justified through the use of select Scripture quotes.

So you know where I am heading, right at the beginning, my general approach is to change the seer and not to change the text. Only converted people can be entrusted with inspired writings. They alone will operate in a symbiotic ("shared life") relationship with words and stories. They alone are unlikely to use the Bible as a personal power pack, a hammer, or a rationale for their bad behavior. Stay in prayerful dialogue with almost any spiritual text - even a problematic one - and it will almost always bear fruit.

This resonates with what we heard Paul saying in last week’s Romans reading. “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” Change the seer from dying in the flesh to living in the Spirit, and the rest will follow.

Two weeks ago we heard Jesus pray, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” Being born again, made an infant in Christ’s love, frees us from the status and ego that obscures the gentle love of Jesus. This again is the conversion Father Rohr speaks of. 

We don’t need a dramatic story of coming to Jesus. Hitting rock bottom or being roundly punished does not convert us. It’s realizing that our whole lives God has gentled us in love as a parent does for an infant, and will continue to do so, even when we’re at our “worst,” most “unworthy,” “least loveable.” This is often hidden from the most religious people, Jesus said. We need constant daily conversion - daily “remembering our baptism,” Martin Luther would say, daily dying to sin and rising to new life in Christ - lest we get stuck acting like God is a parent who scolds a cholicky baby and locks them in eternal time out.

Rohr’s point is this: the Bible is not a problem. What we do with the Bible is a problem. Stoop low enough to meet the Bible where it's coming from, like Jesus did with his own scriptures, and you will indeed fall into the bottomless love of God. Then we’ll hear what the Bible keeps saying: Fall in. The water is fine.

Thanks be to God.

Pastor Clark Olson-Smith