The Bible is not like Wikipedia

I love Wikipedia. It is among my most frequently visited websites. When I'm bored, have a random question, or want to refresh my knowledge on topics I learn in college, I turn to Wikipedia. It's a beautiful thing.

But the Bible is not like Wikipedia, no matter how often we try to make it so. Here are a few reasons why not:

1. It does not answer our every question. The Bible is a narrative. It has an author and an author's message/story to us telling us what He intends. Selfishly we want the Bible to provide us with an omniscient objective point of view over all of history, which we can evaluate and judge based upon our own understanding. Sorry we don't get to be omniscient, that's just part of finitude. Some questions are left unanswered.

2.  We don't get to edit it to say what we want/think it should say. It edits us.

3.  We have to study it and discover what God was saying and is saying, which means we need to do our homework and be careful. When reading the Bible is all too easy to interpret a passage through my own cultural understanding. The problem is importing my culture, my ideas, my paradigm is inadvertently editorial.

To properly understand scripture we have to understand culture; both our own and that of the original audience. People have always existed within a culture and cultural context. The difficulty for us arises when our own culture is separated from the original author and audience’s culture by, say language and a couple thousand years. To assume that I can read a text written to another audience in another culture at another time, without considering or trying to understand the original author's culture and the original audience's culture is arrogant. There is no book in the Bible written to Tim with his Western 21st Century Post-Enlightenment paradigm, so I guess I will have some studying to do.

But the good news is, the more I learn about the Bible, the context, and the cultures, the richer my understanding of the Bible becomes. I love Jesus, but the more I understand what His words and actions meant in First Century Palestine under Roman oppression, the more I am challenged and inspired. Future posts on some examples to come.

My New Year's Resolution is Learning to Grieve Better (part 2)

This post continues my new year’s resolution of learning to grieve. I began writing about grief with my own grief because it is important first grapple with this before I consider engaging with anyone else’s. If I cannot process my own grief I am likely to be a burden to those around me who are grieving, and there are people around me who are hurting. This world is a broken place, it is inevitable we and people we love will hurt and grieve.

My experience is most of us do not know how to healthily grieve, at least not well enough. I want to learn better how to process life when it is horrific, and I want to be able to help others when they are experiencing the same. In grief, in the midst of our raw emotions, we need each other, and we have the unique opportunity to meet this head on. 

I think it is important we own our grief when it comes; to be willing and comfortable to acknowledge when we are in the agony of grief. We need to also be able to help others acknowledge their grief. In general I find we are really uncomfortable with other’s pain. It makes us very uneasy.

When Emily and I were first married a lesson I had to learn (and am still learning) is that it is okay for Emily to be upset. I cannot always fix the problem. Acting or attempting to resolve the problem and working until I have does not solve the problem. All it accomplishes is make Emily feel unheard, stifled, and controlled by my inability to allow her to be upset. Sometimes we need to be honest and upset, and we need to allow others the freedom to be upset. If this is challenging over minor issues, we know it will be amplified several orders of magnitude with grief.

Well intended words like "everything happens for a reason" and "she's in a better place" are garbage. They help no one. They only speak to someone’s discomfort with another’s grief. Good intentions are nice, but if we are serious about helping others, being there for others, we need to not settle for good intentions. God's Kingdom is not built with good intentions. When we have loss, when we have grief, we need to be honest and process through it. Well intended words invalidate the suffering and grief of others. Doing so harms the person and does not build the Kingdom of God. Emotional suppression is not healthy, and Jesus came so we might be "whole/holy". I do not mean to condemn those who offer up such well meant words, but I do mean to call us to do better and seek to truly help people.

Instead of offering vague words I want to be there. To sit with others in the midst of the storm, when everything sucks, and cry with them. No one wants my empty words. I think honestly the best thing I can offer is my presence. To be there. To listen. If they want to talk we will talk; if they want to sit in silence we will sit in silence. Maybe I can try making food, perhaps I should learn a few casserole recipes to have in my repertoire for when the need arises.

My New Year's Resolution is Learning to Grieve Better (part 1)

This year I have a new year's resolution, and it sounds odd, but I want to learn to grieve better.  Weird right?  It all started at a Christmas Eve service in a cemetery and Christmas day away from family.

I want to learn to grieve well not because I am necessarily poor at it (thought I do have a lot to learn) but because I have found grief to be among life’s guarantees (like taxes and needing to eat food even when I don’t want to).  Grief is nebulous, both in experience and its source.  My greatest experience of grief has been the death of my grandmother, but I am currently experiencing grief for the loss of my native culture and time with family.  It feels odd to admit this and to use the same English word and emotional turmoil to describe these two subjects, but my feelings are probably more indicative of my own immature views of grief than the nature of grief itself.

Grief is not a sign of weakness or unhappiness.  I have been surprised how much I have grieved living in France, especially this holiday season.  I mean we’re living in France!  If this is not a dream life I don’t know what is (and it is an absolute dream), but grief is not mutually exclusive to other emotions.  We humans must give ourselves credit for being complicated enough to feel more than only happy or sad or bored at any one moment in time.  I am coming to terms with the fact a grieving process is part of cultural acclimation.

Beyond grieving for the comfortable and familiar back home, where I can do mundane tasks like buy toilet paper without culture-stress, this holiday season has the added grief of being away from family at a special time of year.  We were visited by all the emotions and memories of Christmas past. 

For Christmas Emily and I spent five days in Salzburg adventuring in castles, cathedrals, and the Christmas market; it was a magical time.  I will always look back fondly upon this unique opportunity.  But we also grieved being away from our families this Christmas.  To help each other Emily and I traded stories of holiday traditions and memories.  While skype (even with a poor internet connection) was a huge blessing, there is no replacement for being physically present with loved-ones and there’s no point in pretending there is.  Such pretending is exactly the thing I want to learn not to do.

So we took time to be sad and allow ourselves and each other to be sad.  There were good reasons to feel so.  All this has me thinking about grief and how I handle my own as well as the grief of others (which I will explore in future blog posts).  I want to ponder and learn about grief this year.

Why I'm sad the world didn't end a year ago

As you may have noticed the world did not end on 12/21/12, and a year later we are still here. Don't get me wrong, I had no expectation the world would end last year. The Mayans have joined the long list of people who have incorrectly guessed when the world would end.

But it still makes me kind of sad.  Allow me to explain.

Often we think of the apocalypse as some horrible event, this great disaster which we all live in dread of. It is very human to see Judgement Day as some terrible day to be feared.  It sounds like a day of punishment and every nightmarish depiction of Hell. But in truth the Day of Judgement is a day of justice.

For now the wrath of God is being held back and building, waiting for the day of release. Judgement Day will be the day when every hurt, every wrong, and every sin will be redeemed and washed away. There will be justice for every crime committed against another. God is not mute to the sufferings of the world. It is with this future hope of justice Paul writes Romans 12:19
"Never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord."

Judgement Day will be the day when sickness, cancer, sex slavery, oppression, exploitation, and every other horrible thing which plagues humanity will be defeated. It will be glorious! It will be a day of true justice. No more suffering.

And it's hard to wait sometimes. This world is a dark and broken place, there are a lot of terrible things happening to people who God deeply loves, and it seems like there is no end in sight. Humanity will never save itself.  But our great God of Justice will. And I yearn for that day.

Advent in France: Peace

Every Advent I love contemplating the awesome Truth of Emmanuel; "God with us" (Mt 1:23, Isa 7:14).  I am continually amazed by God; after I had rejected Him and have betrayed him on a daily basis, He still chose to come back and be with someone like me.  It's crazy.

In John 1:9-13 we see the sad truth of God coming back to this beautiful creation of His, now marred  by sin, and not being recognized.  There are examples of darkness all around us and the internet has only heightened this availability.  But the passage does not end here.  In verse 12 and 13 we see hope break through.  We who have become enemies of God have a way back home.  We can have peace with our Creator not based upon our efforts but because of His efforts.

With less than a week to go before Christmas, let us each make room for this awesome gift of peace in our lives.  Emmanuel has come and is coming.  May we celebrate the peace we have in Him.