Monthly Archives: May 2010

Remember

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I’m not particularly patriotic.

I pledge allegiance to the flag and I am grateful to the sons of friends now serving, but I am unwilling to say, “my country right or wrong” when I know there are good people in other countries saying the same thing and when I am called to be a citizen of a different kingdom.

That said, there are times to specifically remember specific people.

The man who died one Easter morning in Korea sitting in a jeep next to my dad. The uncle I never knew, dying young from exposure to something in the Arizona desert while a soldier.

These two men are connected to me. Their deaths are not abstractions, any more than their lives were. A man that I know knew them and cared about them.

It is not being patriotic to remember them today, it is being human.

I cannot on this day remember deaths on behalf of other people without remembering Jesus. I know. He gets his own memorial day. We call it Good Friday in a peculiar twist of language. But if Memorial Day is about remembering people who have made the ultimate sacrifice, have paid the ultimate price, then including Jesus on that day seems right.

There is a bit of a problem, however. The earlier name for Memorial Day was Decoration Day. Graves of soldiers and veterans were decorated with flags and flowers. The tangibility of decorating helps us remember. Having something to do makes things more real than talking about them or merely thinking about them.

Jesus helped with the process of having something to do by offering his followers bread and wine. “When you eat and drink,” he said, “you remember my death.”

A clear memorial.

But now – how, exactly, do you decorate an empty grave?

more on reading the Bible

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Yesterday we talked about about reading the Bible. I suggested a couple answers for one question I hear: Why is the Bible so confusing?

Here’s another suggestion: Remember that you read poets and letters, genealogies and histories,  critics and SparkNotes  in very different ways.

Poems reveal deep feeling. Poems leave out details. Poems often make challenging metaphoric leaps. You read poems with passion, whether ecstatic or despairing. Letters may have the same passion but they are more prosaic. They offer information and direction. They root the relationship in time shared.

Genealogies are factual. Relationships reduced to simple lists. They are interesting only as they suggest what might exist in the gaps, creating a skeleton.  Histories, on the other hand, are the stories,the adventures, the parts you skipped to when bored with name lists.

Critics are anything but neutral. They take sides, make judgments, suggest implications. If this continues, they say, everything is going to fall apart. SparkNotes (or CliffsNotes) summarize. They are being efficient, telling the stories without most details.

We would never think of reading these kinds of writing the same way or for the same purpose. And the Bible is exactly the same way. The poems in the book of Psalms are very different from the letters at the back of the book. The genealogies in the beginning of Matthew, or in parts of Numbers, aren’t meant primarily to give room for sentence by sentence application to our lives. The stories, show us what other people following God have done, or not done. They serve as cautionary tales. The social critics, known to us as prophets, are as blunt as any contemporary AM radio talkshow host. The Gospels covering three years of life in few pages each, are pretty focused, pretty concentrated.

As you read, think about style.

But I never understand

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Yesterday, I gave a couple suggestions about researching ideas in the Bible. I could suggest many more. But first, I need to think through a couple questions that come up when reading the Bible.

I hear the first one often:  Why is the Bible so confusing?

I understand. There are days when I read a page and I think, “What?” I know all the w0rds I read, but I can’t figure out what it means.

But I’m writing this post four days after the series finale of “Lost.” It is a TV show. During the past six years, it developed very loyal followers (and people who said, “What?”) In order to track the characters, you had to keep watching, you had to think through each episode carefully. You had to tie different episodes from different seasons together to understand why characters were the way they were. And you had to live with a willingness to wait for more clues.

Too often, when we read the Bible, we read one sentence and think, “I wonder what God is saying to me?” We read one paragraph and think, “I know there should be a life lesson here, but I can’t figure it out.” But what if we treated it like “Lost”, looking for clues, anticipating twists, waiting to see where we end up?

Or consider another way of thinking about reading the Bible:

Do you like conversations? Think of any of the letters (everything after Acts and before Revelation, except for Hebrews) as one side of a conversation. Now, try to think of the other half, the situation that Paul is speaking to, the question Peter is answering, the argument John is responding to. Thinking of two parties helps me think more deeply.

I’ll suggest a couple more ways of reading tomorrow.

What do you want to learn?

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I read a lot. Most of it is pretty random. (See Addicted to Story). Often I will be in  a conversation and I will think, “I need to learn more about that.” But then I forget and read randomly.

You forget too.

So what if we agreed that we didn’t want to forget?

What if you decided to take bits of your time to go to BibleGateway.com and enter “Holy Spirit” and over the next year look up each of the 96 times that phrase shows up and read the couple of paragraphs before and after that phrase.

That’s 400 paragraphs. Doable in a year.

And while doing reading, look for patterns. How often do you read about tasks associated with the Holy Spirit? What kind of responsibilities? What personality traits? What relationships?

After a year, you would have a surprising amount of knowledge.

But what if you are more interested in what to tell friends who are going through very difficult times in their lives? What do you say? What do you do?

You remember somewhere that someone talked about Job.  So you find the book of Job, really close to the middle of the Bible. You find a readable version (not King James, probably something like “The Message” or New International Version or New Living Translation.) You start reading and you discover that Job had done nothing to deserve horrible loss. And you find that friends show up to try to make sense of what is going on. And you find they are clueless. And you begin seeing what not to say to friends. And then you look for other passages about suffering.

And after a year, you would have a surprising amount of knowledge.

So what do you want to learn in the next year?

How can I help?

workin’ on it.

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I walked down the hallway, heading to the car.  To my left, in the conference room, a math teacher was working equations on the white board. Two high school students were at a table, asking questions. It’s an after-school tutoring session. They want to understand, he wants to help.

To my right, from a classroom, came the sound of a piano. A student was picking out notes. In my mind, I could see the piano teacher, patiently listening, directing, correcting, approving. It happens over and over in that room, day after day, week after week.

I headed home. On the right, two little league fields. At the first one, a game. At the second one, one tall person tossing a baseball in the air, ten small people with huge gloves on their hands struggling to coordinate eyes looking up, arms held out, feet moving back.

On the left, coming toward me, seven motorcycles, all signaling a left turn with their left hand out. They may have been guys out for a ride, but there was a conformity of gesture that made me think that this was a practice ride of some sort.

Lots of people in lots of groups, all working to get better at basic skills. All getting coaching, having some people with more maturity helping those with less.

There isn’t pride among the coaches, the teachers, the mentors. In fact, there is a humility. They don’t need to review these basic skills for their own sake. They just understand that others won’t get it without help, without direction, without affirmation.

Solomon was clear about the value of learning:

Instruct a wise man and he will be wiser still;
teach a righteous man and he will add to his learning.

Am we humble enough to learn? Or to teach?

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