(Written 1/18/07) 

Stillness is uncomfortable. It’s scary to be vulnerable.

Tonight I was at church and I was the only one there. It was dark outside and even darker inside where the parking lot lights didn’t reach. For some reason my imagination went crazy and as I looked left into complete blackness, I imagined a demon running through the hallway, unseen but felt, toward me.

I picked up my crap and left.

That may seem dramatic, but hey, these things happen when you start realizing there’s more going in the world than we have control over. When was the last time you shut off your radio while you were driving home late at night, the only one on the highway? When is the last time you went outside and just looked around? When was the last time you allowed yourself to stand and wait before God? ooh…yes.

It’s scary to lose control. It’s scary to not have anything to claim an identity in, no group to link up with, no agenda to hide behind, no control of the situation.

I think we do this with the Bible. We talk about it a lot instead of letting it overwhelm us in silence. It’s not as scary when we talk about it.

This reminds me of Makenna, my almost 3-year old niece. We watched “Robots” more than once in my room, and there is a scary robot who looks like a monster, who happens to be the overwhelming, domineering mother of the main villain…and she has a man’s voice. Anyway, Makenna for some reason kept wanting me to rewind it to the “mean mommy” part… “Is this where the mean mommy is??”  “Is the mean mommy in this part??”  “Where is the mean mommy?”  “I want to see the mean mommy again.”

I could not figure it out until her dad, my brother, called her over and asked her why she wanted to see the mean mommy so badly. She just kind of shrugged her shoulders…looked away…and mumbled something about liking her. Maybe Makenna wanted to see what she feared over and over again so that she could conquer it, and have control over when it appeared and when it didn’t…and so that she could share the experience and talk about it with someone, therefore making it more abstract and not so overwhelmingingly scary.

I do this also, when I tell people about the massive spider sneaking around my room, or the horrible news that broke my heart, or when I look over to laugh with my friends when the movie makes me jump.

Do we do this with God and His word to tame them down and make them less invasive? It’s one thing to go somewhere and talk about the Bible while I munch on cookies (which is good, of course) and it’s another for me to sit in my room in the middle of the night and get extremely uncomfortable with the Spirit of God pushing a truth deep into my heart until it starts to burn and I feel sick with a reality check of sorrow and humility.

Eugene Peterson’s book, “Eat This Book,” has some provocative quotes:

We are fond of saying that the Bible has all the answers…But the Bible also has all the questions… The Bible is a most comforting book; it is also a most discomforting book. Eat this book; it will be sweet as honey in your mouth; but it will also be bitter to your stomach.

We are accustomed to thinking of the biblical world as smaller than the secular world. Tell-tale phrases give us away. We talk of “making the Bible relevant to the world,” as if the world is the fundamental reality and the Bible something that is going to help it or fix it. We talk of “fitting the Bible into our lives” or “making room in our day for the Bible,” as if the Bible is something that we can add on to or squeeze into our already full lives.

He also tells the story of a scholar questioning Jesus’ story of loving a neighbor:

There was nothing wrong with the scholar’s knowledge of Scripture. But there was something terribly wrong in the way he read it, the how
of his reading. This becomes evident when the scholar quibbles, “wanting to justify himself.” He asks, “And who is my neighbor?”

Why does the scholar ask for a definition? Clearly, because he needs to defend himself against responding to the text personally. Defining “neighbor” depersonalizes the neighbor, turns him or her into an object, a thing over which he can take control, do with whatever he wants. But it also depersonalizes the scriptural text. He wants to talk about the text, treat the text as a thing, dissect it, analyze it, discuss it – endlessly. But Jesus won’t play that game.

So instead of inviting the scholar to join him in a Bible study of Deuteronomy and Leviticus under the shade of a nearby oak tree, Jesus tells him a story, one of his most famous, the Good Samaritan story, concluding, as he had begun, with a question, “Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man…?” The scholar is impaled by the question: the words of Scripture can no longer be handled by means of definition, “who is my neighbor?” Jesus insists on participation. Jesus dismisses the scholar with a command, “Go and do…” Live what you read. We read the Bible in order to live the word of God.