“Ancient words, ever true
Changing me and changing you
We have come with open hearts
O let the ancient words impart”
-- Lynn DeShazo
I am captured by language.
Years ago, when guys my age were able to detail the
intricacies of the internal combustion engine (by taking
them apart and putting them together, no less!), and when
they could tell the year of a car by the cut of a bumper, I
could be found reading the dictionary and the thesaurus.
This is true.
I am not suggesting this particular practice was the best
path to take, but whatever the disadvantage my attraction
to language has given me in the real world, I have been
well served by this love of words in presenting to others
the strange dialect of the Bible. This, of course, is not
meant to claim any sort of accomplishment in my writing or
speaking. Far from it. Rather, I only mean to let the
reader know that I take the language portion of my ministry
here very seriously indeed. To put a fine edge on it, words
are exceptionally important to me. After all, what I have
to give our church in the end, may be distilled down to my
presence and my words, both of which I am called to
somehow flesh-out
from the TEXT
of the Bible.
The
Hermeneutical Task
As A pastor, then, I would
express my use of language through preaching, teaching and
conversation as the hermeneutical
task. Hermeneutics (a word
that may sound as foreign to you as rack-and-pinion
steering is to me) may be defined as the interpretation –
the understanding and explanation -- of Holy Scripture.
Allow me to unpack this idea:
I stand before a TEXT;
its ancient cadence ripples the air. Will it speak to us
again? Will these little snippets of words, placed together
as they are, pitch and rumble and roar? Ancient-Future God,
just what will you say to us as a Church this coming Sunday
morning? We pray: Speak now! Speak again! Speak to us from
this ancient TEXT! Thy servants will be listening and we
are ready to obey!
Put this way, the hermeneutical task may sound rather
benign, but I assure you it is not. I remember a preacher
from long ago saying that the appropriation of the TEXT is
like the shedding of blood (!). While I wouldn’t go
that far, I do understand what he meant. For, to bring the
ancient TEXT to life again, using the clatter of our
twenty-first century’s myopic words, figures-of-speech,
dialects and vernaculars, stands as an exceedingly
difficult mission.
First,
the TEXT is hard to hear because language only poorly
communicates an understanding of abstract truth, let alone
something as thick as the Word of God. Simply put, the
encounter with God through his Word cannot be contained in
language. He is simply too large and present to neatly fit
within the contour of our words. Language radiates toward
God, it approximates him, but it cannot sound his depth.
So, when I speak in order to display God through his Word,
I know the language will splinter under the stress. This is
inevitable.
Second,
the TEXT struggles to be heard today because the high view
of the Bible that most of us were taught (inspired,
authoritative) has been consistently undermined by all
segments of modern learning. One need not be a theologian
to recognize that the perplexing world of the Bible has no
resonance in our day. In point of fact, America and the
Western societies are about as far away from the world-view
of the Bible as one can get. Our culture’s understanding of
biology, geology, history, psychology, sociology, and even
medicine have not only stiffly disputed the idiom of the
TEXT, they have dismissed outright the historic structures
of Christendom. So that what we face today is a situation
where, at best, scripture is considered by the
culture-at-large as foolish, and at worst bigoted. The
upshot of this is that truly modern people, and most
especially post-modern people, have little time for an
explanation of the universe that includes first-century
saviors, salvation by bloodshed, and the boogey-man of
hell.
Finally,
and most significantly, the TEXT is difficult to hear
because of the cognitive severance we feel from the TEXT.
The Bible was written to people and by people who lived in
a different place and time (obviously), who spoke different
languages (this is also obvious), and who owned a different
world-view (this is not as evident, but very important).
This means that there is a distance
between us and
the Word of God, a distance that includes language, culture
and most importantly the dullness of the interpreter.
Important implications flow from this. For instance, no
matter how familiar we are with the biblical material, each
TEXT demands that we diligently do the arduous work of
interpretation, and this demand confronts us at each new
sitting. In addition, I would stress that an unexamined
familiarity with the TEXT actually may crash the
interpretative act because, to blatantly assign the
customary
meaning to a
TEXT without struggling to hear the Author again speak life
into those ancient words, is to run the danger of freezing
that TEXT into some sort of calcified belief -- once alive,
once vital, but now stiff and cold as a stump. If faithful
interpretation is to be attempted at all then, our
assumptions must be visible and on the table.
To say all this another way, faithful interpretation means
I must handle those ancient words with what Paul Ricoeur
has called an attitude of suspicion.
Suspicion means I repeatedly ask myself these two
questions: First, am I about to impose my preferred
meaning upon
the TEXT
(reading into it), or am I brave enough to let it speak for
itself, even when it cuts me and even when I disagree with
it? Here I am suspicious of my own motives.
Second, is what the TEXT appears
to be saying
to me faithful to its single-plot of truth? (Frederick
Beuchner) In other words, do the years of various
interpretations, laminated over the TEXT by past
interpreters, really convey the understanding that the
God-of-the-TEXT intends for today? Here I must carry to the
TEXT the suspicion that something new may be presented.
Remember: He that hath ears let
him hear! That is, the God who
stands behind the TEXT might be forcing fresh-breath into
those ancient words, new words for new
wineskins. But am I attuned to
these crisp whispers? My suspicion is that I am not, so I
must be vigilant.
Finally, what must guide the overall interpretive work is
the rather stunning reflection that we are in conversation
with the living God through his Word,
and that his Word
to us is
God-breathed! (2 Timothy 3:16) That is, we must remember
that the TEXT is a carrier of the breath of the God, and
his utterances may burn into us like a lava stream, melting
the marbled heart, warming the suffering soul and
confronting the listener all over again with this living
Ancient of Days. God is not dead nor
doth he sleep. This is the God who is there,
really there. And this is the God who is not silent, often
to our startled surprise.
You see, I am compelled to an irreverent question: Does
this describe our personal experience with the Bible? How
long has it been since we heard His voice reverberate in
the TEXT? Could this silence be due to our neglect? Is it
we who have walked away? Is it we who suppress his voice by
ignoring his call? Do we prefer lukewarm doses of milky
pabulum to the thick, salty streams of God’s utterance? Do
we prefer a god of the museum -- dusty, entombed, safe? Do
we prefer a god who has spoken to long-dead listeners in
the ancient-past, to one who confronts us in pew, in the
office and on the rocky pavement of the post-modern city? A
god who now speaks would be the living God. And this God
might demand! This God might sear! This God might even sing
and dance!
Crossing the TEXTURAL Divide
We might well ask, when we
consider such stiff resistance to the clamor of the TEXT,
if it is possible for us to carry on as Christians in the
face the culture’s shift to neo-paganism and our own
seeming tone-deafness to the Bible?
I contend that this impairment is especially acute now that
we are forced to move beyond the collapse of Christendom
that we mentioned above. We might well have been able to
coast in our religious practices, never much noticing our
dullness to the Word, if Christendom had survived. But now,
nothing remains to prop-up our profession of faith. All
around us the culture ignores our world-view and their
disregard shreds our strength. We simply don’t know how to
be Christians in a post-Christian world. What we do know,
instinctively, is that we are not where we should be. We
know that we have been shoved to the margins of the
culture, and that we have no home. Said another way, we
have lost the practice of the ancient faith and we don’t
know how to re-capture it because we don’t know how to be
followers of Jesus in the same way we used to, when doing
so from the old paths just doesn’t make much sense anymore.
This may tempt us to think that the message of the
cross has collapsed with
Christendom. After all, doesn’t God need us? Doesn’t he
need the hinges of Western Christendom to bend the path of
history to his will? I mean, if Western Christian ideas
have truly dissolved, how can God continue his work? Who
will be his missionaries? Who will train his pastors? Who
will produce his trinkets and mementos? How will his good
news be presented?
The simple fact is, however, God does not exist for the
benefit of culture, either Christian or otherwise. For
example, many today are seeking a religious revival for
America,
but one
suspects this may be motivated more by nostalgic
Americanism than by the desire for genuine revival. If this
is so, what is really sought is a return to the structures
of Christendom. This return is futile. More importantly, I
wonder if we have any understanding what this place would
look like if a genuine revival of biblical religion
actually occurred. Just what do we think would happen if
the LORD of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob actually showed-up at
church some Sunday morning?
Annie Dillard describes it this way:
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the
catacombs, sufficiently sensible to the conditions. Does
anyone have foggiest idea what sort of
power we invoke? Or, as I
suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are
children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets,
mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is
madness to wear ladies’straw hats and velvet hats to
church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers
should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should
lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday
and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to
where can never return.” (Teaching A Stone To Talk)
The Psalmist portrays it this way:
The mighty God, the LORD,
has spoken; he has summoned all
humanity from east to west! From Mount Zion, the
perfection
of beauty, God shines in glorious radiance.
Our God
approaches
with the noise of thunder. Fire devours everything in his
way,
and a great storm rages around him. Heaven and earth will be
his witnesses as he judges his people: "Bring my faithful
people to me – those who made a covenant with me by giv-
ing sacrifices." Then let the heavens
proclaim his justice, for
God himself will be the judge. (Psalm 50:1-6)
The writer of the book of Hebrews declares it most clearly:
It is a fearful thing to
fall into the hands of the living God (Hebrews 10:31)
Would it surprise us to
discover that God is not interested in the survival of any
worldly kingdom, neither a Christian one nor an American
one? Would we be shocked to learn, instead, that he is
actually most interested in the “kingdom of the Son whom he
loves?” Could that be why we are directed emphatically to:
“Hear ye him!”
For those on the Jesus-way, the goal of history is neither
a return to Christendom nor an American renaissance.
Rather, in Jesus we are confronted with the one titanic
truth of both history and of the future. It is an imminent
truth and a certain reality, one that sucks out the marrow
all other thoughts, all other actions, all other momentums
and all other kingdoms:
God's secret plan has now
been revealed to us; it is a plan centered on Christ,
designed long ago according to his good pleasure.
And this is
his plan: At the right time he will bring everything
together under the authority of Christ – everything in
heaven and on earth. (Ephesians 1:9,10)
Think of it, the point of history is not democratic
capitalism, the military industrial complex, or even the
cure for cancer. No, the final resting place of history is
the consummation of all things under the leadership of
Jesus.
Believe me, I know how unpopular this sounds to the
post-modern ear. I know that pluralism disallows such
declarations as this: Jesus is
Lord. But if anything is clear
from the TEXT this declaration is. Plainly, Jesus is God’s
final (read: ultimate and complete) word to us. Jesus is
the Word of God and the standard by which
we understand the written TEXT. To us who believe,
scripture is much more that a mere testimony to the Christ,
just as Jesus is much more that the focus of divine
revelation. In point of fact, all TEXTS find their
perfection in him because he is the pinnacle of revelation,
and therefore the criterion by which the Bible is to be
understood. Hear again these words from author of the book
of Hebrews:
Long ago God spoke many
times and in many ways to our ancestors through the
prophets. But now in these final
days, he has spoken to us through his Son. God promised
everything to the Son as an inheritance, and through the
Son he made the universe and everything in it. The Son
reflects God's own glory, and everything about him
represents God exactly. He sustains the universe by the
mighty power of his command. After he died to cleanse us
from the stain of sin, he sat down in the place of honor at
the right hand of the majestic God of heaven.
(Hebrews 1:1-3)
What must be most difficult to swallow is the discovery
that Christianity is actually in something of a revival,
just not in North America! How discouraging to learn that
God somehow is reviving other Christians around the world,
but not us. How shaken we must be to learn that North of
the equator the faith is deformed and in decline, but south
of the equator the Christian faith is the fastest growing
religion in the world! Down there, among the unenlightened,
apparently there are thousands of conversions, cataclysms
of healings and the stereophonic sounds of Pentecostal
tongues. Down there, the TEXT is not only believed, it is
practiced. Down there, seemingly, God is heard.
Even though it wounds us to be left out, what are we to do?
How can we invoke the name of the ancient-future God with
sincerity when we do not really need him (consumeristic
self-sufficiency), when we refuse to allow him the place of
honor (pride of life, of position, of place), and when we
seek resurrection without the cross (we’ve arrived, we are
sure of what we are sure, and we have no more need to hear
him anymore).
The Hermeneutical Praxis
Can anything be done?
It will probably come as no surprise to the reader that it
is my conviction we need a fresh encounter with the God of
the TEXT, perhaps not as our brothers and sisters in Christ
south of the equator are experiencing it, but a juicy
encounter nonetheless. Somehow, we must re-moisten the
pulse of the Word of God in our lives. Somehow we
must re-immerse our lives in the TEXT, taking what we
“know” of scripture and re-submitting it to the throb of
God’s new tones. Somehow we must allow the Holy Spirit to
re-clarify the Word to us by retuning our
hearts to the pitch of his voice.
This means we must do the tough work of interpretation.
Yet, this is decidedly not the work of commentaries,
lexicons, seminaries or source criticisms. Rather, it is a
quiet listening, a brooding, and a thinking through the
TEXT. It is you and me, standing soul-naked and exposed
before the living Word of God, and letting the language of
the Spirit crash in on us so that we are driven to respond.
To really interpret the TEXT, then, we must erect a
textual
praxis. That is, we must finally
understand that God’s Word to us does not contain ideas to
be catalogued, but truths to be lived.
What is called forth from us is a concrete practice of the
Word of God as opposed to a recitation of threadbare
proof-texts. This means Jesus is to so
be the practice of our lives that he is both heard and
followed. This means we must be so conformed to the
practice of his image, that his character is formed in us.
And this forming cannot occur apart from the cotangent of
the Word of God, the power of the Holy Spirit’s rehearsal
of the TEXT to our ears and our own determination to follow
his calling on our life even to the death if necessary.
Happily, the first call of Jesus still echoes --
“Follow
me!”
“Follow
me!”
Here we are prompted to action. Here we are reminded that
we have work to do. Here we are taken from the Jordan
River, the Mount of Olives and even Calvary’s cross to the
post-modern city where our streets are lined with need,
where kids live with rats and where crack-houses stream
little broken glass vials into the gutter. To hear this
simple call again, “follow me,” is to be reminded that what
is supremely presented to us in the TEXT is a particular
way to live. St. Paul writes:
“Concentrate in doing your
best for God, work you won’t
be ashamed of, laying out
the truth plain and simple. Stay
clear of pious talk that is only talk. Words are not mere
words,
you know, If they’re not backed by a godly life, they
accumulate like
poison in the soul. (2 Timothy 2:15, 16 – from
The
Message)
The
Final Hermeneutic
What is at stake for us in all of this, finally, is the
Word of God itself. If we refuse to
re-hear and to re-enact the TEXT, then we quite literally
are in danger of turning from the voice of God. Remember:
“If you love me keep my commandments.” To prevent this we
must be determined to attend and to live-out the truth of
the Word,
and this
attention and this living-out must be done with others. St.
Paul understands, even if we do not, that “…the church of
the living God…is the pillar and support of the truth.” A
rendering of this TEXT today means to tell us that, in a
world of people, it is exceedingly difficult to believe
anything by oneself. Therefore, we stand in the truth,
together. Then, if the society should humiliate us because
we follow the Nazarene, if they seek to dismiss us as
bigoted and antique, if they should drive us into exile
(either cognitive or literal), if they should cause us to
suffer financially, does this ultimately
matter? In
fact, will any of it matter when together we face that
final moment?
Have you considered the final moment when we who are
fools for
Christ become the fool-makers?
When at the name of Jesus, all things and all people from
all the ages are brought under his tutelage? In that day
will it make a difference how much we own or how much we
know? Will the privileges of rank hold sway then? Hardly.
I would make a case that the last moment of the universe,
that very moment of Jesus’ climactic succession, must guide
our lives and inform our confrontation with the TEXT. By
living in the shadow of his consummation, we are provided
the final context for our understanding of the Word … a
final hermeneutic.
Like those first disciples, we must ever live under the
sound of those angelic messengers who stood beside them
after Jesus’ ascension:
As they were straining
their eyes to see him [Jesus’ ascension], two white-robed
men suddenly stood there among them. They said, ‘Men of
Galilee [and by extension, women and men from disciples
from Madison County], why are you standing here staring at
the sky? Jesus has been taken away from you into heaven.
And someday, just as you saw him go, he will return!’”
(Acts 1:10,11)
We cannot stand staring at the sky, but neither can we
forget that the sky holds our future. What will fire us to
live-out the TEXT day-by-day is our being captured by the
biblical idea that this same Jesus will return. From this
truth we can find our way to life, we can discover the
gravity of the TEXT and we can encounter the movement and
the momentum of the Jesus’ Spirit within us. If this
preview of Jesus’ absolute and concluding Lordship becomes
our conviction, if we are convinced that one day we will
literally stand before Author of the TEXT, then we may
begin to understand what really matters in life, and this
understanding could open a genuine dialogue
with him, the
one, true living God. He is the one who calls us to obey by
walking the Jesus-way and who promises that his presence is
enough for us, even to the very end of the age.
Hear then the words of St. Paul:
Another reason for right
living is that you know how late it is; time is running
out. Wake up, for the coming of our salvation is nearer now
than when we first believed. The night is almost gone;
the day of salvation will soon be here. So don't live in
darkness. Get rid of your evil deeds. Shed them like dirty
clothes. Clothe yourselves with the armor of right living,
as those who live in the light. We should be decent and
true in everything we do, so that everyone can approve of
our behavior. Don't participate in wild parties and getting
drunk, or in adultery and immoral living, or in fighting
and jealousy. But let the Lord Jesus Christ take control of
you, and don't think of ways to indulge your evil desires.
(Romans 13:11-14)
Amen.