St. Bartholomew's Church

Reading the Bible to children isn’t for the faint at heart. The story, it turns out, is not rated G.

And if reading about death and sex and greed isn’t enough, there’s a chance the language they hear from Bible reading or by well-meaning Sunday school teachers gets a strange interpretation by their still literal minds.

Last spring, while reading a science textbook with my 7-year-old about the circulatory system she nearly gave up her faith.

“See Mom, I knew it,” she said. “There is no way God can live in your heart. It’s just not possible. And if He does, that’s just gross.”

Hmmm….

I’ve spent some number of years at different points in my life being trapped by what Wright calls “the polarization between ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ interpretation” of scripture.

I agree with Wright. This is a confused way to live. It’s not that simple. It’s not that difficult.

Perhaps the biggest help to me in understanding Christian scripture as a complicated, beautiful narrative instead of rule book written just for me has been that wonderful children’s Bible, “The Jesus Storybook Bible.”

Reading through that Bible with my girls I am always touched by the narrative that points to God’s rescue plan. God, it says, is making the sad things come untrue.

The story begins in the garden, ends in a new kingdom and in the middle is us, trying to live out our vocations in big and small ways that point to the story of God’s reconciling work in God’s world.

And this is what Wright tells us.

“Listening to God’s voice in scripture doesn’t put us in the position of having infallible opinions. It puts us where it put Jesus himself: in possession of a vocation, whether for a lifetime or for the next minute…..But the performance isn’t just about our own private pilgrimages. It’s about becoming agents of God’s new world—workers for justice, explorers of spirituality, makers and menders of relationships, creators of beauty.”

It seems to me this is what is so right about the way our tradition reads scripture. I am a baby Episcopalian. I was an adult before I realized that Christians around the world read the same scriptures on the same days. I was an adult before I realized that reading scripture necessarily comes before celebrating the Eucharist.

The Eucharist reminds us that Scripture does not exist for us alone, but rather binds us together in imagining what God is up to in the world. We read from the Hebrew Bible, the Epistles, the Gospels and the Psalms as a way to prepare ourselves for the ultimate reminder of God’s intent to make the sad things come untrue by gathering us around God’s table in reconciliation. When we gather together at the Table, we are most fully reminded what God’s rescue plan is.

At the table, we become characters in God’s story. This is what Wright is saying—that when we best interpret scripture, we know ourselves as part of that story. And so we shape our gathering at the table by reading the story, so that when we leave the table to go out into our vocations, we are reminded that we are agents in God’s new world where the sad things are untrue.