The Bible Study

Gospel Reading: Matthew 16.21-28
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

One of the most enduring of truth is "hip sells". I haven't actually heard anybody say this, but I'm willing to bet. What passes for hip among folks like us, sells.

Depending on the particular us you belong to, definitions of hip vary. A lot. Let's just consider things automotive. Whether you purchase a Dale Earnhardt (rest his soul) comfortor and pillow sham set or the Hermes edition Bugatti, hipness played a big role. And I'll bet no one has ever sprung for both.

Kathleen Norris doesn't mention the word "hip" anywhere in her chapter on "The Bible Study." She may not mention the word in the book, but this seems like as good a moment as any to suggest that the meditations in Amazing Grace depends on the regular transgression of a hipness boundary that her readers roughly share.

Part of the pleasure of reading comes from believing that we're the author's kind of people. A good writer makes us feel like the rest of the world may not understand her subtle intentions, but we do. We understand just what she's saying and we're pretty sure she would like us if we ever met for cocktails.

It's clear from this week's reading that Kathleen Norris didn't see the women's Bible Study at Spencer Memorial Presbyterian Church as her target audience. Timid, older women who attend a regular Bible study have a decidedly smaller hipness quotient among most people than either Dale Earnhardt or Hermes.

That's why the story works on us. We're not meant to feel comfortable among these people, and we're not meant to feel like they might have stumbled onto anything much of interest within the small circumference of their lives. But there at the Bible Study, one of the women pulls a folded up placemat out of her purse (probably not a Hermes). She'd saved it from a church bazaar because it bore a quote from Martin Luther: "If you could understand a single grain of wheat you would die of wonder."

Sometimes reading the Bible feels like that. Like pulling something breathtaking from a tasteless purse.

After calling Peter "Satan" (tasteless, don't you think?), Jesus said, "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?" Letting go of our lives might be letting ourselves be transported just past the hipness boundaries that make the most sense to us. Or at least letting ourselves see beyond them and smile.

We let our likes be our likes, be they NASCAR or Bugatti, and we enjoy them. But we lose the illusion that the truth comes to us only in tasteful containers.

Christian

Gospel Reading: Matthew 15.10-28
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I often think that if I'm a Christian, I'll be the last to know
- Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

I used to wonder whether the whole world was a sham. It seemed possible to me as an introspective (neurotic?) child that the reality I experienced was carefully staged.

You see, I didn't know what people were thinking, and I didn't know what they really did as soon as they left my sight. Maybe they stepped into a waiting room replete with discarded magazines and the drone of unwatched television sets until it was their turn to appear as a jogger, or a bank teller, or a President of the United States in the underwhelming drama that is the life of Scott.

My description sounds terribly narcissistic (at best). But the whole strange hunch arose from an appreciation of all that we don't really know, more than the thrilling or terrifying sense that the universe revolved around me. Self consciousness was the definition of all I really knew firsthand.

Religious faith has come to be a self conscious affair. We assume that religion happens, if it happens, in the recesses of self consciousness. Or it arises from an overly exercised self consciousness. But Kathleen Norris makes the counterintuitive suggestion that if she's Christian, she may be the last to know. How can that be?

Our gospel Sunday also shakes up our idea of what it might mean to be a Christian. The hero of the story, a Canaanite woman, is dismissed and demeaned by Jesus himself. It's clear that she doesn't have a warm feeling that she's loved by this Jesus. She just won't go away. And Jesus tells us that this is what great faith looks like.

Self consciousness would have (and still does) kept me from Jesus, I'm afraid. I'm comfortable thinking about religion, but I'm challenged by this Canaanite woman's religion. The same root for 'ligament' lives in 'religion'. Which reminds us that religion binds us to other people. It's not just an isolated, internal affair. So maybe there's nothing more religious than begging an offensive but apparently holy man for the miraculous healing of someone we love.

I don't think this woman was thinking about what it meant to be a Christian. She probably would be the last to know. But maybe Christian faith has always been a leap beyond self consciousness and towards someone or something else. An uninhibited leap towards the holy.

Medieval

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13.31, 44-52
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Wendell Berry imagines an exchange between the prophet Isaiah and entomologist E.O. Wilson. Wilson had written dismissively about our sentimental affection for ancient people with outdated ideas. He wondered how useful a person who didn't know about the electromagnetic spectrum would be to us modern people.

Berry's vignette goes like this:

Isaiah (finger in the air and somewhat oblivious of the historical superiority of the modern audience): The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as of the flower of the field.

Edward O. Wilson (somewhat impressed, but nevertheless determined to do his bit for “evolutionary progress”): But . . . but, sir! Are you aware of the existence of the electromagnetic spectrum?

CURTAIN

I love that little play. Religious people have wasted plenty of breath resisting any science that challenges the literal sense of the Bible. But a few anti-religious people have returned the disfavor and denied the possibility of ancient wisdom, given all the obviously wrong information people once carried. Wrong information about things like our solar system, biology, and the infield fly rule. OK, even lots of modern folks don't understand the infield fly rule. But you get my point.

It's radical to think that someone of another century--particularly one from medieval times, the so called 'dark ages'--might see things that we don't precisely because of their limited world view. What difference does it really make that my information is accurate about which celestial body orbits another if I've lost the capacity to wonder about them?

I'll forge into new blog territory in terms of imposed self disclosure (isn't that what blogs are?) and include a poem I wrote 12 years ago.

Distraction

Alden is fixed on a knot in the floor:
Small discoveries lead ruthlessly to others.
A nail in the baseboard left unset.
A withered fruit dropped from the pepper plant.
Now this.
Grandeur eludes or bores him,
So he's gone prone,
Licking at the blemish as though its lost dimension might be tasted.
Distraction is his only discipline
And the world is mustered
And patient.

-Fall 1996

I guess on a day in the fall of 1996 my eyes were opened to all kinds of unseen things by my infant son's flailing about on his belly. His perspective was terribly limited. Or maybe I should say his perspective was wonderfully focused.

To use the imagery from Sunday's gospel, I wonder just who in our house in 1996 would have been most likely to find a pearl of great price? At less than a year old Alden couldn't change the oil in my car or macramé a plant hanger. But I saw the world differently, I saw things I wouldn't have because of his perspective--belly to the floor, arms and legs and tongue splayed.

Maybe our obsession with accurate information (which I hope my internist and my accountant never get free of) blinds us to things. It's not that we need to let go of modern knowledge or grow suspicious of modern things. We just need to open ourselves to the possibility that even some strange medieval person might see things in life's forest that our nifty new trees obscure.

The painting is "Hemlock" by Heidi Christensen, an artist who was studying at Virginia Seminary when I was a student.