And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.
Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.
-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Confession: too often I sit down with the Scripture as though it is a problem to be solved. I start preparing a sermon in sort of the same way that I would solve a word problem. I was always pretty good at word problems, it was sort of like a spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, using words to cushion the fact that I was doing arithmetic or algebra. To be sure there are cultural, linguistic, theological and textual issues to be unraveled when it comes to interpreting Scripture, but sometimes I feel like all the taking apart subtracts from the putting together of truth, beauty and meaning. Last winter the lectionary study group that I was part of with a group of mostly Lutherans disbanded for a variety of reasons. Everyone seemed to agree that it really wasn't "doing anything for them."
I have spent some time thinking about that dynamic, and I think it was true, and probably symptomatic of a disease that afflicts the modern church: the desire to be right, which is not necessarily the problem in and of itself, but it's corollary is an unwillingness to be wrong. I think we were approaching the texts as though they were riddles to be solved, and each of us had our own method of solving them. We fell into a habit of using the same sources and pretty much adopting the same enlightenment (you could almost call it scientific) exegetical methods, where you try to determine what the text "really means," so that you can give "the answers" on Sunday morning and have everyone admire how clever you are.
When your primary skill is being clever and right all of the time, you become unwilling and maybe even unable to engage in dialogue that might challenge your status as the answer person. As bruising to my ego as it might be, I am trying to learn from those sort of rare moments where someone presents me with a challenge to my assumptions. Sometimes I fail. I fail if the person is angry because I get defensive. I fail if the person is too vague or too far away for me to find the common ground. I fail if I'm just too tired to go through the work it takes to allow my assumptions (often the ones I just unveiled and expounded in front of over 100 people) to be challenged. I can fail for lots of reasons.
The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and you are powerless to solve it on your own. This is not just a matter of willpower and trying harder next time.
This is not just a preacher problem, or even a particularly religious problem, it is a life problem, it is a human problem, and it leads to a lot of tragedy. Think about all the evil that is committed these days in the name of God, and I'm not just talking about ISIS either. There is a terrible destructive power in the shadow side of faith, in the side that sees it as an answer to be worked at, rather than a question to ask.
On a very deep level, when faith becomes an answer rather than a question it ceases to be faith.
A poet of a very different stripe, Charles Bukowski said, "The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence." Yeats said it more winsomely: "The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Why am I quoting all of these poets? Because I suspect they're the only ones who get it, everyone else is too wound up in being right. Poets don't care about that, they're only concerned with telling the truth, but the problem with truth is that it's not always the same for everyone everywhere. That is the core reality that gives birth to the various forms of relativism that are so decried by the various priesthoods of the ages.
Poets, good ones at least, are open to interpretation. Question a really good poet or writer about, what they meant exactly and they will probably give you this quizzical little look. That look means about the same thing as when a southern lady says, "Bless your heart."
There is always something numinous about language (I'm back on words again), and it is only the most brutal usage that can make it otherwise. To treat Scripture (and I will include all texts that are called sacred: Bible, Koran, Vedas, and so on) as though it has anything in common with that sort of profane usage is perhaps the highest form of heresy at work in the world today.
For some fun on what is otherwise a very serious subject, I give you the following examples of contrasting the numinous and profane qualities of language:
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