Beloved Community and Sacred Text
Diving deeper into our relationship with the Bible
Take a moment and think about a Bible verse you’ve carried with you at one point in your life. What about it captured your attention and made it worth remembering?
For many of us growing up in Christianity, memorizing verses was one way we stayed “grounded in the word.” Those verses were reminders of how we should live, how we were oriented in the world, or how we made decisions. We might not feel that way about them now, but at one point, they may have served that function.
So what does the Bible mean to us now? And what does it mean in beloved community?
During a really hard time in my life I stumbled on a verse that said, “In my distress, I cried to the Lord, and he brought me into a spacious place.” I know back then I was feeling boxed in and unsure of what to do next. Just the thought of a spacious place was hopeful. It didn’t fix anything, but it did help me keep my eyes open to what was going on around me.
As I grew in my faith, and maybe beyond that conception of faith, I found out how spacious that place could be. In a spacious place there is room for those that are different than me. In a spacious place there are resources available for everyone. In a spacious place, I can choose to share my spot with others. Eventually, my spacious place began to see connections between other traditions and make space to share our common goals and work toward making the world a better place.
When a text inspires us to go beyond, to grow, to stretch — it’s in that space that we see things start to change. So how does that happen for us?
Sometimes we need to take a break. This is a totally natural thing to do when your faith is changing. After spending 10 (or 20) years wrestling with daily devotions, this may seem antithetical, but there is always space for rest. And when you’re in the midst of faith changes, resting is okay. If you need to, take a break.
Then we start to look at what the text actually means. Literalism and inerrancy are basically American inventions when we talk about how to read scripture. This is not how the Bible was read initially and is not how it’s meant to be read. The Bible (and other sacred texts) are full of different kinds of writing: stories, history, prophecy, poems, songs, erotica, laws, and apocryphal works. Almost none of that is literal.
The Bible was written in a certain context, in a particular place, by a certain people, in a certain part of the world, in a certain time period, in a different language…are you catching where I’m going? Nothing about this lends itself to literal interpretation. Nor is that necessarily what we mean when we say literal. (Pete Enns and NT Wright talk about literal interpretation.)
In beloved community we often look to the text for clues on how to live well. Big ideas like loving your neighbor as yourself, and treating others as you want to be treated, create a framework for how the text informs all the things we’ve been talking about. In particular, when we look at the arc of the stories and history in the text, we see themes of freeing the oppressed (and not being the oppressor), the role of the community in intentionally caring for those that struggle to care for themselves (and not trying to exclude those with complicated lives), and we see themes in the whole of scripture of living in community with others and making sure everyone is taken care of (instead of hoarding wealth and prioritizing the individual). Many of those themes go directly against much of what motivates modern American society.
If we look specifically at Jesus, we see someone taking care of those who were being exploited, ignored, or sick. Caring for the widow and orphan — those who can’t take care of themselves — was demonstrated in his actions and was part of his teaching. Making sure everyone had enough was the meaning behind several of the parables. Healing the sick was about reaching to those in the margins and centering them in the story. Jesus even went to undesirable places to love people that society had deemed unworthy.
When we start to look at the sacred text, and its story, we see the call to live in beloved community not as an aspiration, but as the manifestation of God’s intersection with the world. It’s not about the black and white issues that so much of the church thrives on, but about what it means to treat each other as worthy. Living into the reality that we are ALL made in the image of God and there is enough for ALL.
As you think about what the text means to you, how you’ve experienced it, and what you’ve heard it say, what would it mean to look at that from a new perspective? The beautiful thing about the Bible is that it is a living breathing document that interacts with us in our time and place. If we can learn to understand its origin, place, and time and really take seriously the challenges it puts before us, then we can start to experience the text as it lives through beloved community.
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