Oral Bible

It’s interesting… the larger part of the Scriptures is narrative. Most of the Bible began life as oral storytelling. The very DNA of the Scriptures are narrative units designed to be memorized. 

In Jesus’ day, Jewish boys between the age of 6 & 11 yrs, would go to their local Synagogue for school and the focus of their studies was the Torah. Apart from learning to read & write Hebrew, kids would memorize Genesis through to Deuteronomy by heart. Kids who showed particular aptitude would move on to memorize the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures then the next step was the oral traditions – the Mishnah – that included the rulings of particular rabbis down through the centuries. Beyond that, gifted students would become disciples of particular rabbis. So if the memorization of Scripture was the foundation of Judaic discipleship, I’m wondering why we don’t use narrative memorization in the same way for kids in our churches ? Particularly if we want our kids to grow into mature disciples of Jesus.

Kids learn & think initially in very concrete ways right up into their teens. The type of Bible teaching that seeks to draw out underlying principles for personal application is much more abstract & suitable for adults. My teaching experiences over the years have taught me that narratives stick much better than principles. Kids seem to get clever at reading truth into stories at a surprisingly young age.

New Tribes Mission pioneered the oral storytelling method as a way of introducing the Gospel to animistic tribal groups. They would begin with the Old Testament and over the course of six months, up to even a year, they would move through to Jesus & the Gospels. The idea was to imbed Jesus’ story in God’s much bigger story that we encounter in the broad sweep of the Scriptures. 

Similarly, when my wife & I were working in Africa, we worked among a people group who were mostly illiterate. That meant they were oral learners & as we discovered over time, truth imbedded in narrative is very important to learning and holding important information to these kinds of people. One of the questions I started asking myself was, “What if we gave people an oral Bible instead of a written one ? What narratives from Scripture would it need to be made up of to capture the broad sweep of the Scriptures & the kernel of the Gospel ?”

As the stories of Scripture become a rich part of our psyches, they flavour our imaginations, our actions and thinking a lot more than our traditional deductive styles of teaching. I wonder if that is why Jesus taught using parables.

He trusted people, with the help of the Spirit of God to come to truth & insight by themselves.

The Rock From Which You Are Hewn

God’s story woven into lives of ordinary men…

There’s an interesting word of encouragement that the prophet Isaiah gives the Jews when they are in Exile, when they were poised between the choice of assimilation and despair. It says,

‘Listen to me you that pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord. Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug. Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for he was but one when I called him and I blessed him and made him many’. 

I like what Walter Brueggemann says about theses verses. He says that Isaiah is saying if you want to seek God, look to the oldest, most embarrassing beginning we ever had. He says firstly, remember Abraham. On the one hand, he is the strange, impressive father of the faith who leaves his home at God’s command & goes out on a long journey. On the other hand, Abraham is also a pitiful figure – often helplessness and filled with fear.  Two times he gives his wife Sarah away to other men to save his own skin. Despite God’s promise of a child with Sarah, he sleeps with Sarah’s servant Hagar, to get an heir.

Often Abraham appears so confused, so unsure, so barely faithful.

And when you are done reflecting on Abraham, remember Sarah your mother. Sarah is the beautiful woman who other men desire. She is also the mother of Isaac, the promise carrier. However, when you remember Sarah, remember her oldness, remember her barrenness, remember her mocking laughter in the face of God when He promises her a son.

Yet when you remember Sarah, remember that this old and pitiful woman now laughs a new laugh – an Easter laugh. God uses her very barrenness to create newness. Sarah is the example for all barren people, who have within them no gift of life, no capacity for faith – yet God does something new and unexpected in the face of all the evidence.

What impresses me about this foundational story of Scripture, is what it says about the way God’s story is unfolding among us. Abraham and Sarah are people we can identify with because they are fragile and tentative, often moving forward with fear & hesitation. These are people just like us.

You know, God’s story often isn’t in the grand epics of history, the stories told by the winners. When I read the large sweep of Scripture, it seems to me that God’s story is mostly unfolding quietly, below the radar, twisting and turning – always with the very real possibility of failure. Yet when we remember this story of faith, remember that it is told and retold through the same fragile stories of other biblical characters. Remember the scheming of a timid Jacob, the stuttering of a reluctant Moses, the paranoid actions of a bipolar Saul, the treachery of a wife stealing David, the depressed and suicidal Elijah…

The very wonder of God’s story is that he achieves his purposes in the world through broken ordinary people, just like us.

Bruggemann says we remember these stories because they model faith and they invite faith.

We remember these stories because when these fragile people centered their stories in God’s story, they lived life BIG – filled with purpose, newness and imagination.

Tower of Babel, Translating Genesis 11

”What happens when mission comes home ?”

The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 captures for me the essence of the answer to this question. It begins with the Shems. Long ago, they came to the great plain of Shinar and they settled there. Now the Shems were an industrious people. They were clever & resourceful and they said to each other, “Come let us make some bricks and fire them in the fire…”. So the Shems got working and in time they built a safe and a functional town with a wall all around.

The Shems took great pride in what they were able to achieve together. Their confidence grew and so did their vision. They said to one another, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches up into the skies”. So they got working. And as each building was completed, the Shems grew in learning and wisdom and civic pride. Finally, they had the courage to begin working on the centrepiece of the city – the Great Tower. Day after day they worked on the foundations. Then, they began working on the tower itself and soon the tower was dwarfing every other building in the city.

Spurred on by their ever-expanding vision, the Shems grew bolder still. They said to one another, “Now that we have our city and our tower, let us make a NAME for ourselves, so that we are not scattered over the face of all the earth.”

In this moment the Shems came to the particular attention of God. God descended from heaven and God saw their handiwork. Heisenberg’s principle says the act of observing a phenomena changes it. God saw the city of the Shems, with its tower reaching up into the skies and God discerned the future. He said, “This is only the beginning of what they will do… soon nothing they propose will be too hard for them”.

So God acted. He said, “Come, let us go down and confuse their speech so they will no longer understand each other”. God drew near to the city, he confused the speech of the Shems and they stopped building their tower. God confounded the words of the Shems and he scattered them over the face of the earth. That is why the city is named Babel – ‘City of Confusion’ and why people speak with such a diversity of languages.

I really like that this narrative makes abundantly clear what happens when the Spirit of God comes near to a group of people who have become self-satisfied, complacent and who have closed the circle. It’s a missional story because this is what happens whenever people allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the Spirit of God.

Traditionally we tend to view God’s scattering of the Shems as punishment. Yet for me, this idea of the Spirit of God drawing near and breaking open the circle… this image of tremendous energy and diversity being released; of the Shems moving outwards, speaking a great diversity of languages… all of this sounds like an amazing outpouring of God’s blessing. It sounds like Pentecost in Acts 2.

This is what happens when mission comes home. 

Pure Oxygen

Recently, a friend of mine asked the question, “If you were going to use a passage from Scripture to describe the kind of community you think God would like us to be, what passage would you choose?”

I had to think for a bit but the longer I did, the more I liked the Exodus image of being a pilgrim people in the wilderness. Lawrence Kushner says the wilderness is a place that demands being open to the flow of life around you. It’s a place “that demands being honest with yourself, without regard to the cost in personal anxiety… a place that demands being present with all yourself… possessions cannot surround you… preconceptions cannot protect you… guilt can no longer place you safely in the past”.

There is a sense of weakness and vulnerability, of depending upon God alone that goes with this image. It’s an idea of community that says if we don’t work this out together we are going to die here. This basic survival orientation focuses attention outwards, demanding openness to newness & difference. It is a picture of a community of people who are working out their relationship with God ‘on the way’.

Mars Hill is a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan – who have chosen to locate their story in the deep channel of the Exodus story. This grand narrative of Scripture lends movement, intention & focus to their community. It is the idea of having a deep story that they can keep checking in with to make sure their unfolding communal story is located in a place where God alone is the living center.

Kushner says of dwelling in the wilderness, “That such a way of being would be like breathing pure oxygen.” That we would long to breathe air of such intensity & purity in the Church. Amen, amen & amen again.