FSB Author Article
Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the
book Speaking of Faith
by Krista Tippett
Published by Penguin;
January 2008;$14.00US/$16.50CAN; 978-0-14-311318-8
Copyright © 2007 Krista Tippett
In a small, captivating essay about Genesis, Creation and Fall,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer described biblical stories as "ancient, magical
pictures that we need alongside modern technical, conceptual pictures
if we are to become wise." In England, I began to see in these ancient,
magical pictures a response to the deepest real-world confusions of my
years in Berlin. I was aching with spiritual and moral questions I
could scarcely articulate. I was reading mystical texts and Buddhist
texts and they thrilled me. But this Bible on the bookshelf, long
unopened, was the foundational text of my spiritual homeland and mother
tongue.
The Bible, as I read it now, is not a catalogue of absolutes, as its
champions sometimes imply. Nor is it a document of fantasy, as its
critics charge. It is an ancient record of an ongoing encounter with
God in the darkness as well as the light of human experience. Like all
sacred texts, it employs multiple forms of language to convey truth:
poetry, narrative, legend, parable, echoing imagery, wordplay,
prophecy, metaphor, didactics, wisdom saying. In the Christianity of
the modern West, we've largely left the vivid storytelling of the
Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, in Sunday school. We've consigned it
to the world of childhood figuratively and literally. And in our time a
superficial Christian rendering of these biblical texts underpins false
dichotomies that plague our public life -- chasms we've set up between
sacred text and truth, between idealized views of the way human beings
should behave and the complex reality of the way they do.
But when I came back to read the biblical text after many years away, I
began to love the Hebrew Bible fiercely for the fact that it tells life
like it is. It has no fairy-tale heroes, only flawed, flamboyant human
beings as prone to confusion as to righteousness. Like us millennia
later, they had trouble reconciling the political and the private, the
sexual and the societal. King David -- the forefather by whom the New
Testament theologians traced Jesus' lineage -- was, as the text tells
it, brilliant and charismatic and passionate. He held God's favor.
David was at once a great leader and also an adulteter. He was a
military hero, and yet he sent the husband of his mistress to the front
lines to die. These facts about him stand together and in tension with
an air of sadness in the biblical narrative. They are neither
reconciled nor do they cancel each other out.
Or consider Lot, who is famous in Sunday school around the world for
heeding God's command to leave the sinful Sodomites without looking
back, while his weaker-willed wife gave in to nostalgia and was turned
to a pillar salt. We've internalized the unforgivable sins of Sodom and
Gomorrah as sexual, and contemporary religious voices routinely equate
private sexual sin with the moral decline of our nation. But in the
Bible itself, that equation is inferred rather than stated. It states
that not a single righteous person could be found among the Sodomites,
and this was the reason for their destruction. There is one scene in
which Sodomite men attempt to lure other men from Lot's household out
into the street with them, presumably for sexual purposes. Our hero
Lot, offers his daughters instead. But in a later biblical reference
and analysis of the nature of the Sodomites' sin -- one of very few --
the prophet Ezekiel says that they were condemned because they had
"pride, surfeit of food, prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and
needy." What if, with reference to Ezekiel, we began to understand the
depravity of "sodomy" to be about a nation's neglect of its poor?
One of my favorite characters in the Bible is also one of the most
human and flawed. Jacob, the son of Isaac, the grandson of Abraham, is
a quintessential late bloomer, conniver, and egoist. The Bible calls
him "clay footed" and yet, through foibles and false starts, God's
beloved. He tricks his brother out of his inheritance. He later falls
in with another trickster, his future father-in-law, who cons him into
marrying the sister of the woman he loves. He works slavishly, marries
both sisters finally, and becomes a successful man. In midlife, full of
both pride and regret, Jacob heads home to face his demons and past
mistakes. He makes his way across the land in which he has spent his
adulthood back to the land of his childhood. His sins were great and
his absence has been long, and he is terrified of what will greet him
on the other side.
Jacob crosses the Jabbuk river. And in a moment cathartic for the sweep
of monotheistic spiritual history to follow, he there encounters a
mysterious man whom he afterward recognizes as a messenger of God or
God himself. The "man" wrestles with Jacob, even putting his hip socket
out of joint. Jacob wrestles back. "I will not let you go," he tells
this stranger, who turns out to be the very source of his life, "until
you bless me." At daybreak, he receives his blessing and a new name.
Jacob becomes Israel -- a
word that suggests one who strives, or wrestles, with God.
This is a story beloved by many who have struggled with the gap between
real life and religious ideas. True biblical faith expands and deepens
as it incorporates mistakes, questions, catastrophes, and changes of
mind and heart. Like Moses who "quarreled" with God, Jacob embodies the
tense interplay of devotion and struggle at the heart of Jewish
tradition. I've come to find in Jacob's story a model grappling
honestly and productively with sacred text itself. It is true of the
entire Bible -- and perhaps of any sacred text for its believers --
that if you sit with these bare-bones stories, pick over them, retell
them, they begin to grow -- take on nuance and possibility -- before
your eyes. One layer of meaning is lifted and another reveals itself.
You sense that the text would respond to every conceivable question. In
other words, if I stick with these texts -- if I wrestle with them and
insist on a blessing -- a blessing will come. The only limitation is my
time, my powers of imaginative concentration, and my capacity to listen
to the interpretations of others.
Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Books, a member of Penguin Group
(USA) Inc., from SPEAKING OF FAITH by Krista Tippett. Copyright ©
Krista Tippett, 2008