This week in our Faith Exploration Program – a small group of high school students that meets before Youth Group – we focused on how to read the Bible with our brains booted up. I asked the participants to bring two Bible verses with them: one they found to be beautiful, good, true, or helpful, and one they found to be ugly, bad, false, or unhelpful.
One girl brought a verse from Numbers, needing no explanation for why she found it unhelpful – it was a description of what animals must be sacrificed (and how) to atone for the sin of the people. Bloody yuck.
Another girl in the group brought not just an unhelpful verse, but an unhelpful story: the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Her question was: why do people focus on this story so much? How did this moralizing tale of sin and punishment become the foundation that everyone focuses on (from the apostle Paul through medieval artists and on up to today’s popular Christianity)… when for two whole chapters before that, everything was goodness and light, balance and order, and all the beauty that God created? Why did the sin-story overpower the light-story?
Indeed. Why?
Now, to be fair, I’ll say that we at MPC do a relatively good job of de-emphasizing it, skipping lightly over the sin and punishment bits. In fact our Godly Play classroom did not even have the Adam and Eve story until last year when we added it as a second Creation option for the older students. So from the nursery on up through 3rd grade our MPC children might hear nothing of creation except the brightly colored panels announcing “God created… and it was good” seven times over. But as they get a little older they hear the other story, and of course they face the Real World, with all of art history, and popular religion around them. They read the Bible for themselves and they find the book of Numbers, with all its blood and guts, and the prophets who plead with them to repent of their wicked ways. They visit other churches – our close or distant cousins in the same Christian family – and we cannot hide any longer from the fact that our religion has handed down to us the dubious gift of a strong emphasis on sin.
In situations like these I am happy that our Bible is not a blueprint, an instruction manual, or a systematic theology. No, our Bible is a collection of stories and writings, and in many ways they disagree with one another. Therefore, we must be free to disagree with them too. We are free to prefer one part over another, and we are free to wrestle angrily with the bits we can’t stand. But we don’t walk away entirely, and hopefully we don’t give up on it. Instead we “hold on to what is good,” and we remember those opening two chapters of Creation that were all light and beauty. And we don’t do it alone. Together we work through these puzzles.
Every Blessing,
Talitha