Reading the Bible with your ears open

You read what you hear. Even with the Bible, you read what you hear.

Let me explain. Study leave got me to England in 10 inches of snow. Beautiful. Because it closed the airports, it almost got me to France. How would I have explained that to the college board? Then driving around a country not my own just confused me; there were so many signs supposedly telling me what to do, but I didn’t have the right framework to assimilate them so that they actually made sense. On the freeway: “Spray may be possible”. What, was I going to be ambushed by a tomcat? Coming into Colchester: “The oldest town in Britain. Please drive carefully.” If I don’t, will it break? In an alley way in London next to a huge dumpster: “Fly tipping will be prosecuted”. It’s going to take a lot of flies to fill that bin, for sure.

Then there was the conversation I had after a sermon about how we should have faith, and not work for our salvation. The friend I was with got the point: “Pete, I realize I have been doing the wrong thing. I have a job. But now I am never going to work again.” For the outsider, reading the Bible might be as clear as a dumpster full of blowflies.

But it’s the same for the insider too. Christianity has been around a long time, with a lot of variations and versions. Each version has ways of saying things. So after another sermon that spoke of taking hold of the grace of God and resting in the safety of the Father’s arms, a Christian friend declared there was “No repentance in that!” That’s strange; I thought that was what it was about entirely! How can you rest in the Father’s arms if you haven’t made a radical turnaround from where you once were?

Bible reading takes place in a Bible-reading community. The version of Christianity that has influenced you most often gives you a framework—a set of assumptions—a language. This is what tunes your ear. Sometimes it helps, and then you hear what the Bible is saying. Sometimes it gets in the way, and then you don’t.