I was trained to do proper exegesis, that is, to rightly divide the Word of truth. Seminaries are good for teaching students how to do that kind of thing.

Jesus is teaching me to another type of exegesis: to exegete lives. Exegesis comes from a Greek word that means “to lead out.” It is the discipline of studying a text and “leading out” the proper meaning. Exegesis is a field of biblical studies. Pastoral exegesis is the field of human lives.

Scholars primarily exegete (ancient) texts. Pastors, who can be scholars, too, primarily exegete present human lives.

In the Western world the developing Christian pastoral ministry took a sad turn and a horrible confusion occurred. Pastors were taught to primarily deal with the sacred text (the Bible). Peoples’ lives were disposable; the Word was eternal. Pastors with Bibles in hand, therefore, were called and paid more to talk and to teach than to listen. We were trained to lay down the truth on people’s lives without even knowing much about those lives. Lives were disposable, transitory; the Word was eternal. We forgot that the good Shepherd said, “I know my sheep…by name.” Many pastors today could not tell you the names of the people to whom they “exegete” the Scriptures. The text is supreme; people are disposable. 

Am I saying the Bible (biblical exegesis) has no place in pastoral work? Of course not. But if we take our cues from Jesus, we’ll listen long and well to people before we start spouting off good biblical exegesis. Maybe every seminarian should spend 30 years in obscurity, like Jesus did, before he or she is inflicted on the people of the land. I am convinced that the stories (aka “parables”) Jesus told were based on years of listening to the concerns, the dreams, the pains, the histories, the passions and the hopes of his people. I imagine when Jesus spoke, the people said, “Finally, someone is speaking my language.” We can only speak a person’s language when we know the person’s story. Jesus was a radical exegete.

Some people think Jesus was clairvoyant, with supernatural powers to read minds. I think he was a keen listener and sharp observer. One time his disciples freaked out when a woman poured expensive perfume on him. Jesus, however, ”exegeted” the woman and her actions as exceptionally sensitive.

I know of a pastor in my area of the world who actually avoids his people. Using the excuse to be “in prayer,” he hides in his office between his morning services. He prides himself in being a good Bible teacher. Maybe he is, but he’s a sorry excuse for a pastor.

 When pastors, of all people, in the USAmerican form of church are too busy to exegete lives, then they betray their primary study. People are amazingly unique human beings made in God’s image and redeemed by God’s Son and loved by God’s Spirit, each one with a story uniquely his or her own. The pastor’s task–a diligent, artistic contribution–is to show people how their stories may be caught up into God’s grand story.

Maybe pastors should be sent to detective training school rather than to seminary. It’s a thought.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Julie and I and Julie’s mother, Lois, just returned from a short trip to the great State of Tennessee. We visited Julie’s sister, Diane, and her family in Nashville. Diane is the Administrative Assistant to Mike Glenn, the pastor of Brentwood Baptist Church. Diane’s husband, Larry Mayfield, is known for his many original contributions to Christian music. One evening we ate and laughed with the growing Mayfield clan–Jonathan and Grace, Jeff and Kristin and Austin and Zachary, and Shelley, the VW bug-driving diva.  

Julie and I also visited my mother and step-father, Margaret and Neal Parrish, in Linden, TN. We kicked back and enjoyed good country food, some of which we got right out of the garden. We launched into many leisurely conversations, reminiscing about life together. Neal’s recipe for grilled short ribs is out of this world. I learned the secret…and I’m not telling. We drove part of the Natchez Trace, one of the most beautiful partk highways in the continental United States.  

Tennessee overall is a beautiful state with a rich history and breath-taking terrain.

We’re back in Michigan. Whoopee.

Popularity: 3% [?]

JESUS EMERGES

by

John W Frye

Jesus emerges into the public eye,

a young man into a stiff culture that revered

the Torah-seasoned wisdom of old age.

Jesus, pushing hard on received, sacred categories,

created quite a stir on the Bible-based, right-wing blogs,

where he was labeled a deceiver, demon-possessed,

crazy and, oh!, leading the simple youth astray.

The Jerusalem posts skewered this upstart Galilean

carpenter, who healed blind people, and

who outwitted the most learned in the land,

who dared to ransack their place of worship and

their ransacking of very poor widows.

The nationally-known religious leaders did not like

the emerging movement he led out of Nazareth.

“We have no king but Calvin!” they shouted.

They conspired a cross for the trendy One.

Sound  familiar?

Popularity: 8% [?]

I am a fan of Annie Dillard. I read her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek like some people eat dessert, thoroughly enjoying myself. And I laughed my way through her An American Childhood, brooded with her in Teaching a Stone to Talk, and learned from her in The Writing Life. So when her latest book, The Maytrees: A Novel, came out in paperback, I read it straight away.

The story is an unusual love story in that Dillard through her main characters, Maytree and Lou, ponders, probes and pokes at what is lasting love? It can’t just be biological (sexual) thrill because old people fall in love. Poets try to capture it, but all poets are meaningless until one experiences love. “Love so sprang on her [Lou], she honestly thought no one had ever looked at it. Where was it in literature? Someone must have written something” (31). Science fails to grasp lasting love, chalking it up to adrenaline. “Lasting love makes no scientific sense after the kids can hunt and gather… . That it [lasting love] was outside science’s lens did not mean it did not exist” (129-130). Like most lovers, “Lou and Maytree saw their love as unique. Of course they rarely fought; she rarely spoke. They both knew love itself as an epistemological tool.”

I found the book cumbersome to read in places and I freely admit that it could just be me. I am not in the same Northeast, Cape Cod culture in which the story happens. Also I admit Dillard used some words I have never read and didn’t know their meanings, but I kept reading anyway. Annie has an intriguing, artful way of using words and you feel like she is leaning over your shoulder as you read and at times says “Gotcha!” Reading on to experience these moments is the gravitational pull of the Annie Dillard adventure. Here is one describing Lou who went into a self-appointed solitude: “Lou hoped to scandalously live her own life. …She only wanted to hear herself think. …Maybe someday a thought or two would come. In the meantime she cleared the landing strip” (133). Another amazing two sentences: “Now she knew he woke. The room seemed to get smarter” (32).

Annie Dillard is 63 years old. She is at the leading edge of the Baby Boomers, many of whom are following her into the last 20 years or so of life. To have an artistic, accomplished author of her witty skill craft a story about love-growing-old is a gift to readers everywhere and of any age.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Sensitive to Smell
by
John W Frye

They could have heard
a feather drop.
Quiet. Still. An eye blink a thunder clap.

She snapped the frail neck
of the valued jar.
Surprising, captivating smells assault their senses
pushing back musky odors of weary men
resting from the dusty heat of a turbulent Jerusalem day.

One of the men is Jesus,
anointed alive for burial by her.
“Outrage!” snort the Twelve,
calculating the cost of her crime.
“Beautiful,” replies Jesus, “she is gospel worthy.”
Timing, her most sensitive gift.

The Bethany Leper smiles, too, nodding his approval,
as alabaster pieces lie on his floor.

Popularity: 11% [?]

CONTEXT MATTERS

Have you ever been bored silly listening once again to the flight attendant rattling off the routine “…in case of loss of air cabin pressure, an oxygen mask blah, blah, blah…”?

How can a life-saving device be considered so boring? Next time you’re on a jet, look intently and with great interest at the flight attendant as the message is given. You will make a lasting friend because everyone else is ignoring the sound counsel as they put on their Walkman headphones or read a newspaper or fall asleep. Act interested and the attendants almost go into cardiac arrest.

Yet the question remains: how can a life-saving device be considered so boring? One word: context. I suspect that should the cabin pressure actually drop at 30,000 feet and those little yellow masks make their real debut, they will instantly become objects of supreme interest. Context, my friend.

I’ve been musing about how the USAmerican suburban life renders the life-saving gospel of the kingdom of God almost as boring as a flight attendant’s speech when we’re safely taxiing along to the runway. USAmerican comfort and materialism serve to blind many of us to the exigencies and emergencies assumed by the gospel of the kingdom. Our numbing context filters out what makes kingdom survivability possible. For us, almost every New Testament imperative to “Watch out!” and “Be alert!” and “Stay rivited to Jesus” (Hebrews 12:2) comes across as bland as “…pull the mask toward you and place the strap around your head… .” We read our morning snippet from My Utmost for His Highest. We yawn and then read the paper or watch TV or play another round of golf. All is well…in the context.

What makes My Utmost for His Highest an enduring devotional classic? Context, my friend. Oswald Chambers wrote during a time of war. He served as chaplain to Australian and New Zealand troops in Zeitoun, Egypt. He wasn’t writing in and from the comfortable suburbs.

Would we have Henri J. M. Nouwen’s profound book The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming if he had stayed as a Harvard professor and had never lived with the poor in the barrios of Bolivia and Peru or had never served the multiply-impaired at L’Arche? Context, my friend.

JESUS AND CONTEXT

I have been paying attention lately to the Gospel of Mark. It’s a dangerous thing to do. If (and it’s a big if) we are deeply attentive to context, then the life of Jesus is radically reframed for most of us. Why?

We have been conditioned to view Jesus as the idyllic good shepherd who wanders the Galilean green hillsides and rests by still waters. Why, what a beautiful suburb Jesus lived in. Jesus, the One who makes friends (except for that dastardly Judas), and shows such sweet, sweet compassion toward men, women and, of course, the little children. Jesus, the One who teaches such lovely, heavenly moralisms on how we can live the really good life. In most pictures in our churches Jesus looks like the Breck girl with his long, flowing hair and sweet face. Isn’t it such a shame that gentle, beautiful Jesus was so misunderstood and mistreated? Shame, shame. We have no clue about interpreting Mark 13 other than in some fantasizing, dispensational “end times” way. Why? Because what Jesus is describing fits no context we know. We know, however, Jesus just had to die for our sins so that, if we believe in him, we can go to heaven when we die. So nice, so clean, so tame.

Ask people in blood-splatted Belfast if that’s the way they see Jesus’ life. Or those who survived apartheid South Africa. Or those who survived Hitler and Stalin. Read the diaries of the Christian martyrs who, fleeing the Roman persecutions, lived in deep caves, dying for Jesus rather than voicing allegiance to the State. Go anywhere besides USAmerican suburbs and you’ll experience a different context. Your comfort-filters will slip and suddenly Jesus and the Gospels explode with meaning. Things get messy fast. Mark 13 becomes survival instructions. You can’t escape the sight and smell of massive amounts of blood in the dust.

Jesus, from his earliest days of public ministry, was a marked man. Marked for death (Mark 3:6. See also 11:18; 12:12; 14:1-2). Had there been “wanted” posters in those days, Jesus’ picture would have been on every corner lamp post. Jesus lived urgently. Get that? Urgently, not frantically. He was a man quickly on the move to accomplish his aims. He didn’t kick back after a rough day and watch American Idol. He didn’t fuel up his SUV and drive to Disney World with his friends. He lived alertly. He kept watch. Sometimes, when the plot thickened, he slipped the trap set for him.

Take a look at the disciples’ finger nails…if you can find them. They were chewed to the quick as they followed the man whom the government described as demon-possessed, illegitimate, insane, deceiving, traitor and a Galilean nobody.

Please, Christian leaders, make sure you discover and define your “discipleship principles” in that context or you will miss the Jesus Way completely and lead people astray. “Follow me and duck for cover when needed” is an appropriate paraphrase of Jesus’ call to discipleship.

OUR DANGEROUS COMFORT CONTEXT

We USAmerican believers have been emasculated by popular, suburban theology. We don’t know how to live the improper life. The kind of life Jesus lived in Galilee and Judea and for which he died. We don’t know how to live as outlaws. We older ones will sell the upcoming generation down the river in order to preserve the tidy faith and comfortable life we’ve always known. How sad is that? Very, very sad.

If sometime soon, we lose cabin pressure in the jumbo jet of USAmerican Christian piety, many people I think will die for lack of Life.

Popularity: 20% [?]