We Don't Want to Know

"It is strange that the Bible is our most treasured book, and yet it seems so difficult that we don't find it very helpful.

Perhaps we have expected the wrong things of it; we have asked of it what it cannot do. We have expected the Bible to keep promises that it has never made to us.

The Bible cannot be a good luck piece to bring God's blessing. Nor can it be an answer book to solve our problems or to give us right belief.

I suggest that the Bible is precious to us because it offers us a way of understanding the world in a fresh perspective, a perspective that leads to life, joy, and wholeness. It offers us a model, a pattern, through which we may think about, perceive, and live life differently."

― Walter Brueggemann, "The Bible Makes Sense"

********

Dear Kate,

Yesterday I gave you a quote of exposition long and explicit and then followed up with a story to re-tell it slant.  I asked you to come up with a question of your own when sharing it on Facebook.  As expected you gravitated towards the latter, which is understandable for it being my writing, but your negligence still glaring because my story makes not the sense I meant it to with not the context of Brueggemann's prophetic utterance.  Somehow I didn't make an express connection between the two, and you proceeded to perceive the whole by its half.  The question is then: did you understand at all anything I wrote yesterday?

You can stop here and read today's quote again, and see how the first paragraph I wrote just now is a retelling of it from an angle more than a few degrees removed.  Please allow yourself the time to loiter around if you can't see it yet.

Stories engage us.  Bullet-point sermon is allowed, indeed welcomed, if we are looking for something helpful, something promising, a good luck piece to bring us the blessings we seek.  The best-attended meetings at church are, not surprisingly, about money, and vocation, which we take to mean our self-actualizing way to make money, to have our way of/with life.  Stories, then, should be used to engage us on a way that we have already determined on, not to question wise assumptions all civilized human should have now subscribed to, not to cast us into the wind of unknowns, dangers, and, God-forbid, self-doubts.  Stories, finally then, are degraded into mere sermon illustrations, purposely shallow and self-serving.

If I am to give you only expositions of truth you will say I am teaching you what you don't want to learn; if I am to tell you stories to engage you in truth-exploring you will say Can't you just tell it straight and spit it out?  We want instructions to support what we wish to be true, make us look good, thoughtful, successful, a sprinkle of self-deprecating humor very occasionally maybe, but all in all everybody should emerge from the public bathhouse, morality carwash unscathed.

Burying children prematurely, that's what we say our fathers and mothers have done.  How about our own children, how does our burying business with them go lately?  Summer time.  Many young people I know would wake up not until after noon, and then half-consciously order from their bed food delivery to begin their day.  If they are woke enough they might get themselves to tweet about sins of their fathers and mothers before the door bell rings.  They are buried in a totalizing vision that we not only help built, but engaged ourselves in as our way to engage them in our collective Way, a totalism that contains "all thinkable, imaginable, doable social possibilities...always wants to monopolize imagination...to monopolize technology, so that there are no serious alternatives that seem on offer."

Nothing mysterious we want.  We don't know better because we don't want to know better.

Yours, Alex