The Blue Parakeet, 2nd Read online

  In other words, I learned that God spoke in various ways in various times. And I was taught that God wasn’t saying those things today. I was only beginning to wonder just how enormous a dragon that little expression—“that was then, but this is now”—was hiding. I learned that sometimes the Bible expects things that were designed for that time but not for our time. I wasn’t sure how we knew that, but I was sure we were making decisions like that. This really sealed my question: How do we know how to live out the Bible? But there are a few more examples for us to consider.

  Surrendering Possessions

  There is nothing clearer than this statement by Jesus about possessions: “In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have [possessions] cannot be my disciples” (Luke 14:33). Two chapters earlier Jesus said, “Sell your possessions and give to the poor” (12:33). If there is anything that is straightforward, those two verses are. I knew enough about church history to know that St. Francis did exactly what Jesus ordered, or at least he got very close. I also knew that we weren’t following Jesus’s words at all. In fact, I knew that most Christians were not living below their means and were in fact living well beyond their means.

  The most common explanations I heard were either “but that was then” or “there were special expectations for Jesus’s personal disciples.” Others suggested that what Jesus was getting at for us was that we should “cut back” on our spending so we can be more generous. However we read them, these are statements made by Jesus, seemingly without condition; we weren’t doing them as Jesus said; and they evidently belonged to a different era and a different culture (this principle kept coming up). How did we decide such things? How do we know what to do and what not to do? (I can’t tell you how much these two questions have energized my forty years of Bible study.)

  Contentious Issues

  On top of these discoveries, I was encountering contentious issues like evolution, Calvinism, Vietnam and war, abortion, and homosexuality. I must confess, I loved the thrill of these debates. These hotly disputed issues took some of these discoveries of mine and stood them up into questions—questions of practical and present significance, questions that started to mound up into my one big question:

  Do we conform the Bible to science, science to the Bible, or . . .?

  Is Calvinism or Arminianism right? Are both right? Is neither right?

  What kind of music should we play in church?

  Are charismatic gifts relevant today? All of them? Even miracles?

  Should we oppose the conflict in the Middle East?

  Which view of the second coming is biblical?

  Should women be ordained? Can they preach and teach? Bless the bread and the wine?

  What do we do about abortion?

  What do we do about capital punishment and nuclear war?

  Is homosexual behavior a sin?

  And they became the one big question for me: How, then, are we to live out the Bible today?

  The Question Is “How?”

  What made me so curious and what gave me a deep discontent was how we came to our answers. Some people went straight to the Bible and stayed there; some took one passage and used that passage to overwhelm other passages; yet others read the Bible, appealing to history and change and then to theologians, science, pastors, psychologists, and even to “that’s the way we do things at my church.” I began to see that Christians read the Bible differently, and I began to see that no one group seemed to get it all right. At that time in my life I was asking questions like these:

  • Why is it that one group thinks the charismatic gifts are dead and gone while other groups vibrate with speaking in tongues and words of prophecy?

  • Why is it that two of us can sit down with the same Bible with the same question—Should Christians participate in war?—and come away with two different answers? One can appeal to Joshua and Judges, and another can appeal to Jesus’s statement to love your enemies and to turn the other cheek, and yet another to the cruciform shape of God in the New Testament that challenges the warrior God of some Old Testament passages, even if some of my friends say the New Testament God’s got some warrior in him too.

  • Why do some churches ordain women and let them preach, while other churches have folks who get up and walk out when a woman opens her Bible for some teaching in front of men? Why did this teaching on complementarianism become so important today but arise only in the wake of the Equal Rights Amendment, but get taught as the way the church has always said things?

  • Why do some of my pastor and theologian friends say things about the Trinity that are challenged by both very knowledgeable theologians and church historians and are what many think are “sub” orthodox? And how can they do this with many followers and very few criticizing them?

  • Why do some issues become so incredibly politicized—like same-sex relations—and others—like greed and materialism and military violence and torture—are nearly ignored?

  As a faithful attendee of churches, as one fully committed to the faith, who reads his Bible daily, and who watched and listened to debates unroll and even unravel, I became convinced that it was not as easy to “apply” the Bible as I thought it was. In fact, when it came to contentious issues, how we read the Bible helps us to decide how we are to live. To be perfectly honest, I knew there was plenty of picking and choosing on both sides of every question. I pressed on for two more decades, and I have now come to the conclusion that this question—How, then, are we to live out the Bible today?—is a pressing question for our day. I believe we need to begin asking this question and start explaining ourselves. I believe there is an inner logic to our picking and choosing, but we need to become aware of what it is. (To get to the simple answer that will unfold in the pages that follow, we read the Bible through the lens of our theology, and that’s the basic and undeniable fact.)

  Until we do, we will be open to accusations of hypocrisy. It’s that simple, and it’s that lethal. If you tell me you believe the Bible and seek to live out every bit of it, and if I can find one spot that you don’t—especially if that spot is sensitive or politically incorrect or offensive—then we’ve all got a problem. I taught college students the Bible, and I can assure you that they are fully aware of the “pick-and-choose” method. They are fully convinced, at least many are, that the pick-and-choose method is an exercise in hypocrisy or worse. (What they are not as fully aware of is that they are doing the same thing.)

  What I’ve learned is this: People are afraid of this question once they turn it on themselves and others. Too many of us don’t want to think about this. Too many of us don’t want to admit that we are picking and choosing. Even if we prefer (as I do) to say “adopting and adapting,” we are doing something similar. But I think we need to face this squarely and honestly. I’ve learned that it is time to think about why and how we pick what we pick and why and how we choose what we choose. What can we do to get ourselves to face this question honestly?

  What Will It Take to Get Us to Ask This Question?

  Sometimes it is a classroom setting that provokes this question. I once had a student ask me point-blank in class about this passage: “As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons.”

  “Yo, Scot.” (I had learned that “Yo” meant “Dr.”) “Yo, Scot, since you believe we should preach the kingdom of God today, as Jesus said in Matthew 10:7, why don’t you also believe we should heal the sick as in Matthew 10:8?” What he was asking me, in his playfully snarky way, was why I pick one to do and choose not to do the other. I have done lots of verse 7 but have never done any of verse 8. He had me, but it was one of those moments when I got to ask my favorite question: How, then, are we to live out the Bible today?

  There’s a story here, as there so often is. Joel Martens, the student, at that time was an active member in a Vineyard Church where charismatic gifts are emphasized. I wa
sn’t either Vineyard or charismatic (though I always say, “I’m open!”). Does that mean he’s given to exaggerating or that I’m given to minimizing Matthew 10:8? You answer the question. When I talked to Kris about this classroom experience, she asked why I didn’t ask him, “Do you raise the dead at your church?” You can answer that one too. (When I see Joel next, I’ll ask him in a snarky way.) Anyway, Joel got our class thinking about this question, and his question hasn’t gone away for me.

  More often than not, it is a person who enters into our world that shakes up our thinking and gets us asking this question. Perhaps we encounter someone who speaks in tongues or someone who thinks they can heal others or a friend’s daughter who is a lesbian and a Christian. It’s one thing to say we think homosexuality is sin, which is the uniform church tradition and the best explanation of the Bible in its context, but it’s a completely different pastoral reality when we know a gay or a lesbian and that someone happens to ask us why we believe in Leviticus 20:13a but not in 20:13b—the first prohibits homosexuality, and the second insists on capital punishment for it. Or if we are asked why we think the instruction from nature in Romans 1 about homosexuality is permanent and applicable today, but the one in 1 Corinthians 11 is evidently disposable.

  Here’s what Paul says about “nature” in Romans 1:26: “Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.” But those same persons don’t think Paul’s instructions about nature in 1 Corinthians 11:14–15 are permanent: “Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory?” (emphasis added in both passages). So a lesbian asks why some embrace the appeal to “nature” in Romans 1 while their wives have short hair and their sons have hair pulled back into a ponytail. What then does “natural” mean? Why do we think it’s permanent in one case and temporary in another? That’s the only reason for this example. Again, before you answer that question, it would be really good if, while having coffee with a few friends, you open your Bible to these passages and ask yourselves this question: How, then, are we to live out the Bible today?

  By such personal encounters we are driven to think aloud about what we believe, we are driven to think more carefully about what we think, we are driven back to the Bible and how we read it, we are driven to ask how it is that we are living out the Bible, and we are sometimes driven to our knees to ask for wisdom about contentious issues. One such issue, which will be the focus of the last part of this book, is the giftedness of women for various ministries in the church, including teaching and preaching and pastoring.

  Perhaps we need a visitor to come by, and maybe this book will be that visitor, who gets us to ask this question. I believe we need to ask the question and, together, begin to work it out.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE BIRDS AND I

  Which Way Do You Read the Bible?

  Kris and I are both bird-watchers, something we absorbed from Kris’s Grandma Norman and Kris’s father, Ron Norman, so we have a few bird feeders in our backyard. Which means, whether we like it or not, we feed sparrows and chase or throw things at squirrels. You know you are a birder if you chase squirrels from your feeders by running through the yard yelling wildly and squirting them with the water pistol you bought for your grandson’s birthday next month. You know you are even more of a birder if you decide to keep the water pistol you bought for your grandson’s birthday and get him another gift because squirting squirrels is both effective and a whole lot of fun.1

  Squirrels are a problem, but so are sparrows. If we could get rid of sparrows, we would, because we prefer the cardinals, goldfinches, and chickadees, and we’d love it if some cedar waxwings would visit us. But sparrows are omnipresent in our yard, sometimes as many as fifty fighting for places on our feeders and knocking good seed onto the ground while they look for the perfect little chunk. Because we’ve been watching birds for about forty years, we’ve become adept at recognizing them. It is unusual when we see a bird we don’t recognize. At times we’ll see a rare visitor, like a white-throated sparrow or a rose-breasted grosbeak or a migrating warbler, but not very often. I was in Kansas not long ago and spotted a bird I didn’t recognize, but a professor at Tabor College did from my description: a scissor-tailed flycatcher!

  Sitting on my back porch reading in the summer of 2007, I looked up and saw a flash of soft blue in the bushes next to our fencerow. I didn’t see the whole bird. Only part of it was visible through the green leaves. I got to wondering, and my bird-watching skills kicked in. I said—any birder will tell you this is how it happens, so don’t think there’s anything special here—“Not a blue jay, too small; not an eastern bluebird, the blue is too soft; not an indigo bunting, it is too large and the colors too soft.” I began to look for those distinguishing marks that separate one bird from another. “What kind of a blue bird is this? Could it be a stray mountain bluebird?” No, that’s not possible. Mountain bluebirds don’t wander from the Rockies into the Great Lakes regions during the summer.

  Then the bluish bird moved a bit. I stretched my neck to look closer and caught a full view. I was disappointed. It was someone’s pet blue parakeet. It had escaped its cage and was now a free bird. Tempted to ignore it—after all, it was nothing but a stray pet—I began to take note of its manners. Odd thing, this chance encounter. I wondered how it would behave, and that got me to comparing its behavior with other birds in our yard.

  I immediately saw that our sparrows were—and no other word describes their response—terrorized by our visitor. When the blue parakeet moved even a little, the sparrows scattered like teenage pranksters when a cop car wanders into the neighborhood. When it flew, the sparrows were scared witless and scattered into hiding in bushes or found distance landing on telephone lines. When the parakeet let out its obnoxious sound, the sparrows flew away. Odd, I thought, for the sparrows to be so fearful of a pet bird. Even though they scattered, they eventually found their way back to their usual locations.

  The inhospitality of our sparrows bothered me, so I got up from my comfortable seat, went inside, found my Franciscan brown habit, put it on, tied the rope around my waist, went back on the back porch, and I preached—à la St. Francis according to Giotto—to our sparrows about how to treat visitors. (I really didn’t do this, but I grew up Baptist, and we permit making things up as long as it is “preacher’s license.”) Anyway, the sparrows were scared, and I was learning.

  I was now hooked on backyard social ethics when an odd sort of social miracle occurred before my eyes. The sparrows gradually became accustomed to the blue parakeet. Instead of being shocked by the odd sounds and sudden flights of the parakeet, they became unfazed. In fact, they not only got used to the parakeet, they became best friends, what my daughter Laura calls “BFFs.” When it flew to the feeder, they joined it—not because they were hungry, but because they wanted to be near the blue parakeet. When it flew to the neighbor’s roof, they followed. One time I saw about thirty sparrows surrounding the blue parakeet on the neighbor’s garage.

  Within an hour, the sparrows had adjusted to the parakeet’s strange ways. They didn’t try to teach it to fly as they did, nor did they silence its funny sounds. They let the blue parakeet be a blue parakeet. Our visitor maintained that obnoxious squawk and flew with glorious speed and capacity, taking sharp turns and sudden dips unlike any the sparrows had ever seen. The sparrows may have seemed adjusted, but every now and then that blue parakeet—he stayed around for about a month—did something that frightened the sparrows. The blue parakeet, like Narnia’s Aslan, was not tame, but it became a familiar stranger to our sparrows.

  Chance encounters sometimes lead us deeper into thought. The passages I mentioned in the previous chapter as well as comments from students are for me “blue parakeet experiences.” When we encounter blue parakeet passages in the Bible or in the questions of others, whether we think of something as simple as the Sabbath or foot washing or as complex and emot
ional as women in church ministries or the warrior God theme in the Bible, we have to stop and think, Is this passage for today or not? Sometimes we hope the blue parakeets will go away—as I hoped. After all, it was just a pet. Or perhaps we shoo them away. Or we try to catch them and return them to their cage. I tried to see if I could catch the bird, but he (or she) didn’t even let me get close. It had been caged, got loose, and it wanted to keep its freedom.

  How we respond to passages and questions will determine if we become aware of what is going on or not. When chance encounters with blue parakeet passages in the Bible happen to come our way, we are given the opportunity to observe and learn. In such cases, we really do open ourselves to the thrill of learning how to read the Bible. But like the sparrows, we have to get over our fears and learn to adjust to the squawks of the Bible’s blue parakeets. We dare not try to tame them.

  How do you read the Bible? What happens to you when you encounter blue parakeet passages in the Bible will reveal all you need to know about how you read the Bible. I want to suggest there are three ways to approach the Bible.

  Three Ways

  There are actually more than three ways, but getting every possible option on the table is not important right now. If you’d like to think more about this, Appendix 1 is a quiz that many say creates all kinds of thinking about how to read the Bible. I have chosen to keep the ways simple in order to see the alternatives more starkly. Most people combine these ways, but most people are also often not aware of the way they read the Bible.