Reading Large Chunks of Scripture
Day 6/15
Mark 7

Oops! I'm a day late in posting this. Following several encounters of challenge and confusion with his disciples, the circle of confrontation and invitation to deeper, more organic belief is expanded. In this chunk Jesus moves on to a conflict with the Pharisees, the established religious leaders of his day. It's about faith and daily life. Are we living what we're saying, what we say we believe? Or are we couching our inauthentic or measured responses in our actions, words, presence and relationships with justifications and philisophical re-interpretations. Is Jesus a fundamentalist? Is he encouraging that? Seems like it in a sense. And yet the Pharisees were actually the "fundamentalists" of the day. Jesus challenges them to organic, authentic, concrete faith. It seems that shortly there after Jesus himself is challenged - by a foreign (syrophenician, and thus not Jewish) woman - to live out what he says - that God loves all people. A challenging story chunk. Does she convince him to do something new? Does she change Jesus' mind? Does this encounter irreversibly transform Jesus' faith, practice of it and understanding of sacred community? Was it all planned on his part? Or is it the editing of Mark as he writes down the story that flavors it with such complexity? Hmmm. The whole chunk ends with a deaf mute man, becoming whole, hearing, recognizing, and proclaiming what has happened: "the deaf hear, the mute speak!" I wonder why there was only one such healing when the whole scripture chunk seems to be about really hearing and authentically speaking?

It all makes me wonder about today. We're so split - in and out of the church community - over polarization: liberal vs. liberal, hymns vs. praise songs, styrofoam vs. paper, same sex couples vs. other sex couples, traditional vs. modern, big vs. small, zune vs. ipod. In the end I hear Jesus challenging the Pharisees, the disciples, the deaf mute man, even the Syrophenician woman - everyone he encounters (even us today as readers) to authentic faith, which is organic in nature, action-oriented in practice, engaging, committed, focused on real people as opposed to policy and/or programs. It's about here and now as well as the future and not yet. On his facebook page, Jim Kitchens shares the moto he hopes for the church community he serves, "We take the Bible seriously, but not literally." Maybe he's on to something. (More about Jim on pomomusings, Amazon.com)