In worship this weekend, I encouraged people to be singleminded in loving God with all of their minds, and I urged them to read the Bible daily. In fact, I offered specific suggestions of online resources to assist them in the habit of daily Bible reading, including one which takes you through the entire Bible in the course of the year. (Bibleplan.org.)
In one of those God-chuckling moments, I opened my email yesterday to read the daily Scripture. I found myself enmeshed in one of those crazy, is-that-really-in-the-Bible stories. 1 Kings 13 tells of a prophet that follows God’s command to travels great distances and speak harsh words to an evil king. The prophet is successful in his efforts and, mission accomplished, heads home. After all of that work and travel, however, prophet is under a command of God to not eat, drink, or follow the same path home. A false prophet lies to him, “God told me to tell you to come back to my house for supper.” As a result of being lied to by this false prophet, the first prophet ends up killed by a lion on the road. The false prophet then, in mourning, collects the body to bury in a tomb that they will one day share. The end. Uh, the word of the Lord thanks be to God? I pondered what to make of this story. Clergy may work their hearts out and still get chewed up while on the journey? Watch out for colleagues who will mess you up? Someone suggested that the point of this story is as simple as it sounds- don’t get led astray. That might be, but I think it’ll take a better preacher than I to unravel it fully.
The thing of it is, anyone who took my sermon seriously and took action (and I hope there were some) had the same story delivered to their email inbox yesterday morning. Asking people to read the Bible all the way through is asking for trouble, because they will encounter messy stories that have teachings that are oblique at best. The Bible is neither as blandly spiritual nor as clearly logical as most of us have been led to believe. Encountering the entire thing is going to expose us to things that mystify and confuse and maybe even worry us. Which sounds like what life does to us each day.
Maybe it will be okay for people to see what all is contained in the Bible. It’s not a simple book to read, but, then again, life’s not always simple, either.
