My Bible is Crowded
Every morning after tending to the dogs and getting my coffee, I sit down for some time alone with God and the Bible. I’ve done this more years than I can count. However, I’m finding the room increasingly crowded as the years go by. It seems not to matter what part of the Bible I’m in, I run into old friends waiting on me there. There are my old Bible professors and preachers I’ve heard through the years. My parents and grandparents are lurking about in most books, with their repeated admonitions in hand.
The faces of people I’ve counseled with specific texts pop up at times. The stories of joy or tragedy and the names of the people to whom they happened are there also. Then there are the elders and ministry co-workers who show up when I come across a passage we lived through or argued about in some past day. I see pews full of faces from the congregations where I’ve preached as I read again scriptures that were texts for past sermons. As I said, my Bible is crowded.
Sometimes the room is filled with people I’ve never met. There are the composers and musicians who turned scriptures into songs that wedged themselves in my cranium. There are authors of devotional books, theological tomes, commentaries, and special studies I’ve tossed on the compost of my mind through the years.
Of course, the authors of the Biblical books show up along with the people to whom they were writing. And there are the seminal church leaders and pivotal reformers who pipe up and demand to be heard when I come across passages which formed the foundation for their struggles with the church.
All these people are joined by the faces of people I’ve met on six continents who see different things in my Bible than people of my region do. I want to ask them what they are hearing that I tend to miss, and I’m naïve enough to think I may hear them tell me at times.
Yes, my Bible is crowded, so crowded at times that I wonder if I can hear God’s voice in it at all. Is there any room for God to speak in this crowded room I meant to be just me and him? Do all of these people who join us and make so much racket block out God’s voice completely? I wonder sometimes.
Most of all, less welcome and looming above all these other voices are the Nephilim (also known as my wishes, rooted in my American consumer culture and willful nature). The unredeemed portions of my flesh want the Bible to say certain things to me. I want it to vindicate my warped values. I long for it to validate my selfish ambitions and confirm my hidden self-interest. Any unoccupied words tend to get filled with my pre-conceived convictions. These voices often claim to be God and sometimes, God help me, I believe them.
My Bible is crowded and if I’ve learned anything through the years it is that I can never read the Bible by myself. Even when I am alone, I read my Bible in community. My Bible was preserved by others, translated by others, printed by others, interpreted and taught to me by others, and incarnated in the lives of still others. Any attempt to have an exclusive encounter with God’s words is more than naïve, it is downright arrogant.
Can I still hear God in all these other voices? Yes, I think I can. In fact, that may be the only, or at least the best, way to hear God. It is all these voices that help me distinguish the Nephilim from the Lord. If I can’t convince most of those voices to be at peace with a reading, I’m probably on shaky ground thinking it is from God. Where the voices chime in together with an “Amen” I am on fairly safe ground.
So, yes, my Bible is crowded, just as it should be. Lord, thank you for all the people who join us when it is just you and me together in a room with the Bible.