Ruminations

I’m finding it interesting to see how our environment so colors what we read in the Word.

We tend to interpret our world based on our experiences. While that works relatively well in our normal environment, it typically works poorly in a foreign environment. I learned that the hard way many years ago on my first trip to Brazil. Standing on a busy, metropolitan street corner, I was innocently flashing the “OK” sign (index finger and thumb making an “o” and the other three fingers sticking upwards) at cars. I was shocked to see them flipping me off, angrily blowing their horns and seemingly wanting to get out of their cars and hurt me.

I was even more shocked when a cop (a military policeman with a sub-machine gun strapped across his front) rudely slammed me up against a building in the spreadeagle position, barking orders at me that I couldn’t understand.

Thankfully the friend I was waiting on arrived at that moment and explained in Portuguese to the cop that I was an idiot and didn’t realize I was telling everyone to go have intercourse with themselves. Something that was normal, and correct, in my culture, meant the exact opposite in that one.

Being a prime guilty party, I marvel at how we do this in the Bible. Blithely and sloppily painting it with what we think it means based on our experience in life, we exegete it and extrapolate it to fit our understanding. The end result is that we not only miss the point, we mess ourselves up.

It ends up being something akin to reading the Constitution through the eyes of Mickey Mouse. Mickey is fun and entertaining; the Constitution was created with suffering, sacrifice and blood. The Constitution interpreted through Mickey’s eyes is going to be quite different than through the eyes of a patriot on Lexington Green.

The Jesus we talk about in churches tends to not be the Jesus presented in the Gospels. We have convinced ourselves that he was prim and proper, polite and quiet; I fear that we’re using Mickey’s glasses.