Return To Remembrance
Sometimes we look back over a stretch of life and think how little we've changed, how much time has passed with nothing much to show for it. Where did the years go? Other seasons, the time seems somehow more full, more contentful. Perhaps we live more, but age less, in such times?
Despite my appreciation of all scholarly erudition, and my steady effort to avoid the spiritual emaciation that post-modern hermeneutics inevitably entails, by my 50th birthday little in scholarship really fired up my imagination and made me want to jump in. I felt a failure. I also felt somehow that it was wrong to be made to feel this way. But what to do?
In God's providence, and perhaps as a sign of his quirky sense of humor, I found myself the most improbable and unlikely, almost unwilling, leader—albeit a stand-in leader—of a group of students to study the history and geography of the Bible in Israel as part of a class at Asbury Theological Seminary called "OT 540: Historical Geography of the Bible." Never had I anticipated doing this, in fact, I rather recoiled from the idea. I had always looked askance at pastors and professors who were always leading “study trips” abroad, droning on and on about going to Israel or John Wesley Pilgrimage sites in England as though that qualified them to be something other than a tourist. I vaguely felt, probably unfairly, that they were compensating somehow for some inadequacy, some lack. Using the "cool factor" of exotic travel as a substitute for solid publications, powerful preaching and teaching, or effective teaching. For whatever reason, I was not inclined to embrace this. A few older colleagues talked about “getting Stone over to a dig in Israel” almost like a fraternity initiation or hazing ritual. I figured I’d let that go by.
But…a colleague had to drop out of this travel course that was already organized…asked me to go instead…and then played the ultimate trump card: urged me to bring along my son. “Think how much it would mean to you guys to do this together…” So one cold, wet night in January 2006 after lugging my suitcases up a steep, twisting, narrow staircase of about 75 high stone steps, I looked out my window and realized I was looking down on the Valley of Hinnom, in Hebrew, Ge-Hinnom or "Gehenna," the term Jesus used for hell! It was the one piece of Jerusalem’s geography I actually knew! I had to laugh out loud. God indeed has a sense of humor. So I penned a blog entry that very night entitled "A Room Overlooking Hell." Those of you who know me will know that the rest, as they say, is (recent) history.
In the 3 or 4 years since, I can only say my life has undergone a transformation. That 3-week experience with Jerusalem University College, their president, Dr. Paul Wright, the students and friends of Asbury Theological Seminary, and my bright, impressionable son, reawakened in me a piercing, almost painful awareness that the Bible is not merely a set of cryptic signs to be construed by the reader. Nor is it merely a sample of ancient language, nor even is it a body of literature. The text of the Bible is part of a large, interlocking, multi-layered interaction in which the ancient Israelites, their neighbors, enemies, friends, and competitors struggled to create a life for themselves in a very particular spot on the earth, a spot of land that in its own peculiar way, became a character, and actor, in the drama. And this all happened because the heart of God, broken over the spoliation of his good creation brought about by his finest of all creations, humanity, could not just let it all blow away in the winds of eternity. Implementing an all-embracing solution for an all corrupting catastrophe, God began relentlessly to renovate and recreate the very fabric of creation by entering into the threads, the warp and woof, of history, one life, one family, one tribe, one nation, one land, until he finally assumed flesh and blood himself to present himself as the final and perfect redemption price to take back his sick and shattered world. A broken world received a broken God, and life triumphed over death.
The Bible is the precipitate, the distillate, the sediment, the fallout, the log of this passionate, personal, political and social investment by God of himself in his creation. More than merely signs, language, literature, more than even messages sent by authors to readers, more even than revelations of unchanging, abstract doctrinal truths (it is all of those to be sure!), the Bible is the meshing point, the integrative intersection at which all of God's actions to take back his world flow together and find expression. The word became flesh; but it then became…text…texts. So yes, it's divine revelation. But it's also intransigently human authors talking to readers, some known to them, but like most authors, most readers unknown and far in the future. It's definitely literature, but not all of it. Some of it is deadly dull, boring lists and reports—about as literary as a Form 1040…about as spiritually compelling as a survey platt or an autopsy report. And surely it's language, that most characteristically human capability so laced with intimations of the divine. But all this coheres, co-inheres, as a living, vital organism of truth in which events, persons, places literary forms, linguistic features, ancient politics and eternal realities all dance around each other, within each other, and invite us, as the voice said to Augustine, Tolle lege! "Take, read!"
And for it all to make sense, well, it helps to be there. Or at least, to have been there. St. John knew. “That which we have seen and heard, which our hands have touched…” Hard to imagine John’s gnostic detractors, or their post-modern Neo-Gnostic counterparts, being easy with that, having worked so hard to forget it.
One cold January night in 2006, I was there. And I remembered. All of it. All at once.
God willing, I won't ever forget again.
