Debbie Blue - From Stone to Living Word: Letting the Bible Live Again

FROM STONE
TO LIVING
WORD

FROM STONE
TO LIVING
WORD

letting the BIBLE live again

DEBBIE BLUE

2008 by Debbie Blue

Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blue, Debbie.

From stone to living word : letting the Bible live again / Debbie Blue.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-58743-190-6 (pbk.)
1. BibleCriticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.

BS511.3.B63 2008
220.6dc22 2007029555

Unless otherwise indicated, scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Contents

PART TWO: Reviving the Dead
Marrow

PART ONE
MAKING
STONES

Nooses and Knots

Im not good with answers. I used to do okay with them on tests in school, but lately someone asks, How do you get to 35E? and I cant remember any street names or which way is east. The other day when I was getting my hair cut, a woman asked me where I lived and all I could do was point. I did manage, in the end, By the river. She looked at me like I was two and said, Thats nice.

When someone from my church says theyd like to arrange a time to get together because they have some questions, I tend to get a little panicky. I love it when people want to get together to talk. I like having coffee with people and listening to them put their lives into words. Im amazed at lives. They are heartbreaking and outrageous and beautiful and sad. Its when I get the feeling that people might need me to do more than listenneed me to offer guidancethat I feel the possibility of clarity vanish, the ambiguity of every situation rushes in. This is admittedly not a good quality for a church leader.

The word pastor derives from sheepherder, animal husbandry. Herd seems different from lead, less gallant. Last summer my kids and I went to the Minnesota Sheep and Wool Festival. It was in Mora, a small town about half an hour from our farm. We saw lots of shepherds there. Some wore dirty jeans and coughed and spit. Some had beer bellies. A young couple who looked more urban than rural was selling cheese. Sheeps cheese. They milked their flocks and then laced the product with fennel and rosemary. I wonder if shepherds ever really watched their flocks or if they sat in the shade playing cards or the lute or smoking and drinking. Did shepherds really lead the sheep, or was it more like they followed them around, yelling out occasionally to try to scare away coyotes? I dont know that much about shepherds. I dont know if pastor is a very good word for what preachers do. Im certainly startled when someone addresses me as Pastor Blue. It seems funny to me. Not just funny weird, but it makes me want to laugh funny. Not at them, but just the whole idea.

It seems like the church has a reputation for being a place you go for answers, or to get your life straightened out. Thats probably a lot because the church has encouraged this image of itself. Some churches promise this on billboards or cable TV: Are you messed up? Is your life in shambles? Jesus can make a difference in your life right now, this minute. A smiling man vows that his church is committed to helping every person, regardless of background and economic status, to achieve his or her fullest potential. He seems comfortable, as if he belongs in the TV studio with his nicely fitting suit and open collar and his haircut and the bright lights and his perfect teeth. Call 1-800-555-5555. I wonder who is on the other end of the line and what they say. Maybe something wonderful and helpful. And there are testimonials. I grew up hearing constant testimonials from former drug addicts or atheist devil worshipers or gang members, stories of how people walked through the doorway of a church and from that moment on their lives got better, cleaner. I believe people can help people and churches can help people. Maybe these churches really do deliver what they advertise, but I cant help thinking its a misrepresentation of what faith is like.

Often when Im struggling to write a sermon, feeling more like a squirrel than a shepherd, Ill vaguely remember something Father Zossima said. So I scan the pages of TheBrothers Karamazov looking for that sublime or searing something. Its usually around midnight, and I usually get a headache, and I usually dont find it, and I wish I could just sit down with him and ask him a few questions. I realize hes a character in a book, but I admire him. I like his style. Eduard Thurneysen describes Zossimas pastoral approach: It is not designed to remove [peoples] burdens, to lead them out of the uncertainties of their lives, but it is intended to lead [people] into them truly and for the first time,... for in persevering in the uncertainties of life, he sees the only way of redemption.

I honestly dont know what it would even quite mean to straighten a life out. I have hardly ever seen anything alive that seemed very straight or very neat. Im not sure if you can keep anything that is alive entirely clean. Being alive is just very wild. Nerve endings and eating and anger and orgasms. Ive heard that the color you paint your bedroom can affect how you feel when you wake up in the morning, and so can clouds. Every moment it seems like you truly can and truly cant predict what will happen every next moment. I dont even know what dark matter and dark energy are, but apparently they are the dominant constituents of the universe. Theres the warping and curving of time and space, extra space dimensions, quantum jitters. Uncertain is too mild a way of putting itits outrageous to be alive. Life isnt simple and coherent. It is inexplicable and lush and desperate and sad and beautiful and scary. I dont know how anyone could figure it out. The factors are beyond figuring. It would be like stuffing sunflowers and giant sequoias and birth and death and ten thousand variables into an equation. And yet we all seem to be constantly trying.

People talk a lot about the necessity of stability: we must have stable homes, a stable environment for our children, stable personalities, stable marriages, stable jobs, as if stability were the highest good. But even though my family eats dinner together, though we have managed to establish a bedtime routine, though the kids generally brush their teeth at least two times a day, I dont feel like I encounter all that much that I could very accurately describe as quite stable. What does stability really even look like?

I know what striving for the appearance of stability looks like, like me not wailing and pounding my chest (even though I feel like it) when my ten-year-old son says maybe this year hed rather I didnt join him in the school cafeteria for Parent Lunch Day. Like my copastors walking into the sanctuary with what seems like perfect equanimity even though five seconds before church we were all snapping at each other and freaked out because theres no communion bread and the baptistery flooded and Jonathans parents, who suspect us of being liberal pagan imposters, are in the front pew and Russells preaching a sermon he entitled (perhaps a tad recklessly) There is No Hell. Striving for the appearance of stability seems to involve being a little removed, to require some rational detachment.