Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Whateth the crapeth?


I’ve been eyeballs deep in the Old Testament. It’s seriously unsteady ground. Nothing about it fits into neat little packages and the “anemic” descriptions of “characters” that I grew up with are embarrassing and downright untruthful.

David, for example, is a selfish womanizing murderer and not just in that “unfortunate episode” with Bathsheeba. An honest reading reveals there were no heroes of the Hebrew bible… none. Every single person was warped, twisted and downright human. Interesting.

The psalms are 40% laments, Jeremiah rants nearly incoherently at God for an entire chapter (and often in snippets elsewhere}, Ezekiel isn’t so thrilled with YHWH himself, the book of Job seems to slyly take shots at typical ‘easy’ answers and tidy theological explanations and then there’s the book of Lamentations. Each ancient voice saying “whateth the crapeth?” (that was a joke…)

It seems to me the ancients regularly questioned, ranted, screamed and left the edges of their stories raw with inexplaination. As much as the Hebrew bible makes me want to scream in frustration, as much as YHWH sometimes seems schizophrenic I prefer this true to life version of faith. I’ve started to understand that what lies across my lap when I read the bible is the record of a community literally wrestling with God and most often totally not getting it. There is nothing static here, there is honesty among manipulation, there is fear, pain, drop kicking of faith and seeking it out.. Life is messy… there is no cleaning it up.  

“He is not a tame lion," said Tirian. "How should we know what he would do?...” – The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis

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