There is something worse than ignoring or neglecting the Bible. Professing Christians are in a more dangerous place than outright, unrepentant sinners. The worse reality is to read the Bible and not do what it says. James, the Lord’s brother, wrote, ” Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says” (James 1:22). And so deceive yourselves. A few verses later James writes again about a loose, uncontrolled tongue leading to “deceiving” ourselves (James 1:26).  The word for deceive in verse 22 means to cheat or mislead ourselves and has a slant toward thinking or the mind. The word for deceive in verse 26 has a slant toward desire or feeling. James has already warned “Don’t be deceived” (1:16). Listening to or reading the word and loosely talking about it, but not doing (obeying) the word leads to a comprehensive, permeating deception. Remember, it is a deception. That means you won’t know you have fallen victim to it. If you do know, then you’re not deceived.

Shouldn’t this create an urgent if not meaningful pause in our “use” of the Bible? Isn’t deception the Serpent’s primal strategy to lead to the fall of mankind? Paul reports that Eve was deceived (1 Timothy 2:14). The more exposure one has to the Bible and its teaching without a complementary and intentional passion to do what the Bible says is on the slipperiest slope of all. As a pastor I am forever hearing about the slippery slope of this or that or this cultural trend or that theological position. Rarely do I hear Christians admitting that they are in danger of the most horrific slippery slope. Rather, they prance around as if because they’ve read a verse or two and read some moralistic story that accompanies the verse(s) and as an result experience their fuzzy, warm devotional feeling, they are obeying the Word. The last concept that would ever enter their dutiful minds is “deception.” Some read the Bible so they can adroitly debate those who are not Christians or who are “those kind” of Christians; some read the Bible so they can be good, moral, sweet people; some read the Bible to feel delightfully comforted by it–all these are using the Bible for themselves. Could deception be reigning supreme? Because someone faithfully and diligently uses the Bible does not mean he or she is actually encountering the living, flame-throwing, love-lavishing God.

James gets to the nitty of the gritty. “You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless?…so faith without deeds is dead” (James 2:20, 26). Foolish. Useless. Dead. Bummer. James even says, “…a person is justified by what he does, and not by faith alone” (2:24). A Christian who has no engagement with the marginalized of our world (the widows and the orphans in James’ day, 1:27) is living an unjustified life, a kind of faith without deeds. It is not a saving faith. Deception run rampant and because it is deception, we laughingly slide down the slippery slope. Isn’t this fun! And, no, I don’t think James is contradicting Paul at all. At the level of authentic Christian formation, James and Paul are on the exact same page.

What am I trying to say? The very Word we approach and read with ourselves primarily in mind so we can be fed, informed and comforted is the very energizing reality that can deceive. For every degree of knowledge without a corresponding degree of obedience propels us farther into the darkness of deception. The letter kills, the Spirit gives life (see 2 Corinthians 3:6). The Spirit was not given to give us Bible-reading goosebumps, but to expel us into the world of people wandering in the darkness of the fall and sin, the world of anti-Christ values and ways of relating (which the church absorbs in an attempt to be “relevant”), the world of naked, famine-ridden children crying over slaughtered parents, a world of oppressed women beaten to submission in the name of God, the world of people anesthetized to any meaning and purpose by things, things and more things. The Spirit was never given to work for us so we could live a comfortable, American life.

“You can’t reduce this book [Bible] to what you can handle; you can’t domesticate this book to what you are comfortable with. You can’t make it your toy poodle, trained to respond to your commands” (Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book, p 66).

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Jesus said, “You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (John 5:39-40).

Imagining that merely possessing and studying the Scriptures, the Pharisees believed they had life. Life with God in God’s kingdom. They were Book-obsessed. Book worms.  Jot and tittle types that boasted in owning “the oracles of God.”  When “the Word made flesh” stands before them, opposes them, warns them, the Book-centered folks dismiss him as an alien, as a life-destroyer, not the life-bringer.

The Pharisee syndrome is still alive and well in USAmerican Christianity. Many Christians are much more at ease with studying the Bible than coming to Jesus. Reading a Book is safer, more comfortable than relating to a Person, especially an enigmatic Person like Jesus.  An insidious pride lurks in the heart when one presumes to know the Book, to possess it and revere it and use it to fence off undesirable types of people from our tidy lives. People, well-intentioned, begin to substitute finding something new and refreshing in the Bible with relating to a holy, very present God.

As a pastor I’ve observed how the Bible is used to distance a person from God the Spirit. If I view the Bible as a box of matches from which I can draw one match and light it and see the flame and feel the fleeting warmth and call that a devotional life, then I am happy. To walk into the flame-thrower named Jesus the Christ is a different story. I don’t want to be burned up in the fiery passion and mission of God–that’s too extreme.  I’m happy with “this little light of mine…”.  Living as a whole burnt offering is too…what shall I say? Indelicate. I want to stay in charge of my commitment and piece-meal it out at my discretion. Dying to self is a nice metaphor after all.

Imagine a newly married couple reading to each other each night from a Christian book on the sexual life in marriage. They  even memorize  sentences or paragraphs of it. They write songs about love and intimacy. They arrange sexual topics into a nice groupings of thought and make charts and graphs. They study all sorts of other books to understand what is in their manual…medical and anatomical definitions, history, and issues. After years of this they wonder why they are still childless. They know the book backwards and forwards. They diligently study the book, but have not come intimately to each other as persons.

You diligently study the Scriptures…you refuse to come to me. Saints and scholars have not been reluctant to make daring parallels between the sexual life of a man and woman and life with God. The Song of Songs is notoriously used to make those parallels. Eugene H. Peterson as a pastor strongly suggests that a person’s prayer life is a mirror of their sexual life (in Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work on the “Song of Songs”). It is entirely possible to use the Bible as a book about intimacy with God and actually be very far from God. Jesus confronts folks who thought they were intimate with him and passionate for him, but were in fact “evil-doers” (see Matthew 7:21-23).

A common objection I hear to this is, “The only way I can know God is through the Bible. The Bible has to be first, God second. If I don’t go to the Bible first, then I may concoct crazy things about ‘God’.” This sounds noble and right, but is in fact a lie. God has not locked the awesome Trinitarian reality of Being in a book with a cover and pages with ink. Jesus had to bluntly make this plain to Nicodemas in a night conversation. My intimate life with Julie and the fact of the existence of my four lovely daughters never were locked in a sexual informational guide. Never. Adam and Eve were procreating the race long before the printing press gave us sex manuals. The living God-head Three in One has been and is and forever will be independent of the Bible. God is totally able and free to introduce God-reality to anyone, anytime, anywhere. The humbling strategy that the living God has chosen is for those who intimately know God to go and bear witness to God’s loving, present, gracious, saving Trinitarian Being. We aren’t commissioned to go read a manual to people, but to bear fruit as we abide (stay in union with) Jesus.

Behind the insidious insistence upon the Bible first and God second is the fear that God cannot make himself truly known without our help, you know, those of us who “know the Bible.” The Bible becomes our precarious and presumptuous replacement of the Spirit poured out on the planet at Pentecost.  Again, we would rather have a nice, controlled “lamp to my feet” than a fire-breathing, untameable Spirit to contend with.

Please, please don’t misunderstand me. I am not belittling or ignoring or demeaning the Holy Scriptures. My passion is that the Bible find its rightful place in our lives. The Pharisees no doubt loved God and they made a fatal mistake of placing holy writings between them and Jesus. Why do we think we cannot make the same grievous mistake? I am afraid many have…yes, even pastors.

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Meet Rhea.

I visit Rhea about once a week with a church member who has been Rhea’s long time friend. Rhea is 84 years old and lost her husband about eight years ago.

We were sitting in Rhea’s rooms at a local assisted living complex. My friend, Ray, was inviting Rhea to his upcoming birthday party. Ray is turning 86 years old.

I am not sure how or when the conversation turned, but I discovered that Rhea was recounting her husband’s death. I was stunned to silence as I watched her relive his death moment by moment in her mind. Rhea would speak a few sentences and stop. I could tell that in her mind’s eye she was “seeing”  the next scene. Her husband had experienced a heart attack and stroke. She painted the shocking and chaotic scene at home and the arrival of the ambulance, the hectic trip to the hospital, the crucial flurry in the trauma area of the E.R., the moving of her husband to a room. She is in the room with her husband. “He did not speak to me,” she quietly said. She sat next to him for two days. She spoke to him over and over, assured by the doctors that he could hear her. “He did not speak to me.” The words had the same impact on me as if she’d said, “My child died.”

Rhea became silent for an uncomfortable amount of time. She was seeing something she did not want to see. There in her rooms her eyes teared up and she whispered, “Then he was gone and he never talked to me.”

The way Rhea repeated this refrain made me rethink conversation. I so easily lose the pricelessness, dare I say holiness of speech between a husband and wife, between friend and friend. I will never hear her husband’s voice, but she heard it and then lost it by his death. I have no idea what they talked about, how they talked, if they ever fiercely argued, how they made up; I’ll never know. But I could not escape the profound heartbeat and loneliness in her words, “He did not speak to me.”

When Rhea stopped remembering I felt like I had walked a sacred path with her. That she had invited me (and Ray) to some “private rooms” of her soul. Ray was so sweet as he held Rhea’s hand as she relived the starkly pivotal event in her life.

Visiting older people has been like walking into a palace filled with treasures. I’ve chatted with a 93 year old man who met General George Patton in North Africa and Patton was wearing his pearl-handled pistols. Six degrees of separation and all that.

I saw Rhea today…at Ray’s birthday party. She was happy and engaged in the festivities. Yet, for a brief few minutes, Rhea had opened a door for me into the hall of all that is valuable.

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Remember Ralphie Parker in A Christmas Story? Ralphie’s dream gift was a Red Ryder 200-shot Carbine Action Range Model Air Rifle. I loved the scene where Ralphie imagines that he saves his family from the bad guys who try to storm the house from the back yard. The family cringes under the table in the kitchen as Ralphie with his sharp-shooter eyes takes out the desperadoes.

As I ponder that little pardner, I think Ralphie is onto something deeply profound about cowboy stuff and boys…and men. I suggest something on the scale of Jungian archetypal, if you catch my drift. Because what happened to Ralphie’s imagination happened to mine after I bought myself a pair of  Justin genuine leather, pointy-toed cowboy boots. I bought them in, get this, Justin, TX, where they were made.

Something strangely dusty and smelling of the open range came over me as I slipped them on. I squinted my eyes and felt the urge to spit and talk with a deep Western drawl. “Yee haaa! These y’here are some mighty fine boots, y’all. Somebody rustle up some grub for this old cowhand while I go unsaddle and bed down Lightning, my horse. Then I’m gonna mosey on over to the Shady Gulch and quench my thirst. I hope none of them boys in thar is hankering for a fight ’cause I got myself an itchy trigger finger tonight. I’ll be back shortly for the grub, y’hear, Darlin’ ?”I walked away suddenly wanting to  whistle the haunting theme music to “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly…wha wha whaaaaaaa; doodle, doodle, dooooo…”.

I reached down and took the boots off and instantly I was myself wanting to parse the Greek verb apostello. I thought of brie and white wine and Starbuck’s lattes. I wanted to ride in my Pontiac and wear comfortable things like my PJ’s. Being dusty with a dry throat seemed revolting. And grub? What the heck is grub? I was stunned witless. What sort of massive electro-magnetic field exists in those boots?

Looking around to see if anyone was watching I shakily slipped the boots back on. A harmonica began to play and I heard a horse whinny. I had the urge to blurt out, “Now you git! I’m the law in this town, and this town ain’t big enough for the two of us.” And spit while I stared, all squinty-eyed, the vermin down.

Carl Jung would probably say that there is a Ralphie in all of us. Ralphie never goes away no matter how old we get.  What brings our inner Ralphie out is anything cowboy. That is the fun of a bb gun or a pair of boots. Y’all.

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Seven of us crowded into a van and headed west to Holland, Michigan from Hudsonville. We were scheduled to serve lunch to the Holland Mission residents. One of the residents is from our church and is completing the program and learning to be a certified builder by trade.  This was the first time a band of us did this.

When we got there, Jake, our insider, gave us a brief tour of the Mission. I felt like I was in a nice hotel; it had the feel of a well-organized, friendly, resident-centered Christian ministry. We shot a little pool and played a little foosball. After a tour of the recycling building, we reported for duty.

We had to wear special attire–baseball-style caps and/or hair nets, aprons and rubber gloves.  You can imagine the masculine humor as we snapped on our rubber gloves. Ray looked like a doctor: “Paging Dr. Minnema; paging Dr. Minnema.”

We served “left-overs” since it was Saturday.  After the residents were served, we were free to make our own plates of food. I enjoyed chicken cacciatore over rice, a pork chop, lasagna and a pizza bread stick. The best “left overs” I’ve had in a while. I also took a chocolate-covered doughnut the size of Montana and ended up giving it away I was so stuffed.

Ray, Dan and I sat with a resident named Chris. He’d been in the Army and recently got cross ways with the law. He was a temporary resident waiting to get into the Veterans Facility in Grand Rapids.  Eager to befriend Chris, we asked questions about his life and he told us some of his story. What I thought was memorable was Chris’ time as a restaurant cook at a honky tonk in Miami, FL called “The Out House.” One time a show was booked called “A Taste of Key West.” Chris laughed as he told us, “We had ‘a taste of Key West’ at ‘the out house’.” Chris came from what sounded like a dysfunctional family, but still had a sense of hope about him. His court hearing is next Tuesday.

With our duties accomplished, we piled in the van and headed East. We might go back to the Mission on a week night (a non-left overs meal). We might go on a Sunday for the dinner meal when the eating is mighty fine we’re told. I kept thinking about Chris and what his future holds. Bless him, God, and guide him.

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Emergent theology seems to have reached a muddling place.  All kinds of ideas are being creatively combined to produce a “new kind of Christianity.” Others more competent than I am have pointed out that what is touted as new is really actually old.  Brian McLaren offers old line Christian Liberalism dressed up in postmodern clothes, but it is still old Liberalism.

A sticking point in today’s emergent conversations is the exclusivity of Jesus Christ as both the only authentic revelation of the true God and the only access point to that God. Brian McLaren rightly questions the haranguing snootyness of some factions in Christianity who harp on “who’s in” and “who’s out” of authentic faith. What I think Brian misses, however, is that it is one thing to question the way Christ’s exclusivity is presented to a wrecked world, but it is a whole other thing to make Jesus just one of the many nice (and religious) ways to get to God. Christ’s exclusivity seems to bother McLaren and others a lot; it seems too intolerant; it seems religiously bigoted; it can be infuriating.

Here’s the skinny. Jesus Christ is an infuriating person. He was in his own day and he is in our day as well. Many are aware of the lexical slight of hand that McLaren uses in his interpretation of John 14:6. He seems to not like that verse, and he certainly doesn’t like the way that verse is used by some. On the second concern–the way the verse is used by some, McLaren has a valid point. To use the verse obnoxiously and intolerantly is way out of line. I don’t think Jesus spoke it as a blunt weapon to be put into our “witnessing kit.” Context is vital.

Yet, the statement is there: “…no one comes to the Father except through me.” That is exclusive on the face of it. Jesus spoke it to the Eleven in the Upper Room conversation. Yet, we must go deeper into this idea of exclusivity. Thankfully, again, Jesus helps us…this time in his prayer recorded in John 17.

Take off your shoes because we are on holy ground. The Son is addressing the Father in his last extended session of prayer with his friends. After this prayer, the dominoes tip quickly, tumbling toward the cross.  In this prayer Jesus says this, “I revealed you those you gave me…” (v. 6). There seems to be an echo to John 1:18, “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” Exactly who did Jesus make known and/or reveal? In John 17:3 we hear Jesus praying this: “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (emphasis added).

We know that Jesus’ exclusive claim to make Israel’s exclusive God known infuriated the Pharisees and entertained the Sadducees. We know that Rome winked at this strange Jewish religion and gave Israel special permission to maintain their exclusive religious beliefs. Yet, when the early church began, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to spread into the religiously pluralistic world of the Roman Empire, the exclusive declaration “Jesus is Lord” (and Caesar is not) became dangerous to your Christ-following health. “Jesus is Lord” infuriated Rome.  As N. T. Wright has pointed out: the most advanced religion in the world and the most advanced political system in the world conspired together to stamp out the exclusivity of Jesus the Christ.

There is only one authentic God. Only Jesus has revealed that one authentic God. Only in relationship with Jesus Christ is that one true God known (experienced).  In fact, Jesus even explains that “eternal life” is only in that relationship. It is in no other relationship or religion.

There is no grand cosmic unity beneath the surface of all world religions including Christianity-viewed-as-a-religion. Both Old Testament and New Testament concur that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the God of the Lord Jesus Christ sits in judgment upon the religions of the world. I know this is hard to acknowledge. It’s more palatable to muddle. Muddling defuses the exclusivity and we can all be very nice, imagining the great vast unity just below this world’s volatile religious surface. But that fantasy just won’t work in the real world of the Jesus Way.

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