We Make the Road by Walking

the second creation story presents us with our challenge as human beings. We constantly make a crucial choice: Do we eat from the Tree of Aliveness – so that we continue to see and value the goodness of creation and so reflect the image of the living God? Or do we eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – constantly misjudging and playing God and as a result mistreating our fellow creatures?

Like wood, reality has a grain. Like a river, it has a current. Like a story, it has characters and setting and conflict and resolution. Like poetry, it has syntax and structure, so letters are taken up in words, and words are taken up in phrases and sentences, and they’re all taken up in a magnificent pattern of beauty and meaning that we can glimpse and savour, even if it’s too big and deep to comprehend fully.

This Word or Logos, he said, was ‘made flesh’ in a man named Jesus. In other words, if we want to know what God is like and what the universe is about, we should pay attention to the logic, meaning, wisdom and patterns found in the life of Jesus. He communicated the logos, or logic, of God in his teachings. He lived the logos, or pattern, of God in his life. He showed the logos, or essence, of God in the way he treated others.

Share with someone this week – a family member, a friend, a co-worker or an acquaintance – the idea that we all live by a certain logos or logic. Ask them which logos they see to be most powerful in today’s world – rivalry, compliance, meaningless mechanism or love.

For ancient people in oral cultures, a story was like a hypothesis. A good and helpful story, like a tested hypothesis, would be repeated and improved and enhanced from place to place and generation to generation. Less helpful stories would be forgotten like a failed theory, or adjusted and revised until they became more helpful. Sometimes, competing stories would stand side by side like competing theories, awaiting a time when one would prevail – or both would fail, and a new story would arise with more explanatory power. In all these ways, storytelling was, like the scientific method, a way of seeking the truth, a way of grappling with profound questions, a way of passing on hard-won insights. As our ancestors deepened their understanding, their stories changed – just as our theories change.

We eventually come to understand God as one who consistently prefers non-violence over violence, equality over dominance and justice over injustice. Taken together, these stories make one of the most audacious claims in all of history: the living God doesn’t uphold the status quo . . . but repeatedly disrupts it and breaks it open so that something better can emerge and evolve.

Through the ten plagues, we might say, God got the people out of slavery. Through the ten commands, God got the slavery out of the people.

take the passage in Deuteronomy 7 where God commands Joshua to slaughter the seven Canaanite nations. They must be shown no mercy. Even their little girls must be seen as a threat. Then we can consider a story from Matthew’s Gospel which offers itself as a response to the earlier passage. There we meet a woman who is identified by Matthew as a Canaanite. This identification is significant, since Canaanites no longer existed as an identifiable culture in Jesus’ day. Calling this woman a Canaanite would be like calling someone a Viking or Aztec today. She asks for the one thing that had been denied her ancestors: mercy . . . mercy for her daughter who is in great need.

Then Jesus repeats a miracle for these outsiders that he had done previously for his fellow Jews, multiplying loaves and fish so they can eat. In the previous miracle, there were twelve baskets left over, suggesting the twelve tribes of Israel – the descendants, that is, of Jacob and his twelve sons. In this miracle, there are seven baskets left over – suggesting, it seems quite clear, the seven Canaanite nations that Jesus’ ancestors had been commanded to destroy.

good interpretation begins with three elements: science, art and heart. First, we need critical or scientific research into history, language, anthropology and sociology to interpret the Bible wisely. Second, since the Bible is a literary and therefore an artistic collection, we need an artist’s eye and ear to draw meaning wisely from ancient stories. But at every step, we must also be guided by a humble, teachable heart that listens for the voice of the Spirit.

the Bible presents a morally complex and dynamic world where the best of us can do wrong and the worst of us can do right. The line between good and evil runs – and moves – within each of us.

When we give both sets of voices a fair hearing, we can agree that sacrifices fulfilled a necessary function for the people at one point in their development, even though ultimately sacrifices weren’t an absolute and eternal necessity.

Suddenly the Spirit-filled disciples began speaking in languages they had never learned. This strange sign is full of significance. The Spirit of God, it tells us, is multilingual. The Spirit isn’t restricted to one elite language or one superior culture, as almost everyone had assumed. Instead, the Spirit speaks to everyone everywhere in his or her native tongue.

At Babel, God opposed that imperial uniformity and voted for diversity by multiplying languages. Now, in the Pentecost story, we discover a third option: not unity without diversity, and not diversity without unity, but unity and diversity in harmony.