“We devote our daily life to God, and to
serving our neighbors as images of God”
- I will daily read the Scriptures and meditate on the witness of Jesus Christ.
Why this messy holy book? So many
different voices, so many different genres, so many different pictures of God.
For Christian people who believe Jesus calls us to a peacemaking discipleship
that is always nonviolent, the Bible doesn’t always seem to yield a message in
line with that calling. So why search for God in this messy book (anthology,
really)?
Pastor Barbara Brown Taylor describes untidy
scripture, “God’s story has its own
twists and turns, its own chapters of rage and repentance along with some
magnificent cruelties, but it is above all the story of a God who does not
break promises, a God who entered into covenant with humankind and who remains
loyal to that bond, no matter what we may think of its terms…That is the God
who walks toward me in the Bible…The Bible is the book in which the terms of
that relationship are explored” (The
Preaching Life, 53)
Our central confession is that Jesus—not
anyone or anything else—is our Lord, our ruling authority. And when we see that
Jesus himself was profoundly shaped by the Hebrew scriptures and that the
earliest Christians searched those same texts trying to figure out what God had
done through Jesus and how to order their lives accordingly, we are compelled
to do likewise. In their example we see the pages of the Bible as the best way
to discover God’s reconciling ways shown in Jesus.
