Wild Horses (by Jonathan Storment)

You don’t go to jail to teach inmates about God, you go there to learn.

I don’t say this patronizingly, secretly wanting to give a virtual wink and let you know that I don’t really mean it.  I was involved in the Fort Worth jail ministry for several years, and I sincerely believe I learned more about God there than I have anywhere else.  I worshiped and studied the Bible with middle class white men, young uneducated African-American men, Hispanic gang members, and Skinheads.  And I watched them all come together and worship (from very different angles) the same God.

I learned that the way inmates read the Book of Acts or the Book of Exodus is much different from how I read it, and much closer to how it was originally read.

I don’t know about your context, but I serve a church in a university town, and about this time of year I hear a lot about something called Post-Colonialism.  If you are not caught up on that terminology, Post-Colonialism is a fascinating discipline that exposes some of the ways Western nations throughout history have exploited other countries.  It comes up this time of year (particularly around Columbus Day) a lot more often as Americans are slowly becoming aware that we too were once illegal immigrants in our own land.

But often when someone talks to me about Post-Colonialism, I am inclined to think something like, “What a very colonial idea.”  The conversations I have about it tend to be brought up in the context of talking against Western missionaries or evangelism, and they tend to be brought up with a tone that hints, “If you only knew what we knew…”  But the best impulses of this discipline will make privileged people curious about the world around them, and humble enough to learn about it.  The best impulses of this discipline shouldn’t stop Christians from evangelizing and sharing their faith, but should shape the way we do it.

In their great book Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes two former missionaries and current religion professors talk about how much the gospel grew for them as a missionary, how they learned to read the Bible differently, really how they learned to read it better.

In their book they mention an experiment of reading the story of the “Prodigal Son” to a group of diverse people and then having each one retell the story as accurately as possible.  When they did this experiment with Americans, only 6 out of 100 mentioned the famine in that story.  Later they tried again with 50 Russian students.  This time 42 out of 50 mentioned the famine, because 50 years earlier, Nazi Germany laid siege to Moscow, causing famine.

The authors point out, that for Americans, the point of the story is the son’s wastefulness.  For people in different parts of the world, the point is to show how God delivers his people from hopeless situations.  The point of the story for much of the world is not the wastefulness of the son, it is that he is lost, and God is searching for him.

When Richard Foster first came out with his seminal book The Celebration of Disciplines he was disturbed to discover that people were using these historic disciplines individually.  He knew they were created for the Christian community, and he knew that they couldn’t be fully entered into alone.  This is especially true about reading the Bible.  It must be read in community, but not just any community, the Bible must be read in a community of reconciliation. Otherwise you might be mis-reading it.

I love the way Brian Zahnd talked about this recently:

I am a (relatively) wealthy white American male.  Which is fine, but it means I have to work hard at reading the Bible right.  I have to see myself basically as aligned with Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, and Caesar.  In that case, what does the Bible ask of me? Voluntary poverty?  Not necessarily.  But certainly the Bible calls me to deep humility — a humility demonstrated in hospitality and generosity…  Every story is told from a vantage point; it has a bias.  The bias of the Bible is from the vantage point of the underclass.  But what happens if we lose sight of the prophetically subversive vantage point of the Bible?  What happens if those on top read themselves into the story, not as imperial Egyptians, Babylonians, and Romans, but as the Israelites?  That’s when you get the bizarre phenomenon of the elite and entitled using the Bible to endorse their dominance as God’s will.  This is Roman Christianity after Constantine.  This is Christendom on crusade.  This is colonists seeing America as their promised land and the native inhabitants as Canaanites to be conquered.  This is the whole history of European colonialism.  This is Jim Crow.  This is the American prosperity gospel.  This is the domestication of Scripture.

Last year, a few Christians and I were having a Bible study with a Muslim man from Sierra Leone.  When we got to one of the exorcisms in the Gospel of Mark, I told him that none of us at the table had ever seen anything like a demon possession, and maybe he could speak more to the issue.  So he started talking about the witch doctor in his village, and how he could point at a goat and kill it with his voodoo, and about how he put spells on people, making them go crazy.

When my friend read the Gospel of Mark, he was glad to see that demons obeyed Jesus. Because he knew what a demon was in a way that we don’t.  As soon as he told us that story, I looked around the table and realized that this was a holy moment for all involved.  For all of us at the table, the world had suddenly become re-enchanted.

Who was teaching whom?

A few weeks ago I preached the story of Jesus’ Triumphal Entry.  After preaching, I had a member come up to me and point out one little detail in that story that I had never really paid attention to before.  Jesus asked specifically for a donkey that had never been ridden on before.  I preach in West Texas, and West Texas people hear that detail differently than other parts of the world.  It turns out that people who are familiar with horses know how to read this better that I did.  It was less like our church pageantry and was something closer to a wild rodeo.  My friend said, “Jesus rode into town on a bucking bronco!”

I smiled and said, “Huh…I’ve never thought of it like that before.”