Michelle Ferguson
January 2006
We are people shaped by what we encounter. Whether by television, music, movies, newspapers, advertisements, relationships, or church services, we are constantly being influenced. What enters into us by way of sight, sound, smell, taste or touch becomes part of who we are. The scary thing about living in a society where we are bombarded by stimuli is we cope with encountering so many things by becoming desensitized. We become people who do not even realize how many influences surround us. We become unaware of what is getting in and shaping us. And we’re probably so tired from all the stimulation (whether we’re aware of it or not) that we just want to shut down, check out… go to sleep. We do not feel we have any extra energy to spend on anything. We become people who go through each day guided by that of which we are not aware. And because we are tired, we don’t question it. We “go with the flow.” And as we are carried along with that flow, we become people who gather up extra energy only to attend to crises. Unless we are forced to, we do not often swim against the current that is sweeping us downriver.
I realize that I am living that pattern when I am overwhelmed with feeling that my life is out of control. Things are happening around me and to me, but I am not living the way that I want. Life may not be “bad,” but life is not all I know God has promised it to be. I find myself not being the person God has called me to be. And I wonder why.
When I swim out and take time to sit on the shore, I gain some perspective on the river. And I see that it is taking me where it wants to go by the force of its flow. But where I want to go, where I am called as a follower of Jesus Christ is a location different than the destination of the river.
On the train to class last week I read Matthew’s gospel; on my way home I read Mark’s gospel. It was a surprising experience to finish those two gospels and realize that it had been a very long time since I last read any of the gospels all the way through. Now, I am a seminary student. My full-time job is to study. However, though I may study sections of scripture and read thousands of pages of biblical scholarship and theology each quarter, I haven’t sat with the text of the bible and just read its story in a while.
How in the world am I supposed to be shaped by the good news Jesus Christ proclaimed if I am not living in that text? Jesus said, “If you abide in my word, you are my disciples indeed. And you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” Paul said, “Do not be conformed the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may discern the will of God, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” I am not saying that I never read the bible, but I am realizing that I do not even come close to reading it enough. Is there “enough”? Am I a person shaped by the word of God, or do all the other things that surround me and influence me win as a shaping force in my life?
In the second sermon you let me share with you during Advent I said,
We are called into this story. And the only way in which we can truly enter in and live in this story is to know it as well as Jesus did. And to be readers of the story who encounter this story imaginatively. My favorite Old Testament theologian, Ellen Davis, writes extensively about imagination – and about shaping our imaginations by the text in order to then read the text imaginatively. We can’t manipulate the text to make it say whatever so-called imaginative thing we want it to. We have to submit our imaginations to the story that began at creation and be shaped so that we can engage the text over and over as storytellers.
Ellen Davis writes:
Consider this: imagination is the capacity to envision the existence of something that does not yet exist; we see this in the imagination of the artist. So it makes sense to say that the creation of the world, the covenant between the Creator of heaven and earth and an old man named Abraham, the creation of a nation of priests out of a band of runaway slaves, the incarnation of the Godhead in human flesh, the explosion of death’s finality, the inclusion of the Gentiles in God’s covenant with Israel – all these and more are remarkably imaginative acts on God’s part, acts through which God envisions and effects something totally new, totally unimaginable before it was brought into being. If we are faithful readers of the stories of these imaginative acts, we will find our own imaginations expanded and transformed. Scripture will claim us and make us into new people. (Ellen F. Davis & Richard B. Hays, The Art of Reading Scripture, xvi)The people we will become if we submit ourselves to abiding in scripture are people who resist and escape the force of the river’s flow. We will be people who strike out on the path of Christ because his word will truly be a lamp unto our feet. Life won’t be something that carries us along; it will be the intentional pursuit of the claiming and proclaiming the abundance of God’s promise.
We are being shaped every moment. And by what? Things of which we are unaware? Or the story that we have said we believe? Will we protect ourselves from the “pattern of this world” that seems to saturate the very air we breathe? Will we abide in the word that transforms us?