Forests and trees

When Robert and I still lived in Guerrero, we met a Mixtec Christian man named Jose Guadalupe who was a gifted evangelist. One day we took him along to visit a family we were evangelizing. They brought him a chair next to the kitchen fire, and he started telling a story to the few people milling around. The story began with Adam and Eve and was about how God was redeeming the world. As Jose Guadalupe wove his story, the people in the kitchen began pulling up chairs and sitting around him. As more people wandered through the kitchen, the group grew until he had the entire extended family sitting around him, spellbound, listening to God’s story. They later made a commitment to Christ. But Jose Guadalupe never took out a Bible, didn’t even have one on him. He knew the story, loved the story, told the story passionately, the story about Jesus, and the people around him listened and said yes to it—yes to Jesus, the whole point of the story.

The last of the Bible Study sermons this Sunday reminded me of Jose Guadalupe . Mike was talking about how we can miss the forest for the trees. He used an illustration from Psychology about selective attention that I watched when I taught AP Psych in Oaxaca. Here’s a link if you want to be a guinea pig. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo I’m an idea kind of person, someone who lives in her head; so I miss a lot of forests! I remember teaching about missions in a church once and catching myself saying that missions is the most important topic that the Bible covers because it’s about God rescuing us from everywhere we’ve lost ourselves. It’s about our getting back to him. But someone brought me up short saying that no, missions isn’t the most important topic in the Bible. There won’t be any missions in heaven. There is only one most important topic in the Bible. Really, there is only one topic in the Bible. That is Jesus. And that is what Mike was getting at.

He reminded us that the Bible is not Jesus. It’s not as important as Jesus. The purpose of the Bible is to direct us to Jesus, to reveal Jesus, to persuade us of Jesus. Every bit of it, from Genesis to Revelation, is to lead us to Jesus. And the Bible isn’t the only way Jesus reveals himself to us: the Body around us reveals him. Worship reveals him. The sacraments reveal him. Visions reveal him. Even the burning of our own hearts can reveal him. Reading the Bible wasn’t even possible for most people up until the printing press and still isn’t possible for many people today because of language and political barriers. But that doesn’t stop God from revealing Jesus. That was certainly my experience with the conversion of the first Mixtec Christians in Guerrero. They didn’t come to Jesus because of reading a Bible (someone was reading it, but not them).

So Mike’s point is that as we discuss our interpretations of the Bible, agreeing, disagreeing, even sharply disagreeing, we should not forget the forest: Jesus. Perhaps more importantly, as God reveals Jesus to other people through us (scary thought) we shouldn’t forget the forest. In the end, it won’t be our interpretations of Scripture that save us; it will be Jesus. So if people don’t respect the Bible, don’t believe it, don’t know it, don’t trust it, don’t even have it, all is not lost. Isn’t this where our culture is now? Pretty much where the Mixtecs are? A dim memory of some stories told that sounded like tall tales, but not much else? Nothing personal that hits you in the gut?

Perhaps, just as in the days of Paul, we may have to be the word of God to people, knowing how to be Jews to Jews and Gentiles to Gentiles and post-moderns to post-moderns, knowing how to get the facts across about the life of Jesus, how to convince people of his sheer awesomeness, how to lead them to worship. We may have to carry him in our words and in our days and in our acts, so that people who no longer read Scripture may read us. This is how the disciples turned the world upside down, and how the Mixtecs came to Jesus, and how Mixtecs like Jose Guadalupe carry Jesus to other people. Maybe Niagara isn’t much different.

Don’t forget to watch the video. How many passes were there…?