The Miraculous Feeding of the 5,000

Today, I overheard a snippet of a conversation taking place on the first floor of my house as I walked through the second. "Oh, you Methodists and your non-miraculous reading of that miracle," said one housemate jokingly to another. I knew exactly what he was talking about, and it prompted me to think a little further about my troubles with a particular reading of the passage in question. But I get ahead of myself.

The feeding of the 5,000 (or 4,000...or 5,000, not counting women and children...but still a lot of people...) became a boring narrative for me sometime in middle school. I'd heard it so many times I tended to zone out when that Bible story was being read or preached on.

Imagine my surprise when one time earlier in college a sermon on this Gospel lesson caught my attention. Having drifted off mentally as usual, I was suddenly listening and disoriented. The preacher was wondering aloud whether perhaps the crowd was moved by the generosity of the young boy with the fish and the loaves. Perhaps someone pulled out a piece of bread here, a hunk of cheese there, and before long everyone's little to offer became a lot to eat.

I felt myself immediately averse to this account, but I couldn't explain why. In fact, more recently, my friend said she thought that it would have taken a greater miracle to move the crowd to such generosity than it would have to reproduce baskets of bread and fish. I had to agree with that. But I was still troubled, and I think I'm starting to figure out why.

Let me make it clear that I'm not opposed to this Stone Soup version of the story. I'm open to different readings of the Bible, and besides, the stone soup approach works wonders in the household of which I am currently a part. It isn't so much this interpretation that bothers me, it's where it came from and what it can lead to.

In my Old Testament precept last week, we were discussing a book by Peter Enns called Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. Enns attempts to find a way to reconcile a non-literal reading of the Bible with the maintenance of Scriptural authority (to summarize very crudely). In order to give us background on where the debate over the Old Testament and the authority of Scripture began, our preceptor described to us some of the theological and philosophical history of the various issues. He talked about one school of thought that sought to explain, in modern terms, the seemingly miraculous happenings in the Bible. One scenario that struck me was that on the Sea of Galilee, Jesus was walking on a sandbar and simply appeared to be walking on water. There were several other explanations that rubbed me the wrong way, and the interpretation of the feeding of the 5,000 that I outlined before was ranked among those.

My issue isn't so much that I'm so attached to and dependent on the miracle status of the stories from the life of Jesus that I can't give them up, like a child with a security blanket. I won't call down curses on someone who says the demoniacs in the Bible were schizophrenic or otherwise mentally ill. (By the way, it seems to me that curing someone of a mental illness is at least as impressive as casting out a demon.) What troubles me about this whole train of thought is the obsessive need to explain everything. Faith is an art that requires an ability to live in the tension between the known and the unknown, the revealed and the unseen, the fulfilled and the yet-to-be. Certainly we should be exploring the Bible with minds that are open to new inspiration, but we should not take our need to explain so far that it becomes an attempt to control and manipulate the text. And we must never forget that while alternative explanations of Bible stories may be interesting, when they become the focus, we miss the point. The technicalities of how a miracle occurred should never become more interesting or important than the Miracle Worker. Explore possibilities, share new ideas, ask questions; but don't get rid of the mystery.

Fully an academic institution AND fully a faith community

After 4 years of lurking in the halls of Langford and Westbrook, I'm finally a student at Duke Divinity School. I've been around so long that there are faculty who think I'm a third year, and plenty of people who I'm sure must wonder what in the world is taking me so long to get an M.Div.

Anyway, in the process of going through ordination and of explaining some of the philosophy of DDS (Duke Divinity School) to others, I came across an interesting question: How in the world can a place function both as a competitive academic institution and as a community of faith? Are we primarily students or primarily ministers?

I'm a big fan of holding things in tension, so the distinction doesn't bother me personally, but orientation was rife with instances of faculty and administrators actually sounding confused as to how to define what the heck we're doing here. I heard one person tell me DDS is first and foremost a graduate school; another said that ministry is a priority over against academics. One faculty member tried to explain that DDS is most importantly academic, AND most importantly faith-based.

Like I said, nonsensical "both/and" statements like that don't bother me. The main reason for this is that we have a Savior who is fully human AND fully divine. Christians should be used to this kind of nonsense. But that doesn't mean that living out our identity as divinity SCHOOL students and DIVINITY school students is easy.

I've had some people react with surprise when I tell them that most of my professors begin class with a prayer. I love that we do that, even though I know full well that the love of Christ isn't going to keep Dr. Smith from giving me an "F" in Church History if I don't study.

Then there's the funny question of spiritual formation. DDS tries to be intentional about forming not only the minds but also the hearts of its students. Part of this effort is the required spiritual formation group to which each first year is assigned. You don't get a grade or really any credit for it, but you can't move on to your second year of seminary without it. That class is itself in many ways the embodiment of the fine line we're walking between academics and faith.

I guess we'll just see how this plays out. I already know Duke thoroughly for the competitive academic institution that it is, and I know the Div School is no exception, so I'm not going to pretend the competitiveness isn't there. But I also know that for the most part my classmates are going to be far more willing to help me out than perhaps some were in undergrad.

"If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it" (1 Cor. 12:26). As weird and awkward as it might sometimes feel, we are all one body, and it does me no good to get an A in Hebrew if the seminarian sitting next to me can't remember the alphabet.

2009 Wright Room

Glow Sticks

(This post totally steals an idea from my boyfriend, Gary Mitchell, www.myspace.com/visionrise.)

Consider a glow stick. (Bear with me.) Now, erase everything you know about glow sticks. In fact, forget the "glow" part. We'll call them...all right, I can't think of a great name, so just imagine all you know is that these are small liquid-filled plastic sticks.

What uses could you think of for such an object? Today, my youth came up with a few: paperweight, necklace, Christmas tree decoration, action figure stand; you could play catch with it or use it as a toy for your dog to fetch. You can certainly do some things with it.

But we all know what the real purpose of a glow stick is--I mean, it's right there in the name! A glow stick is supposed to glow. And how do we get it to glow?

Exactly. We break it. Until it is broken, a glow stick can never fulfill its real purpose. It can be lots of different things, but never what it was meant to be. With the breaking comes light.

In college, my boyfriend and his roommate had a tradition surrounding glow sticks. Every time someone they knew came to Christ, they would break one. They collected these glow sticks as reminders of their friends who had been broken--who had surrendered to Christ, admitted their sin and need of forgiveness, submitted to the will of God.

The glow stick image goes along well with 2 Corinthians 12:9--"My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." In our pain and suffering, God enters in to reconcile us to him and to make us whole in his love. In our brokenness, God shines a light we cannot see when we think we've got everything together.

Earlier this summer, I marked the 2nd anniversary of an extremely painful event. After helping me turn the day into a celebration and helping to give me good memories of that date, Gary brought out a glow stick. I had heard his explanation before, and I admit I had thought it a little cheesy at first. But wept as he broke the stick and gave it to me, saying that he was proud of me and he could see how God was using me in my weakness to serve others.

Today, I did a glow stick demonstration with my youth at the end of a discussion about why bad things happen. Afterwards, I was wearing my sample glow stick around my neck, and a question from one of the kids showed me another dimension to the metaphor: "Can you turn it off?" asked Kristopher. "No. No, you can't." I smiled. Sure, it's an imperfect comparison, because glow sticks do fade...but then again, maybe that's about right. We often need to be reminded of our need of God. Maybe we don't have to be broken drastically over and over again, but faith is not a one-time thing where you get it or you don't--it's a process. Some of us might need to go through Wal-Mart's entire stock of glow sticks before we get it.

Summer Youth Retreat 2009

Theology without Faith

My campus ministry group has an annual tradition: students write "affirmation letters" to the graduating seniors. When I graduated from college this spring, I received one that included an important observation: "There's always more to learn about God, but I still believe the best way to do that is through time with him on our knees, not in the classroom."

I'm starting divinity school in the fall, and I'm a little nervous about it. I'm going to the same school where I did my undergrad, and I spent way too much of the past four years in the religion department and divinity school. I know that I thrive on academic pressure. But I'm also aware of the danger that exists when thinking about faith becomes more absorbing than faith itself.

Theology is fundamentally different from other disciplines because it requires not only that you contemplate the logos but also that you know and engage with the theos. While nonbelievers can study the history or sociology of religion, theology outside relationship with God completely misses the point.

So I'm grateful to be attending a school where regular worship, spiritual formation groups, prayer in the classroom, and field education are significant, even mandatory components of my education. My goal is to avoid becoming so fascinated with the eschatological implications of the Eucharist that I forget to spend time in prayer.

This post first appeared on Theolog, the blog of The Christian Century.

Nature and Scripture

"While I see evidence of God in nature, I would not know the person of Jesus Christ without reading the Bible. I cannot look at the stars and know that God wants us to turn away from wickedness. I cannot marvel at a sunset and feel the pain God felt as Jesus hung on the cross." — Caroleah Johnson, Upper Room Daily Devotional

Yes. This is great. I've always gotten agitated when people talk about seeing God in nature. Honestly, I wasn't terribly nice about it for a period of my life, and I had to be taken down a notch, which in part took the form of me finding peace at a monastery in the middle of the New Mexican desert—a place where God reveals himself, in no uncertain terms, in rock and river and sky. But I have continued to long for a way to articulate my concern when someone tells me they experience God primarily in nature.

There is nothing wrong with that. The devotional I pulled that quote from draws on Psalm 19: "The heavens are telling the glory of God." It's not that nature isn't a valid means of connecting to the eternal; it's just that our meetings with God in nature and other settings need to be informed by a familiarity with and understanding of Scripture. Jesus is universal and particular—though his face can be seen in any person or natural wonder, we need to know the story of the actual man who lived and died if we are to draw any meaning from that connection.

The kicker: as much as I've complained about relying too heavily on stars and flowers for a God connection, I don't read my Bible nearly enough to make up for that. It's something I'm working on, more intentionally now than at other times in my life. This reflection is one more bit of motivation for me to be in the Word more.