Lonely Exile: A Daily Advent Devotional
Part Seven: Reimagining Our Faith
“My commitment, however, is to the reality of Jesus as a God experience; it is not a commitment to the reality of the traditional explanations of that God experience in Jesus. There is a vast difference.” - John Shelby Spong, Jesus for the Non-Religious
Read: Luke 24:44-49
You might notice that today’s text comes not from Luke’s Christmas story, but from Luke’s telling of Easter. Those two events, birth and death/resurrection bookend Luke’s Gospel, and there’s a detail in this particular passage I want to point out.
As Jesus engaged his disciples on that first Easter evening, Luke says that “he opened their minds to understand the scriptures.” This raises an important point about the way Jesus’s first followers renegotiated their understanding of Scripture in light of their Jesus experience.
Simply put, when you see in the Gospels, or before that in Paul, a Scripture quoted with introductory words like, “This took place to fulfill the words of the prophet…” that is a clue that we are about to see how these early Jesus followers were rethinking—reimagining—their interpretations of their Bible.1 What I mean is, before they reread their texts in the aftermath of their experience of Jesus, no one had interpreted the Bible that way. Because of their Jesus experience they went back to their Bible and wrestled and reinterpreted the text in order to make room for their expanding understanding of God that their encounter with Jesus had given them.
That is not just a phenomenon, experience, or responsibility of the past. We too, today, are invited to continue that sacred task of allowing our experience of Jesus—often, but not exclusively, through other people—to cause us to go back to renegotiate and reimagine our interpretations, doctrines, and theologies. That is not being flakey or “wishy-washy.” Far from it. The work of going back to reexamine and rethink the beliefs and positions we’ve inherited is exactly what is modeled for us in both our Scripture and the Tradition itself. It is an act of faith to be celebrated. When we reimagine our received and long held understandings, letting some things go because we’ve been presented with better information, and also embracing new understandings, we are taking our place and playing our part, just like so many who came before us.
Faith will always need to be reimagined in light of the experiences of each generation. May we have the courage to engage this holy task of reimagination, because it is also an act of hope—hope for a better, more Christlike Christianity for the future.
Questions for Reflection:
How has your experience changed your understanding and interpretation over time?
What has that reimagining been like for you? Scary? Exhilarating? Something else?
What are you currently rethinking or reimagining?
Of course we are talking here about the Hebrew Bible, what some Christians call the Old Testament.