Those of us who are caught up in the struggle to live as Christians find ourselves somewhere in the middle of two styles of operations. There are some who claim that real Christians are those who live “by the Book.” They take the Bible literally as the Christian’s owner’s manual that must be thoroughly studied, stringently obeyed and ardently defended in order to guarantee worry-free miles of living. Others like to fly by the seat of their pants, looking occasionally at the Book but enjoying the scenery and trying to figure out instinctively how to play the situations by ear.
Whatever our style or whatever our definition of Christian living might be, we all tend to learn our lessons the hard way: by being confronted by our own human limitations on this journey from birth to death. When I was a senior in high school, a close friend was killed in an automobile accident. A piece of paper was found in his shirt pocket on which was scribbled the following: “Live your life as a Bible; it may be the only one some people ever read.” Vulnerable for some noble thought to guide this eighteen-year veteran, I latched onto that idea. I began diligently learning the Book and struggling to live by the Book. I kept wondering why I couldn’t quite master this quest.
Many years later, I am beginning to understand the wisdom in Ezra Pound’s words in his A.B.C of Reading: “Men do not understand books until they have had a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.” Thus, trying to live your life like a Bible means being open to all those corruptible changes that keep occurring to each of us and realizing how down-to-earth that stuff in the Bible really is. How close to home. Which is the basis of our understanding the Incarnation, when the Word became flesh and blood. H. Richard Niebuhr says it well in his book, The Meaning of Revelation: “The revelation of God is not a possession but an event, which happens over and over again when we remember the illuminating center of our history. What we can possess is the memory of Jesus Christ, but what happens to us through that memory we cannot possess.”
I vividly remember the occasion when I was being examined as a minister for entry into a certain Presbytery. The vote looked like it might be close. One old gentleman stood and said that he could not vote for me because I evidently did not read from the same Bible as did he. Later, I thanked him for the compliment. And I felt relieved from the presumption that I could embody a Book like that.
I’m still out here winging it along this journey and kicking myself in the seat of the pants for doing such a lousy job. Maybe somewhere along the road some Judge will throw the Book at me. That’s the risk. Beats being having your head buried in some old book. And the scenery is very nice, especially some of the people you meet along the way. Many is the time I feel like old Jacob confronting Esau with those precious words: “To see your face is like seeing the face of God.” What a revelation worth more than the book itself.