So this past week at MBCC we had only 17 adults in worship (SF AIDS walk week) and while we could have probably all just drag ourselves over to AIDS walk (which raised a record $4.5 mil btw). I got a pleasant surprise which is when there are only 17 of you in worship you get a chance to talk to pretty much everyone of them (and much more at length than an average Sunday).
So I wanted to post something about this because my conversation with Ray, Hannah, Phil, Jee, and Joe about how prophecy came to be and what my own teaching perspective is around the least well known books of the bible (we're currently doing a series on that at MBCC). They encouraged me to write without pulling any punches about how we came to get a lot of the stuff that we have in the OT (and really the NT for that matter too). So I'm writing on the evolutionary themes of prophecy in the OT based out of Amos (a lot of my ideas come straight out of Bob Coote's brilliant book "Amos among the Prophets").
Anyways. That is what most of my thinking has been based around this week and it's really interesting to see how God drops all sorts of supporting evidence and stories in my lap when I get to teach. A friend of mine (Don who I still can't believe just turned 40) and I were out to lunch when we got to talking about this idea. He mentioned to me that Einstein wrote on similar subject around the problem of what space is made out of. He said that Einstein used to have to argue over what the density of space was and if it was made out of ether or a vacuum (I have to warn you I don't know much about science).
Basically the story goes that he got so tired of arguing over which it was made out of he just choose one. He then set about using it (I believe he choose vacuum) to do his other research. When he started to present findings he was met with questions about how he had made an assumption. So he showed how he did the math to include either ether or a vacuum, and he discovered that it ultimately didn't matter, which is really wonderful. He discovered that it didn't matter. He did all his calculations over and over again (using both) and discovered that mathematically speaking it was such an insignificant difference that it didn't really matter (yet remember that many at that time were fixated on it). I think this is what I'm going to close my teaching with on Sunday. That we have all of this textual evidence and can see the process of prophecy (I think that might be better than evolving?) and we are left to decipher what we think is right. That we can spend our days arguing over it or we can raise these sorts of questions and observations and see how they can lead us further down the path.
So many people in religious circles are so focused on which is right that they miss that maybe we can see that their is a step in faith beyond this deconstruction that can take us to new territory of changing the world. All of that to basically say that I think that while all this stuff around the development of scripture over the course of human history is interesting and needs to be taught in church, it is also important not to lose sight of where all of it is pointing. Just look at the book of Amos. Amos A (the oldest part) is about condemnation and inevitable catastrophe, which then progresses into Amos B (the first redaction) becomes more f a warning to do justice or else while Amos C (the last redaction -- although it's probably not a simple 3 times) is about a reversal and justice as hope. But after all this deconstruction of the book of Amos, I'm struck with the simplicity of Einstein which is that it doesn't really matter what was intended, that if Amos was indeed written by one guy one day speaking out a specific moment in time that ultimately it's not as important as being able to move past the details and just start doing calculations.
So all that to say. I loved it that my entire sermon shifted gears based on a short conversation I had with the handful of people who came to worship with us on Sunday. Here's hoping God can use my teaching to speak to the lives of people just as 17 in worship spoke to me.
