It’s probably just a sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I find myself fascinated by lectionaries, those lists of Scripture passages to be used in worship services.  I go to this site a lot.  The question I’m trying to answer is “What passages of Scripture should be read and preached on all these Sundays that keep coming once a week?”  Ideally, I’d like to us to read the entire Bible.  I’d like to preach on the entire Bible.  Unfortunately, the Bible is a really big book.  I don’t understand why anybody is interested in “lost gospels” and such, since the 66 books we have (if we’re Protestant) are more than enough to keep us busy for a long time.  Besides, I’m not sure that all Scripture is actually meant to be preached.  3 John comes to mind as, if not un-preachable, at least not as preachable as, say, Luke.  The Good Samaritan proclaims the gospel a lot more clearly than, say, the rape of Tamar.

So the problem of choosing Scripture for worship is pretty much unsolvable, which is why no one is ever satisfied with any lectionary (see the discussion about the Revised Common Lectionary here.  That lectionary was a wonderful step forward in using more of the Bible than previous lectionaries, yet many still think it does not include enough of the Bible.)  I usually solve the problem for myself by first looking at the Revised Common Lectionary and seeing what books it emphasizes for a given season.  Then I dig into those books, either preaching them bit by bit all the way through (lectio continua) or preaching highlights.  A few years ago, I preached through Ephesians lectio continua style.  Last month, I preached highlights from the Song of Songs (because lectio continua through the Song means I’d have to say “breasts” in the worship service, which is just too weird.)  It’s harder to preach highlights, because you have to know the whole book well in advance to know what the highlights even are. 

Because the lectionary emphasizes Wisdom literature this year, I was going to preach highlights of the Song of Songs, Job, and Proverbs, and then lectio continua through Ecclesiastes.  I had fun with the Song and got good feedback on most of those messages.  But Job is just too much.  It’s absurdly long, repetitive, and complicated.  There is way, way too much commentary on it to deal with.  I could wrap my mind around the Song, but Job has been resisting me for a month.  Yesterday I came to the hard realization that, right now at this stage of my life, I cannot find the gospel in Job.

Which is not to say that Job doesn’t proclaim God’s grace somehow.  I’m just not ready to see it.  For that matter, I also don’t think I’m quite ready to see it in Proverbs or Ecclesiastes.  The problem is not with the Bible; the problem is with me, the preacher.  And if I’m going to preach, I’ve got to preach from Biblical texts in which I can hear the gospel message.  Just like there’s some music where you can hear the melody obviously and some where it takes more work (e.g., jazz), there’s some Scriptures that speak Christ obviously and some where it takes some ear-training.  I think I’ve begun my ear-training in Job, but I’m not far enough along in it.

And this is okay, because I’ve been itching to preach through Romans for a few years now.  And here I’m breaking all the “rules” . . . Romans isn’t slated for this year or next year in the Revised Common Lectionary.  I’d be preaching a text just because I want to preach it.  The whole purpose of a lectionary is to keep the preacher from going to only his/her favorite texts.  But I think I’d be doing Bridgeport a disservice if I try to preach from texts I haven’t gotten under my skin.  It’s part of my calling not just to preach but also to grow spiritually myself.  And here I’m breaking another rule:  they told me in seminary to keep my devotional reading and my sermon preparation separate.  But I don’t see how this is even possible, especially if one is preaching from the heart.

There is no good “solution” to the problem of choosing Scripture for worship.  Trying to harness the Bible is like drinking from a fire hydrant.  So rather than obsessing about it, I pray I can simply learn to enjoy the abundance of Scripture, to relish the knowledge that no matter how studied there are, no one will ever completely fathom all of its mysteries.

I was reading this post, which asserts that creating community happens in the time before and the time after a worship service, but not during.  I quote:  “People think they are going to get something out of going to a church service and then are disappointed when it doesn’t or when they don’t find community. The good shit happens before and after when we actually get to know people.” 

I’ve often thought that also.  But then, in the last few years, I’ve come to know many people who attend worship to meet with God and not with other people.  In fact, I’ve come to realize that I am one of those people.  When I was in grad school, I liked going to Sunday worship occasionally, taking in the Word of God, singing the great old hymns at the top of my lungs, even taking communion, but not saying anything else to anyone besides “Peace of Christ be with you” at the appointed time in the service. 

At other times in my life, particularly when I was employed as a choir director or music minister, I lamented the lack of human contact on Sunday morning.  But I think that had a lot to do with what I thought my role was supposed to be as a church musician.  I thought I was facilitating human community through music.  I imagined that if everyone would sing lustily, then people would connect with one another.  The truth is that they don’t.  Additionally (and this is the missing piece I was never taught), THAT’S OKAY.  What really depressed me, I see now, is not the lack of human community, but the hyped-up expectation of it that was impossible to meet.

Which is better:  No human contact except “Peace of Christ be with you” and some harmonious singing OR lots of human contact, some of it awkward and embarrassing (esp. for us introverts and social misfits), some of it sinful (e.g., gossip, lying, preferring the rich or the thin to the poor or the fat), none of it being a cure for my troubles?  Given the choice, I’d honestly rather have the Church be the community characterized by nothing else than the peace of Christ, which is to say, the Church is heaven on earth.  Of course, we’re all still sinners, but in the community of Christ we only open our sinful mouths to praise God and offer peace to one another.  The liturgy becomes our disciplinarian.  Otherwise, we end up making Church one more social club, one more place where our sin runs rampant.  And our sin will eventually destroy whatever community we create to begin with.

I acknowledge that this is an extreme opinion, but I hear Christians talking so endlessly about “doing community” or “being community” and frankly I’m sick of it.  The Spirit creates community, and historically the Spirit has done this through the liturgy, not through the coffee hour.  The community that the Christian desires is not the community created by pals having a beer together, but the community created by the Spirit bringing us into the light of God’s love and judgment, the community created by the cross and resurrection of Christ.  When Christians lately talk about “community,” they seem to mean a group of friends, maybe some you can call when you’ve got problems, maybe a support network.  But the Church is not a support network.  The Church is a sign of the coming kingdom of God, and our true support is not one another, but God.

Truly, I’m still of two minds about this.  I want folks at Bridgeport to get to know each other, but I also want to respect those who don’t want to get to know anybody, not because they dislike other people, but because they simply aren’t able to embrace new relationships.  Let’s face it: we live in a socially retarded society.  Our iPhones and Blackberrys claim to connect us, but actually keep us farther apart by eliminating face-to-face communication.  We aren’t ready for the sort of community that resembles a support network.  The good news (gospel) is that the kingdom of God doesn’t require social skills.  Social misfits are welcome in the kingdom.  The liturgy is all we need to relate to one another in the Church, because the only true way to relate to one another is by relating first to God.

Bridgeport has traditionally been a “family church,” a tight-knit social group where everyone knows everyone’s business.  A support group, if you will.  But lately, it has grown past that.  Members do not know one another as well as they used to.  Some people have no idea who else is in the congregation.  Conventional wisdom says that’s bad, that we need to work on “doing community.”  But talking with an elder a few days ago, he helped me see that our social disconnection may actually be a good thing:  I dream of us planting a new congregation.  A tight-knit family church cannot plant a new congregation; it would never dream of splitting.  But if we have a group that is more loosely connected, then we have a chance of planting.  “Community” in the conventional sense may actually be the enemy of evangelism. 

Praise God for a group of people who do not know each other, but are instead all known by the One who has gathered them together!

No one can read the Song of Songs literally.  No one does.  Take the verse that goes “In his shade I took great delight and sat down, And his fruit was sweet to my taste.” (2:3)  Mark Driscoll, who pointedly does not read the Song as a poem about God and Israel or Christ and the Church, reads that verse as a reference to oral sex.  I thought that was a highly implausible reading.  If we were really looking for the plain, literal sense of the text, we’d surmise that the subject of the verse is a tree.  He has shade, he has fruit.  He’s a tree.  It wouldn’t be the first instance in the Song of a person being identified with vegetation.  The chapter opens with the declaration:  “I am a rose of Sharon.”  Of course, this is absurd.

Reading the Song of Songs does not involve a choice between a “literal” and an “allegorical” interpretation.  It involves a decision to read it as part of the larger story of the Bible or not.  Modern (mostly liberal) Biblical scholars who like to examine the parts of Scripture rather than the whole will naturally read the Song outside of the context of the whole Bible.  I found it amusing that Mark Driscoll (a self-identified conservative evangelical) chose to use a similar reading strategy, divorcing the Song from its place in the Old Testament and instead reading it against the background of modern-day sex therapy and marital advice.  I have been cultivating a different way of reading the Bible for the past few years, basically ever since I discovered the Church Fathers.  Origen, the first notable Christian commentator on the Song, read it as the tale of Christ’s love for his Church not because he was an idiot living in the darkness of the 3rd century, but because he saw Scripture as a unified whole.  It may very well be that the Song originated as a poem to be used at weddings (and Origen admitted that).  But now it’s in the Bible, and it really ought to be read as a book of the Bible.  Who cares what the “original” author’s “original” intent was?  Now the Jewish and Christian faith communities are using it, and they have, from the beginning of their use of it, said that it was about God’s love for God’s people.

The arguments against reading the Song as a poem about God’s love for God’s people don’t hold up.  One argument is that God is never mentioned in the Song.  So?  Are we in the habit of saying that God is not somewhere simply because God is not mentioned there?  As I recall, God is good at hiding, lying concealed until the right time.  Another argument is that reading it as a poem about God’s love dampens its romantic ardor and downplays its positive view of human sexuality.  But this seems to suggest that the only way to view human sexuality positive is to exclude all God-talk when discussing it.  In fact, God is the only reason human sexuality can be viewed positively.  The best human sexual relationships are the ones that mirror God’s relationship to humanity:  mutually loving and even mutually sacrificial, exclusively one-to-one, and faithful to the end. 

One of the most interesting arguments against reading the Song as a poem about God’s love for God’s people is given by Cheryl Exum in her commentary.  She writes that the relationship described in the Song is between a man and a woman as equals.  She suggests that we can never view God as our equal.  And yet, God did for a time become our equal, even walked around in our flesh.  We called him Jesus.  Hard to believe, I know.

When the Song of Songs is read without God in the equation, it loses the very life-giving quality that should characterize the Word of God.  Listening to Driscoll’s sermons, I was struck by how un-life-giving they were.  It was marital advice, basically.  If I want marital advice, there’s several books I can go to.  The Song of Songs is no more a marriage manual than the Parable of the Sower is a gardening manual.