Engaging The Story of Scripture

Pastor Sean Palmer continues our series looking at the voices of women of faith by looking to the words of Barbara Taylor Brown. Barbara’s words invite to engage with the Bible by seeing ourselves in the stories of Scripture.

Live Teaching Podcast Scripture & Quotations

“For all the human handiwork it displays, the Bible remains a peculiarly holy book. I cannot think of any other text that has such authority over me, interpreting me faster than I can interpret it. It speaks to me not with the stuffy voice of some mummified sage but with the fresh, lively tones of someone who knows what happened to me an hour ago. Familiar passages accumulate meaning as I return to them again and again.

They seem to grow during my absences from them; I am always finding something new in them I never found before, something designed to meet me where I am at this particular moment in time.

This is, I believe, why we call the Bible God's ‘living word.’ When I think about consulting a medical book thousands of years old for some insight into my health, or an equally ancient physics book for some help with my cosmology, I understand what a strange and unparalleled claim the Bible has on me.

Age does not diminish its power but increases it. When I recognize my life in its pages — when I am convinced that this story is my story — then I am lifted out of my own time and space and set free, liberated by the knowledge that my oddly shaped piece of life is not a fluke but fits into a much larger and more reliable puzzle. In other words, I am not an orphan. I have a community, a history, a future, a God.

The Bible is my birth certificate and my family tree, but it is more: it is the living vein that connects me to my maker, pumping me the stories I need to know about who we have been to one another from the beginning of time, and who we are now, and who we shall be when time is no more.

— Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life

Matthew 22:15-35

15 At that, the Pharisees left. They determined to trap this Jesus with His own words — hang Him by His own rope, you might say. 16 They sent a batch of students to Him, along with a group that was loyal to Herod.

Students: Teacher, we know You are a man of integrity and You tell the truth about the way of God. We know You don’t cotton to public opinion. 17 And that is why we trust You and want You to settle something for us: should we, God’s chosen people, pay taxes to Caesar or not?

18 Jesus knew these men were out to trap Him.

Jesus: You hypocrites! Why do you show up here with such a transparent trick? 19 Bring Me a coin you would use to pay tax.

Someone handed Him a denarius. 20 Jesus fingered the coin.

Jesus: Of whom is this a portrait, and who owns this inscription?

Students: 21 Caesar.

Jesus: Well then, render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.

22 And those who had come hoping to trick Jesus

were confounded and amazed. And they left Him and went away.

23 That same day, a band of Sadducees — a sect of Jewish aristocrats who, among other things, did not expect a resurrection or anticipate any sort of future life at all — put their own question to Jesus.

Sadducees: 24 Teacher, the law of Moses teaches that if a married man dies with no children, then his brother must marry the widow and father children in his brother’s name.

25 Now we knew a family of seven brothers. The eldest brother married and died, and since he had no children, the next brother married his widow. 26 And shortly thereafter, that second brother died and the next until there were seven marriages with the same woman.

27 Eventually the wife died. 28 So now, Teacher, whose wife will she be at the resurrection? Will she have seven husbands, since they were each married to her?

Jesus: 29 You know neither God’s Scriptures nor God’s power — and so your assumptions are all wrong. 30 At the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. They will be like the messengers of heaven.

31 A key to this resurrected life can be found in the words of Moses, which you do claim to read: 32 “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Our God is not the God of the dead. He is the God of the living.

33 And again the crowd was amazed. They were astonished at His teaching.

34 Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, a group of Pharisees met to consider new questions that might trip up Jesus. 35 A legal expert thought of one that would certainly stump Him.

“The Bible also teaches us how to imagine ourselves. In a world where we are offered so many unsolicited definitions of ourselves, it is easy to forget who we are. First there are all the voices that come to us from outside ourselves, describing us as successes or failures based on our looks, our performances, our incomes.

Then there are the voices that come to us from inside ourselves, reminding us what we will never be, never do, never have. No one has ever explained to my satisfaction where this relentlessly critical chorus comes from, but it never, seems to tire of telling me how clumsy, lazy, weak, spoiled, thick-headed, ridiculous, and doomed to failure I am. There are some days when it all sounds true, but there are others when I recognize the voice of the Tempter and am able to fight back.

You have overstated your case, I am able to say; you have gone too far. While there is a splinter of truth in all your accusations, you have missed the central truth: God made me, and God does not make trash.

How do I know that? Because the Bible tells me so. The Bible tells me that God can make a human being out of a pile of dirt, that God can make a barren old couple the proud parents of a chosen people, that God can heal the sick and feed the hungry and raise the dead.

If I believe that, then I cannot also believe myself or anyone else to be a lost cause. Nor can I believe only what my culture tells me about myself. The Bible gives me another authority to consult.

When the culture treats me as if all I am good for is to produce or to consume, the Bible invites me to love. When the culture encourages me to think of myself as a rugged individualist, the Bible calls me to be a neighbor.

When the culture conditions me to become a spectator on life, the Bible bids me to do justice, and love mercy, and walk humbly with my God. Over and over, the Bible offers me an alternative vision, not only of myself but also of other people and of the whole world. Sometimes it seems farfetched, but other times it seems truer than what is supposed to be true.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life

“My relationship with the Bible is not a romance but a marriage, and one I am willing to work on in all the usual ways: by living with the text day in and day out, by listening to it and talking back to it, by making sure I know what is behind the words it speaks to me and being certain I have heard it properly, by refusing to distance myself from the parts of it I do not like or understand, by letting my love for it show up in the everyday acts of my life. The Bible is not an object for me; it is a partner, whose presence blesses me, challenges me, and affects everything I do.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life