Guest Blogger Series: Part 2

This is the second post in a guest blogger series on the Bible.

My Bible hurts…and heals
by Erika Funk

My Bible hurts.

It hurts when I throw it across the room and it hits young people in the face.
It hurts when someone tells me “my Bible” is wrong.
It hurts when something I was sure I understood suddenly becomes very unclear.
My Bible hurts my head and my heart.

But sometimes the Bible heals.

The faith community I live in now, Broad Street Ministry in Philadelphia has a weekly bible study called No Holds Barred, run by our Dean for the Center for Subversive Theology. So already you can tell it’s different.

Because we are located in the heart of downtown Philadelphia and we serve food whenever we gather, we get all kinds of people who wander in for Bible Study…and for all kinds of reasons. Which if we’re going to be honest, isn’t much different than any church Bible Study from Anchorage to Ayr. We all come with our “bibles” in our brains; we come with the tapes in our heads from former Bible teachers and pastors and we all come with bruises from when someone threw their bible at us. We’ve learned too well to duck when something dangerous comes our way (like the gospel) and to re-load and re-launch our rhetoric when we see a breach in someone’s theological fortification.

Having seen some of this biblical bruising and scriptural scarring, our C4ST Dean created some ground rules for the No Holds Barred Bible Study. We call them table manners. One of the rules is no one knows it all, your thoughts and questions are welcome.

Recently, we were studying a passage from Isaiah and got into a discussion about the New Jerusalem and wondered together what that meant, where it is, when we are likely to see it. Rather than leading an exegesis on the historical understandings of the biblical concept of “New Jerusalem” we thought it through together, as homeless, student, professional, worker, and teacher. Michael, one of our regulars at BSM, said he thought he’d found New Jerusalem right here. Michael is a 60+ years-old, well educated, formerly homeless man who speaks 12 different languages, once worked for the U.N. and was raised Jewish. He now lives in a permanent residence run by a wonderful organization called the Bethesda Project. I asked where he sensed this New Jerusalem. He said here at Broad Street Ministry. So I asked what markers he saw that displayed to him that this was the New Kingdom, a place of God’s continual presence. To him, he said, it was the way we didn’t tell him what to think, we didn’t tell him what he had to believe. Instead, we said “invite your neighbor to dinner”. He heard, “come join us at the table and be who you are and have a cup of coffee.” That was to Michael evidence of God’s Kingdom on earth.

My Bible hurts when the unexpected joy of its truth pierces my hardened heart and fills it with grace.

Erika Funk is the Youth Initiative Minister at Broad Street Ministry in Philadelphia. Check out their fantastic ministry and contact Erika for information on youth mission experiences and Broad Street Ministry.