Easter Reprise

Most of you know of the untimely and tragic death of Rachel Held Evans. I've already written about her and will continue to in the months ahead.  She understood Easter as a lesson to be learned as it calls us to die to sin while we are still breathing and eating and sleeping and loving.  

One of the ways she "died" was to re-examine her understanding of scriptural authority.  In her identifying work  A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband "Master" (Thomas Nelson; October 30, 2012) she took seriously the commands that governed the lives of women.  She lived each one of them. She worked to understand them as antique but relevant in how they showed the ancient and faithful minds of those first believers.

She had to acknowledge that there was much that no longer needed practicing: social behaviors regarding menstruation, dress, leadership, teaching, etc.  Not just because we are no longer living biblically ourselves but because we have learned so much that was not known two thousand years ago.  And so she had to die to that teaching and find her way to living faithfully in the 21st century.  

To get there she had to admit something about all of us who take the bible seriously in the modern age.  Here's how she said it:

For those who count the Bible as sacred, the question when interpreting and applying the Bible to our lives is not, will we pick and choose? But rather how will we pick and choose? We are all selective in our reading of Scripture, and so the question we have to ask ourselves is this: Are we reading with the prejudice of love or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed? (295)

Are we reading with the prejudice of love?  Are we reading with a heart like the one Jesus showed his disciples in the upper room as he knelt before them -- including Judas -- and washed their feet?  Are we reading in "obedience to death" so the maddening cycle of scapegoats, sacrifices, and wars and walls and waste does not pass through us?  

How are we reading scripture when we leave out our public lives from its directions or only accept Jesus as our personal savior?  How are we reading scripture when we excuse poverty as a lack of initiative and will.  How are we reading scripture when we destroy aquifers with fracking for fossil fuels we will not need? How are we reading scripture when we only claim Jesus' judgement on our enemies so that we are the ones redeemed?  

Before Rachel's sad and painful passing she died to a bunch of unexamined beliefs that were masquerading as faith.  Easter's lesson,  still for us to learn and to which we must be obedient to our deaths is God is ready to raise us from a death of "the prejudices of judgement and power, self-interest and greed."