Rehearsing Scripture

Discovering God's Word in Community

Anna Carter Florence

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781467450478
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

SCRIPTURE. We can study it carefully. We can listen to sermons on it and read what the experts say about it. But in the end, says Anna Carter Florence, Scripture needs to be rehearsed and encountered —and we can do that best in community with others. In this book Florence offers concrete, practical tools for reading and rehearsing Scripture in groups. Suitable for new and seasoned Bible readers alike, Florence's Rehearsing Scripture invites solitary readers to become community readers as well—to gather around a shared text and encounter God anew together.

PART I

Reading and Rehearsing in the Repertory Church

CHAPTER 1

Finding Something True

Reading Alone and Reading Together

Drop-Outs in the Kitchen

If you’re hungry to encounter Scripture and meet a living Word, you’re in good company. Many of us—people of faith, people with doubts, dedicated churchgoers, and those who are seeking—are hungry these days. We crave nourishment that will sustain us and wisdom that will guide us, and community that will walk with us along the way. We yearn for justice for all God’s people and a peace that passes all understanding. We want to meet, to see Jesus, as the Greeks said to Philip (John 12:21). And since Scripture is a reliable place to search—in my tradition, sola scriptura declares it to be the first and best place—we’re eager to read it and follow in the way of gospel.

The problem is that many of us are reading on our own, and that can be slow work. If you’re a solitary reader, as most of us are, you read by yourself, on your own, and discuss the reading afterwards—in class or meetings or book group or online. And for solitary readers, Scripture can be so dense and so slow that we begin to think we aren’t getting anywhere, and wouldn’t it be better to leave the reading to the professionals and the speaking to the preachers?

Often, this is exactly what happens. It’s not that we think professionals are the only ones qualified to read and speak about Scripture. In fact, our theology tells us just the opposite: the priesthood of all believers opens the task of proclamation to everyone. But solitary readers are at greater risk of dropping out of that priesthood, and a lot of us are in the solitary habit.

The solitary habit can lead to unhealthy patterns. There’s plenty of historical precedent for being community readers, as we’re reminded by Jewish traditions of engaging Torah in multiple voices and conversations, but not many in my tradition know it, let alone embrace it. We have all the elements that could turn our solitary reading around—a great book, the motivation to tackle it, and the theological mandate to do so—but fewer ideas about what to do when we actually get together. For many of us, going solo with Scripture is still the norm, or at least the default position. So is frustration, when we hit a rough spot in our reading.

What we need are more flexible reading strategies to encounter Scripture, so we can lower those drop-out statistics and, together, meet the living Word. Because at the moment, a lot of us are hungry. And a little bored with our reading. And not sure what to do next. We might as well be teenagers at lunchtime who open a well-stocked refrigerator, survey the contents, turn to a parent accusingly, and announce, “There’s nothing to eat.”

Of course there’s plenty to eat. What the teenagers are telling you is (1) whatever’s in the fridge is in a whole-food state and has to be cooked before it can be eaten; (2) they don’t really know what to cook or how to cook it; and (3) rather than learn, they would like you to do it for them. Some parents take on that role and never give it up. But if you want those teenagers to ever leave home and fend for themselves, eventually you have to show them that the pound of hamburger and the green pepper staring at them from the third shelf really can become a lovely spaghetti sauce—if you sauté them with some onion and garlic and olive oil and tomatoes and herbs. Otherwise, you end up with a houseful of entitlement-driven young adults who believe a parent’s primary purpose in life is to cook for them.

The faith community that lets its people drop out of their calling to read and speak about Scripture will soon be sitting on the best-stocked refrigerator in the universe that no one but the professionals can use. And it won’t be locked and hidden away, this incredibly stocked larder that is our Scripture. It will be right there, at the center of everything. In most churches, there’s a refrigerator in every pew.

So when the people wander in hungry, open the fridge, and stare at the contents, surprise—it won’t be clear to them how Leviticus could ever be nourishing, let alone appetizing, let alone dinner. They won’t have any idea of where to start, except that it involves a lot of chopping. The refrain will sound: “There’s nothing to eat at church. We’re hungry; we want some Scripture. Not the Good Samaritan story again; we’re tired of that one. Make us something else, something we like.” And if there’s a preacher on hand, and the preacher capitulates, you’re off and running with another generation of entitlement-driven folk who are always hungry, always hanging around the fridge, and always thinking that the preacher’s primary purpose in life is to wait on them. Why should they know or behave any differently? No one ever taught them how to fend for themselves, to let Scripture be their daily bread. No one ever showed them that church could look like more than the preacher’s basement apartment.

You can see what a vicious cycle it can be for all of us, whether we call the church home or have long ago moved out. But the means to addressing it is totally within our capability. As the United Nations keeps reminding us, hunger is the number-one killer on our planet, and not because there isn’t enough food for everyone; there is. We simply lack the will to change. We have to learn how to prepare and distribute the food we have—and we must do this with Scripture, too. The survival of the planet depends on it, because hunger of the body and hunger of the spirit will intertwine to devour our species.

Here is what I propose: invite the drop-outs back to the kitchen. Release the wait staff and tie on the aprons. Then open that gorgeously stocked scriptural fridge and, together, learn how to prepare what’s in it. Learn to be community readers as well as solitary readers, so we can feed ourselves and others.

As we learn, we can also take a cue from theater studies. Some texts need to be practiced as well as studied. There are times to stop talking about Scripture and learn how to live as those who have been set loose with it.

Where the Wild Things Are

The way some church folk talk, you might think Scripture has become as tame and bendable to human will as a very well-trained miniature show dog. But the truth is that Scripture is wilder than anything we can imagine. It doesn’t need us to open any restraint gates whatsoever; it is indomitable, intractable, irrepressible, and about as resistant to a leash as any gale force wind. As one of my students remarked in a rather dazed way, after he read Scripture from the pulpit for the very first time, “Whoa—something happens when you’re up there.”

The biblical text is a wild thing, and it takes us to where the wild things are. When we read Scripture in community, we have no idea what will happen or where it will take us, except that whatever it is won’t look like anything we know—it is the wild and free vision of God’s reign, breaking its way in. It is the mother of all waves carrying us over the known horizon. Maurice Sendak may not have realized he was writing the perfect description of our biblical interpretive task when he wrote his classic children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, but he was. Maybe, every time we open our Bibles, we should open our mouths too, with a collective roar: “Let the wild rumpus start!”

For any wild rumpus to begin, however, we have to let loose. We need to put on our wolf suits, like young Max in the story, and sail away to where the wild things are. Which is really another way of saying we need a reading space where we can make mischief of one sort or another (as Sendak puts it) . . . with the biblical text.

This could mean a departure from Bible study as we often know it. I once met a man in South Carolina who assured me, “Oh, I could never go to Bible study. I don’t know any of the answers.” That man was an intelligent, confident, thoughtful person, and he was afraid to go to a Bible study at his progressive church because he feared it would expose his lack of knowledge. Let me add that his congregation had one of the best church educators in the business; it wasn’t that she wasn’t doing her job. For this man, however, Bible study looked like a school that is teaching to a test: facts, figures, themes, doctrines, and no church person left behind. He believed himself to be biblically illiterate, and for him, this was something shameful, something to hide. His church offered no other way to gather around Scripture, so he slipped through the cracks—and, as a nifty side effect, became totally dependent on his preacher to explain the text to him every week. Which, I’m sorry to say, this preacher really likes doing, and isn’t about to give up. Once the cycle of power and dependency starts, it’s hard to break.

Maybe it’s time for another move entirely. Our Scripture encounters us in so many rich ways. It is a storehouse of knowledge. It is a sourcebook of wisdom. It is also art. Poetry, proverb, novella, epistle, epic, memoir, farce, and myth—our Scripture is art in all its witnessing forms. And when you interact with art, you take a different approach. There’s a time to talk about it, and then there’s a time to be set free with it, to explore where it takes you and the truth it may show you.

When we interact with Scripture as art, we do much better at putting on our wolf suits and making mischief with the text, because we’re less self-conscious, less burdened about the outcome. We can switch gears for a while, set aside all the other ways we read the biblical text, and be open to something new.

Here’s something else I’ve learned. When the people of God read Scripture together, in a let-loose, wild rumpus sort of way, with no other purpose than to simply speak and listen to the words that are written, the same thing happens every time: we discover the script in Scripture. We see that our biblical text is a collection of scripts that God has given us to rehearse until something true emerges. And we become the repertory church.

The Repertory Church

A repertory company is a small band of actors who perform together regularly. They get to know one another, they build trust, they grow over time, they move into different roles. Because they live in the same area, they put down roots. They grow older together; they are in one another’s lives. No one can afford to behave like an out-of-town star, because this is ensemble work. Stars are constantly changing the subject to themselves. Ensemble players don’t need to do that. They move in and out of the light and the shadows in big roles and small ones, because what they’re most concerned about is finding something true to say together with every script. And they know it requires each one of them to do the hard work of being utterly honest.

When my husband and I lived in Minneapolis, we went regularly to the Guthrie Theater, a professional repertory company, gloriously talented. Every play was worth seeing, and some of them imported big names for the lead roles. But the unexpected pleasure of those years was observing how the same group of actors in the residential company grew over time. They appeared in each play in different roles; we had the fun of watching them pop up, every few months, as entirely new characters—so well camouflaged that you had to pay attention to spot them. No one was ever typecast. An actor who played the king in one production might be the butler in the next, and each role provided a different challenge. The minor roles were often more absorbing to watch—and, I suspect, to play. Through it all, we saw the amazing trust the actors had in one another. It allowed them to take on terribly difficult roles, often in tough performing circumstances—such as presenting three of Shakespeare’s history plays, one after another, in a single weekend. A repertory theater is a powerful witness of what it means to work together on a common vision over the long haul.

Back in college, in that world-opening Theater Studies class—the one that taught me that some texts need to be practiced as well as read, with others, in community—I had to learn this the hard way. When my classmates and I got our first scene assignment (it was from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream), we thought we knew what it meant to work together. Actually, what each of us was secretly thinking was, “I know how to do this! Get the plot down and figure out my character’s motives. Speak the words clearly and pronounce them correctly. And, most importantly, show the professor I have talent—with a dazzling new take on a classic role!”

Off we went in groups of four to do exactly that. And it didn’t work. We were rehearsing together, but we were also trying to outdo one another. We had no idea what an ensemble was, no clue that it could be more than mowing one another down with our interpretive brilliance, and no awareness that our star-struck instincts would doom this sort of work from the outset. Our academic training had formed us to be solitary readers in competition rather than a community of readers united in purpose. Only when our professor received what we’d brought to class and then patiently reworked it with us—only then did we realize that what we were dealing with was something so much bigger than one person’s talent, or another person’s cleverness. The truth wasn’t about us. It came through us. It came through the words of the script that we spoke. But only if our goal was to live in it rather than occupy and conquer it. Only if we had a common vision over the long haul.

In time, our class stopped looking like a roomful of scrabbling, aspiring stars and began working together as a group. We became what our professor was gently guiding us toward: a little repertory company. And then something else happened. We stopped arguing about whose interpretation was the best in all the land. We got over the competitiveness that ran between us, bone-deep. In its place, we noticed some strange new growth. Appreciation. Respect. Trust. Restraint. A generosity of spirit, which flowed into hospitality—even grace.

We saw that the script is so deep that there is always another way to play it, and always another way to read it. And that different casts of players can show you different sides of a scene, and you don’t have to decide which one was right or better or even definitive—just which moments were true. And that truth is a current we really do recognize when we’re in it. And that it doesn’t matter what the source of that current is, whether it came from your performance or someone else’s; the joy and momentum you feel is the same. And that any scene can stay fresh, over and over, as long as you’re aiming for truth rather than innovation. And that some scenes may not be ours to play right now, but will be later, when life has its way with us. And that there is beauty in the waiting. And that although the script is a given and you can’t change the words, you can always change the way you play it—which in turn can change everything.

A repertory company engenders this kind of learning. It isn’t a perfect body, nor can it ever be, as my little Theater Studies class so plainly illustrates. Yet even our imperfect band of players experienced moments of truth—more moments than we had any right or reason to expect. Scenes would unfold, and with them, a glim...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Reading and Rehearsing in the Repertory Church
• Part II: Encountering Scripture in the Repertory Church
• Five More Tools for Rehearsing Scripture