How can we apply this (the bible) to our lives?

This is a commonplace in sermons, Bible studies, Christian non-fiction, and even conversations between Christians. We always are trying to figure out how to apply the bible to our lives. “Let’s read the sermon on the mount…(5 minutes later)…how can we apply this to our lives?” People sit in silence and look at the ground listlessly. Eventually someone spouts out some abstract answer about how we shouldn’t worry. I’m not sure if we have the order right on this maxim. Instead of taking scripture and attaching it to our lives, shouldn’t we make scripture the solid foundation that we build our lives upon? Instead of making the gospel fit onto our lives, should our lives fit the gospel? How can we apply our lives to the bible? Shouldn't that be the question?

Holes in the bucket

I have been thinking a lot lately about what I really believe that I should be doing with my life. More than that, what does God think that I should be doing with my life? I have been reading about discipleship. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian, labels discipleship as complete self-denial and complete self-alignment with Jesus Christ. To me, that is a good theory, but what does that look like? I always have this problem with people who give good concepts, but never any advice about practice, but that is another topic for another essay. In my search for how to practice this complete denial and complete alignment, I have done a lot of reading. From Shane Claiborne, to J.I. Packer, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and they all say the same thing. Give up your modern suburban consumer materialistic self-serving bastardization of Christ! Leave behind your possessions, abandon yourself and follow Christ as much materially as spiritually. So from this, I have gained a very negative view of the suburban Christian life. I have given up notions of a comfortable yuppie future for the vague romance of a missional life. This life would definitely not take me to dwell in the suburbs and go to a church with a Starbucks franchise in the foyer, but to the hood, the ghetto, to the margins, to the economically cast out, to the blind, to the weak, to the orphan, to the widow, to the poor, to the homeless, to the blacks, to the Hispanics, to the inner city. In my romantic notions of missional living, I will be married to a beautiful woman and we will live in the hood and love God and love our neighbors not because they are marginalized, but because they are made in God’s image and deserve dignity. We will serve Jesus by feeding the hungry, healing the sick, giving drink to the thirsty, visiting the prisoner, clothing the naked, and welcoming the strangers. Our neo-monastic lifestyle will flow from our front porch to our dinner table to the neighborhood playground. We will both have full time jobs, but we will love our neighbors and we will be the Good News in their impoverished lives full time as well. All of this romance about moving to the inner city and serving God without materialism to restrain our ministry lights me on fire. However, a good friend of mine recently started to poke some holes in this bucket of thought. He finds problems in the romanticizing of these missional notions. His contention is that many ‘believers’ are rich and live extravagantly. How can they justify this? I don’t know, but my friend says that there is nothing wrong with living comfortably, and I can agree with that, but I think that extravagance plants problems in the garden of ministry. We decided that the purpose for Christianity is somewhat two-fold. We can draw it from Ecclesiastes and the Sermon on the Mount. Ecclesiastes says to enjoy life, live comfortably, but fear and love God. If we can synthesize this with the somewhat missional message of the Sermon on the Mount, then we can found the reason Christianity: to enjoy life, and live with a purpose or a mission: to be the good news to those who need it.

extractions on the mug metaphor

Today in chapel a speaker had a coffee mug resting on a saucer on a circular table. He lightly spoke about how we are the mug always being filled up. “Maybe a disaster in your life has tipped you over,” he said, gently placing the mug on its side, causing a slight ting from the contact between the two porcelain fixtures. A common verse with the metaphor is John 7.38, “out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” So the basic picture is that God fills our cup with water or love and we pour it out to others. I have a few questions for the metaphor. Are we the cup? Or do we just hold the cup? If we are the cup, then we must be nudged or knocked over in order to do any pouring, for we all know that a cup can do no pouring of its own. If everyone is a cup and if we want to be able to pour into people, then logically shouldn’t the other cups have to beneath our cup in order for the water to fall into them? If someone is below us, then aren’t they inferior to us? The metaphor of us being cups and trying to pour into people by design enthrones our mug with superiority, especially if a table is involved. Is everyone else is on the tile floor of our coffee shop theology, just waiting for a random force to push our full mug over and spread water over the table and wait for the living water to slowly drip, leaving the cups on the floor with only a meager portion of God’s love? Instead, all the cups are on the divine earthly table, and God is above us filling us with each other’s flowing waters of his own love. He has an ocean of water overflowing from his vast cisterns of love that fills the coffee mugs of humanity.

The true metaphorical implications that we are filled by God and then poured into others need a different picture. Let’s say that everyone else in the world is a cup full of coffee. They are just a plain mug with plain black coffee. If we want to follow the ‘salt of the earth’ metaphor, then should we, the believers be creamer, or milk, or sugar or something? Shouldn’t we be changing the world for good? Straight black coffee tastes the bottom of a rubber soul-ed shoe, shouldn’t we be the milk, creamer or sugar that makes it taste sweet, smooth, or just plain good? The divine barista in the great celestial Starbucks fills the earth’s coffee cup with sweet honey from us, his vessels of love.

I probably thought too much into this metaphor, but I just thought it was fun. Any comments on the range of metaphors that we should use for God?