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Reading the Bible With the Damned
by Bob Ekblad Westminster John Knox Press, 2005
I've been reading a dangerous book.
Bob Ekblad presents the Bible to people who have no familiarity with it. He then asks, "What does this say to you?" The simplicity of this approach is surpassed, perhaps, only by the rarity of it – at least within our established churches. In a profound way, Ekblad and his "unlikely reading partners" blow the dust off our Bible.
Examined with fresh eyes, the text – no longer domesticated and predictable -- leaps to life. Whose eyes? Those of "the damned," at least in our society: illegal aliens, prisoners, drug addicts, migrant farm workers, and other marginalized folk. These are people unfamiliar with the Bible, usually, but not without notions about it. Often bitter and expecting no mercy, they have little reason to expect anything new from opening the Bible. Or the doors of our churches, it turns out, where literalism, moralism, and heroism too often sap Scripture of its liberating power.
So Ekblad does the only thing one can do to resolve the impasse – he reads it with them! He steps into their world and does what every good teacher does: tosses out an idea, and then listens. The result is a contextual reading of Scripture quite different from that found in most Sunday morning mainline gatherings. Just the sound of that is soothing, isn't it? – "Sunday morning mainline gatherings."
I must tell you that it has taken quite a while for me write about this book precisely because it did not . . . soothe me. I felt convicted by it – discovered as one too ready to use Scripture for my own purposes, dumb to God's often scandalous tactics in rearranging the status quo for some grander plan. As Spencer once preached in a Christmas sermon (I think), the good news I lay claim to may or may not be the good news God is bringing to other segments of society.
The biblical stories Ekblad reads in this community are the ones so familiar to us: Creation, "the fall," Jacob, Moses and the Exodus, Isaiah and exile, the Psalms, and the ministry of Jesus. Time and again, we see that God lives and breathes at the margins, chooses the outcast, rejects the servant's notion that he is unfit, and prods us to leave our comfort zones.
Even though the Epistles are not included here, it strikes me that Paul (the imprisoned one) was empowered by this same notion when he prayed, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" That is, if you can see that God takes into his fold even the most forgotten and mocked – and believes in them enough to use them – what earthly power is to be feared? God's love for and willingness to bless the underdog is undeniable, though it is just as biblical that it may take an underdog to point this out to me.
Ekblad is a skilled facilitator, to be sure – ordained Presbyterian minister with a Th.D. in Old Testament -- but it's convincing when he says he has learned as much in these contextual explorations as he did in any classroom. And ultimately his aim is a missionary one, but this is a missiology that enriches the churched as much as it reaches the unchurched.
Read this book even if you have no plans for changing your reading partners. The dialogues are so clearly presented that you may feel like you're in the "classroom," ready to (re)read the Bible with eyes wide open and the heart of a child, your imagination at the ready.
So I've been reading a dangerous book – 66 of them, in fact. And I thank God for every one of them. As for Ekblad's book, it's available in the church library. Check out other aspects of Ekblad's work at www.tierra-nueva.org or www.peoplesseminary.org.
