Graffiti in the Forest

The direction of our faith expressed through the Bible comes to us through very human hands.

Imagine walking through a wintery Colorado forest with a friend. Just as the wind rustles through the branches of the pines, dusting you with sparkling bits of snow, you feel God’s presence and hear God’s voice more clearly in the woods than anywhere else. Yet, your friend points to a trash can chained to a decrepit picnic table and wonders how it could reveal anything about God. Next, your friend shows you some graffiti painted onto the table and many names carved into the bark of the trees themselves. Certainly, this is no place for God.

In a forest, one can easily uncouple God’s work from the human overlays of trash cans and picnic tables. In fact, providing access to God’s work in nature often includes introducing an odd picnic table throughout the forest. Many Coloradans know to pack in and pack out anything they bring into the forest, while others need a trash can to responsibly interface with God’s work. Other forest visitors have failed to grasp God’s voice at all or sense the real purpose of interaction in the forest and respond by carving letters into living trees. None of these human actions change God’s voice, although they may serve to dial the volume up or down depending on your point of view. Our failure to hear God’s inspiration correctly, our failure to understand and encapsulate it for others, our own graffiti in the forest doesn’t change God’s word.

Consider the defacement of the Black Hills with the heads of four American presidents. The Black Hills are the center of all that is sacred to the Lakota. We desecrated that holy place with images of the very culture that murdered and enslaved their people. It is hard to imagine something more profane. But does that profanity make the Black Hills less sacred? Of course not. Would a vandal writing hateful phrases on your church walls make your church less of a sacred space to you and your spiritual community?

Any place humans interact with God’s word gets messy. That makes the Bible one of the messiest places to spend your time. Christians can’t seem to agree with each other on most doctrinal issues and yet they all use the same scriptures. Is that a failure of God’s word? Is Abraham Lincoln’s face a failure of the Black Hills?

God inspires. That inspiration is beyond human imagination, certainly beyond human language. The original biblical authors did their faithful best to put that inspiration into words. Those words are fragile and culturally bound. No picnic table can ever live up to the majesty of the forest in which it squats. How often do you find a charmingly antiquated midcentury picnic table, decayed and rusted with time, yet still serving your rest, lunches and gaming?

At the risk of offending fundamentalists, biblical scribes and others have either intentionally or unintentionally changed and added words to our scripture over the centuries. Witness the many different translations available to you depending on which pew you sit. There have been simple misspellings throughout history. Various fragments of Revelation state the mark of the beast is either 666 or 616. One explanation is that the number added up “Nero Caesar,” in Hebrew as 666 and Latin as 616. Whatever the case, the meaning would’ve been clear to readers of the day if not to readers of our day. Because we are not accustomed to speaking about Nero in code, today we fetishize the number 666 as a superstitious relic. We miss the forest for the picnic table.

Even Jesus’s own words have to be understood through cultural lenses. Consider the parable of the talents. I remember being a young child and not knowing what the meaning of talent was. I thought it was a story about realizing our gifts — our talents. When I was told it was about money, I still couldn’t grasp it. Was a talent a coin, like a nickel, or was it a huge sum of money? When I heard the master was mad at the servant for burying the talent, I felt sorry for the servant. Who among us hasn’t tried to take the safe route from time to time. Then I heard that burying money was more than just being careful with someone’s money, it was about refusing any kind of responsibility for the money that was entrusted to you. All of these cultural layers created many different conclusions in my young head. Every time I revisit the parable of the talents, I’m still changing my mind based on something new I’ve learned or a new point of view. Is the master really an angry God or is Jesus just showing us the way the world really works? There is a richness to the language, but also a culturally bound limitation to the language that is inescapable. Even though these are Jesus’s own words, these are probably not the way He would express these ideas today. But the ideas are still vitally important, life shaping ideas nonetheless.

The Bible itself deals with cultural change. Consider how laws regarding slavery for the Israelites developed over time. Slavery was a cultural reality that had to be dealt with, but dealing with it is far different than condoning it. Consider how many times Jesus seems to “correct,” Biblical passages, like, “You have heard it said an eye for an eye…” Consider the ending of Psalm 137 with a plea to dash children against rocks. You could view this psalm cynically and say that such passages show that the Bible cannot possibly by inspired by God. Or you can see a place where a particular psalmist is struggling to express their bitterness in light of God’s overwhelming love. Anything written is immediately imprisoned in the language and culture of it’s day, but the meaning remains radically free.

None of this leaves you completely free to pick and choose whatever you want to hear from God’s word. But you have to use prayer and your own intelligence to find what the overarching direction of God’s inspiration is, where it leads through history all the way through your own heart. As Christians, our starting point needs to be with Christ, the word of God made flesh. Jesus modeled a life of unconditional love, unbound forgiveness and radical inclusivity. If something seems inconsistent with what we know of Jesus then it is worth considering whether we are focused on the forest, the picnic tables or the graffiti.